Legislative voting and government-opposition dynamics in Germany

The interaction of government and opposition parties in Germany is marked by a highly conflictual rhetoric in parliamentary debates and the media. At the same time strong veto points such as the second chamber, Bundesrat, and the Constitutional Court often require excessive compromising between government and opposition in ‘grand coalitions’ (Manow and Burkhart, 2007; Schmidt, 1996). Yet, little is known about the actual levels of conflict and consensus in legislative voting and the effect of explanatory factors such as the type and initiator of a proposal. Moreover, the effect of the economic crisis on government-opposition-dynamics is yet to be investigated. To fill this gap, this chapter analyses the voting behaviour of opposition and government parties in the German Bundestag. The original data collected for this study comprises the voting behaviour of all Bundestag parties for all 6532 bills that have been processed since unification (1990-2015). With regard to systematic factors it is shown that the policy area of a bill and the respective policy distance between party groups influence government-opposition agreement. Votes on financial and social policy are particularly conflictual. Furthermore, the study reveals, that in contrast to other countries policy reactions to the economic and Euro crisis (cf. Goetz, 2014) were supported by broad coalitions cutting across the government-opposition divide. Only the socialist Left Party engaged in ‘fundamental parliamentary opposition’ whereas an emerging euro sceptic party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) puts increasing pressure on the inter-party consensus in EU policy from outside the Bundestag (Arzheimer, 2015).