REVIEW : PARTY POLITICS IN GERMANY by Charles Lees, Ch.

Combining the German politics and comparative politics literature and applying key
comparative politics concepts, models, and approaches to tell us about party politics in Germany
that has not been covered and established in studies. So there is advantages to the comparative
method (1) better contextual description, (2) better classification, (3) more reliable hypothesis
testing, and (4) the generations of predictions. It’s provide a different analytical and empirical slant
on the phenomenon of party politics in Germany in general.

Contextual description opening our conceptual and empirical view to bring a new
prespective in the analysis. Understanding the party politics in Germany, it’s critically engages the
narrative of the Sonderweg that underpins much of the German politics literature. So that it allows
us to be more reflexive about the temptation in single-country and area studies to assume a certain
national exceptionalism when explaining complex phenemona and to construct tautological
explanations or partial theories in order to do so. Jutta A. Helm in Comparative Politics and
German Studies also strongly focus on aware of this problem.

The specific configuration of geo-politics, economic and political development and the
strategic decisions of political elites in Germany that created the economical potent, political
stunned, diplomatically aggressive and territorially ambitious state that destabilised Europe from
the late nineteenth century onwards and led Germany to total political and military defeat in 1945.
For instance, the institutional setting for party politics in Germany – such as the system of co-
operative federalism, the proactive nature of the Basic Law, and the existence of an AMS electoral
system with a 5 per cent barrier to electoral representation – is the creation of institution builders
whose work was carried out with one eye on Germany’s unhappy past and driven by the desire to
prevent anything of its kind happening again. And even the unusually high levels of political
disengagement in the new Federal states can be partially attributed to the legacy of over half a
century of National Socialist and Communist dictatorship that are part of the German Sonderweg.

Better classification, the use of comparative method will be more to expose any logical or
empirical weakness in the models and concepts. One particular weakness of single-country and
area studies is the misuse or at least hybridisation of comparative concepts. I think by applying a
different classificatory ‘cut’ to German political parties the schema highlights some interesting
observations, including the convergence of German political parties towards an organisationally
‘thin’ mode and the strikingly similar organisational antecedents to be found when comparing the
Greens and post-industrial far right parties such as the Republicans, DVU and NPD.

The book relies on secondary data, this means the analytical narrative is more based on
inductive rather than hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Even if the hypothesis in this book might
be more formally tested in a systematic manner through future research. Even more so than was
the case with hypotheses-testing, the book does not set out to generate predictions itself. But
throughout the book predictions are made, not just about the future development of party politics
in Germany but also about party politics more generally. I agree that making predictions is a risky
task. Those predictions that prove correct and those that do not look foolhardy.

This study also aimed to problematise the trade-off between depth and breadth, micro-and
macro-level explanation, rich description and abstraction and more. Recalled in the introduction
to his study there are five different techiques of comparison, (1) global statistical analysis, (2) case
studies, (3) focused comparisons, (4) diachronic studies, and (5) pooled comparative research. The
book draws upon primarily data from recent Bundestag elections, recent party publications and
other official documents – including election manifestos and coalition agreements – as well as
secondary data including statistical analyses of voter choice, value orientation, and other socio-
economic data, in addition to the rich narrative of much of the German politics literature.
Nonetheless in introduction to this study the method which not only one in this manner makes it
imperative that care is taken both to avoid individualist and/or ecological fallacies, and to make
explicit the underlying ontological and epistemological position of the book. It’s also described
above highlight two issues that problematise the trade-off between depth and breadth and more.
Because of the need to make one’s ontological and epistemological position explicit, this book
might strike some readers as being quite long compared with other studies of party politics in
Germany and to contain expositions on matters of theory and methodology that they may consider
unnecessary or irrelevant to their interests

Moving to the dominant empirical strand of debate, the book balanced between (1) the
singularities of German sonderweg, (2) the commonality of characteristics shared by Germany and
other nations. The data shown in the book was highly complex that defies over-deterministic or
mono-causal explanations.