ZParl Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen

Decisions on the size of a parliament are genuinely political . Insofar it seems only logical that the few studies dealing with this topic from a political science perspective fail to provide unequivocal criteria that would allow politicians to pick...

The first time arrival of the AfD in the Bundestag focused public attention on the distribution of committee chairmanships . The process of determining who chairs which committees is still based on an old German parliamentary custom whereby the...

The 2017 election brought significant changes to the membership of the German Bundestag. The parliament became much larger (709 seats) and the entry of 291 new deputies marked a new turnover record. Also, for the first time since unification, the...

Apart from gender and age, no other socio-structural characteristics of party members are reliably captured in the membership registers of the German parties. A differentiated analysis of the social anchoring of the German party system can therefore...

Modern election research starts with the study “The People’s Choice” by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet (1944). Almost 75 years after the publication of this canonical work, a study was carried out on the occasion of the...

Up to this day, German Christian Democrats have ruled out any cooperation with the Left Party, citing its alleged radicalism and extremism. Yet in recent months, leading members of the CDU have challenged this strategy, suggesting “pragmatism”...

In Germany political parties are bound by the democratic principles as stated in Art. 21 I 3 GG. Democratic principles are minimum requirements for the design of the internal party decision-making process. These minima include, among other things, a...

The current debate on an amendment to the electoral law for the German Bundestag also includes a possible reduction of the number of districts. On behalf of the Federal Election Commissioner, the authors computed possible apportionment of districts...

Based on the seven criteria proposed by Giovanni Sartori, this article examines whether the German party system can be assigned to the type of polarized pluralism after the 2017 general election. The results show, first, that the AfD’s electorate...

100 years ago, women in Germany received the right to vote and, hence, formally equal political citizenship with men. Looking at the historical and international dimension of the women’s suffrage movement shows that its fight was very committed as...

Just one year after its foundation in 2013, the far right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) succeeded in being represented in every German state parliament as well as in the European Parliament. In 2017, 94 AfD representatives were elected into...

After the 2017 Bundestag election, the Bundestag consists of 709 members. In the public’s opinion this number has been criticized for being too high. The article sets out to determine the criteria for a “correct” number of members of...

It is a widely held belief that the parliament’s ability to control the cabinet is a critical element for the functioning of a democracy. This article questions this hypothesis. The study of core theses of realistic democracy theory led to the...

One central question of civic education is how we can relieve political apathy as sort of de-parliamentarisation from the bottom upÓ. How can we use the increased motivation to participate to foster an appreciative approach to parliamentarism? One...

Imparity of parliamentary influence, common to both the acceptance of the Versailles Treaty by the Weimar National Assembly and the current struggle in the British House of Commons over the Brexit deal, was also a grave problem for the German...

Since Donald Trump was elected president, the U. S. political system of “checks and balances“ has been facing previously unknown challenges. With no prior political experience, Trump over the last two years has tried to roll back the legislative...

The “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD) is now represented in all 16 German state parliaments, the Bundestag and the European Parliament. In the European Parliament, the ideological and personal conflicts of the federal AfD have led to the...

Parliamentary democracies can be characterized as party democracies, since in many respects parties are key actors in political decision-making, the recruitment of officials and elected representatives, and the exercise of power. Intra-party...

In attitude and participation research it is argued that political participation can counteract political disaffection. However, the relationships between action and attitude level are complicated, in particular due to inconsistent causal...

To this day, the young Otto Kirchheimer is regarded as a strong critical voice of the Weimar Republic’s parliamentary system. The article discusses Kirchheimer’s less known writings on parliamentarism during his years of exile in Paris and New...

This is a paradox. Political science literature has often rung the death bell for Second Chambers. They have been declared as no longer being of importance, or even lacking legitimacy. In Ireland, Italy, Canada and the UK the political parties had...