Book Review: Gabriele D’Ottavio and Thomas Saalfeld (eds), Germany After the 2013 Elections: Breaking the Mould of the Post-Unification Politics?
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929917717439 |
| Author | Paolo Chiocchetti |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsEurope |
Book Reviews 661
Germany After the 2013 Elections: Breaking
the Mould of the Post-Unification Politics?
by Gabriele D’Ottavio and Thomas Saalfeld
(eds). Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. 228pp., £65.00
(h/b), ISBN 9781472444394
This edited volume is a welcome addition to
the well-established literature on German fed-
eral elections, which includes classic book
series by VS Verlag, Nomos, Berghahn (in
English) and other more occasional publica-
tions. The book under review collects in-depth
analyses by leading experts and younger
researchers on the 2013 federal election, its
antecedents and its foreseeable consequences.
The 11 chapters discuss the record of the out-
going centre-right coalition; Germany’s
European and foreign policy; the election’s
results; voting behaviour; party manifestos; the
strategy of large (CDU/CSU and SPD),
medium (FDP, LINKE and GRÜNE) and new
parties (AfD and PIRATEN); and the forma-
tion of a grand coalition cabinet.
Some chapters are particularly noteworthy.
Reimut Zohlnhöfer provides a convincing
explanation of the centrist social and economic
course of the Christian-liberal government
based on electoral, budgetary and political cap-
ital considerations. Kenneth Dyson portrays
Germany as a ‘vulnerable hegemonic power’
in the Eurozone, predicting an intensification
of centripetal pressures from debtor countries
and domestic hawks. Matthias Mader and
Harald Schoen use the data of a pre-election
online panel to underline the role of Angela
Merkel’s popularity for the CDU/CSU’s suc-
cess, criticise the campaign strategy of the
SPD and identify a ‘considerable potential’
for the AfD based on its Euroscepticism and
ethnocentric social conservatism. Simon
Franzmann, finally, puts forward an original
and powerful explanation of the defeat of the
GRÜNE and the FDP; this is blamed on their
adoption of an office-seeking instead of a
vote-seeking strategy, which in turn should
have entailed the pursuit of a centrist ‘pivotal
position’.
Despite its interest, the book suffers from
two flaws. First, the origin of the chapters as
contributions to a workshop held shortly after
the election ruled out the use of the full data of
the German Longitudinal Election Study
(GLES) and other primary sources. As a result,
the discussions of voting behaviour and party
strategy remain tentative and insufficiently sup-
ported by evidence. Second, the book lacks a
global assessment of the significance of the
2013 federal election for the development of the
German political system. The findings of the
individual chapters are quickly summarised in
the introduction, but not further discussed or
drawn together into a coherent argument. This
leads the editors to mistakenly label the election
as a ‘watershed’, instead of as a temporary
rebound in the long-term decline of the two
‘people’s parties’ underway since 1976 and
accelerating since 2002.
Paolo Chiocchetti
(University of Luxembourg)
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929917717439
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How Europeans View and Evaluate
Democracy by Mónica Ferrín and Hanspeter
Kriesi (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2016. 410pp., £65.00 (h/b), ISBN 9780198766902
The conceptual and empirical difficulties in
studying political attitudes, and the contem-
porary political atmosphere in Europe, make
this book a valuable and important contribu-
tion. Drawing on data from a specifically
designed module in Round Six (2012) of the
European Social Survey (ESS6), the authors
generate theoretical and empirical insights
into how citizens in Europe and on its fringes
view and evaluate democracy, both pushing
the boundaries of existing knowledge and
subjecting previously held knowledge to rig-
orous scrutiny. The fundamental and guiding
premise is to ascertain how Europeans con-
ceptualise democracy, and what this means
for the legitimacy of European political sys-
tems.
The book, to the credit of both editors and
chapter authors, contains an abundance of
findings which deserve attention. Among
these, there are a few key arguments.
Substantively, the book shows that Europeans
share a common perception of liberal democ-
racy, primarily consisting of equality before
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