Herbert Kitschelt and Wolfgang Streeck (eds.) Germany: Beyond the Stable State     London: Routledge, 2004   256 pages ISBN 978-0-7146-5588-8 | € 130,50 | £ 85.00 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-7146-8473-4 | € 30,90 | £ 22.99 (paperback) Order directly from Routledge.

 

 

Abstract | Contents | Editors

 

 

Abstract

 
From the 1960s to the 1980s, observers attributed to Germany the character of a political-economic "model" that was able to weather a multiplicity of economic challenges. The term "model Germany" indicated a political and economic compact permitting centripetal political competition in the electoral and legislative arenas, while co-ordinating public policy among political parties, large interest associations and private business firms such that changes would take place only in an incremental and positive sum fashion. Since the early 1990s and even more so in the new millennium, the "German model" has faced serious troubles. Authors in this book describe the physiognomy of the incremental disintegration the model has undergone over the past decade and probe into the causes of such developments. Articles in this volume examine Germany's national and Europe-wide integration as triggers of the model's unravelling. Such processes are paralleled by novel tendencies in public opinion, social life styles, and modes of political mobilization in parties, interest groups, and social movements. The strains of "model Germany" show up in particularly sharply contoured fashion in the transformation of industrial relations, corporate governance structures, social and immigration policies in Germany.
 

 

Contents

 
From Stability to Stagnation: Germany at the Beginning
of the Twenty-First Century
Herbert Kitschelt and Wolfgang Streeck
 
Part I: National Unification and European Integration

 
German Unification and "Model Germany":
An Adventure in Institutional Conservatism
Helmut Wiesenthal
 
Germany and European Integration: A Shifting of Tectonic Plates
Charlie Jeffery and William E. Paterson

 
Part II: Labour Markets, Life Styles and Political Preferences

 
New Ways of Life or Old Rigidities? Changes in Social Structure
and Life Courses and their Political Impact
Karl Ulrich Mayer and Steffen Hillmert
 
The Crumbling Pillars of Social Partnership
Wolfgang Streeck and Anke Hassel

Political-Economic Context and Partisan Strategies
in the German Federal Elections, 1990-2002
Herbert Kitschelt
 
The Changing Role of Political Protest Movements
Dieter Rucht
 
Part III: Reorganisation of State and Political Economy
 
Corporate Governance and the Disintegration of Organised Capitalism in the 1990s
Jürgen Beyer and Martin Höpner
 
The State of the Welfare State: German Social Policy between Macroeconomic Retrenchment and Microeconomic Recalibration
Stephan Leibfried and Herbert Obinger
 
The Politics of Citizenship in the New Republic
Michael Minkenberg
 

 

Editors

 
Herbert Kitschelt teaches comparative politics at Duke University. He has published numerous books and articles on parties and party competition in Germany, advanced industrial democracies, and postcommunist polities. His recent research has focused on the interface between economic liberalization and democratic politics in a variety of regions of the world, including Germany.
 
Wolfgang Streeck is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. From 1988 to 1995, he was professor of sociology and industrial relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published widely on the German political economy in comparative perspective. His current work is on the changing structure and function of tripartism in the governance of the German economy.