Voters, Parties, and Interest Groups in the Consolidation of Democracy—France and Germany, 1870–1939

If all parties need votes to get elected, why do some parties court voters more ardently than others? To answer this question, the book analyzes how political institutions determine the degree to which parties behave as entrepreneurial agents of voters or as inert, bureaucratic behemoths and how different levels of party responsiveness affect democratic consolidation."Institutions and Innovations" analyzes the troubled history of French and German parties between 1870 and 1939 to develop a general explanation of how the development of responsive parties constitutes a key element for the consolidation of democracies, past and present. It explains why French parties responded more swiftly than German ones to very similar changes in their economic and political environments. The book demonstrates that the national differences in party responsiveness played a key role in the collapse of the German Weimar Republic (1918n1933) and in the survival of the French Third Republic (1870n1939). It addresses the general fates of French and German democracy by asking three specific questions: Why did German socialists reject Keynesianism while their French counterparts swiftly embraced it? Why did German liberals, compared to French ones, fail to modernize their logistical infrastructure and electioneering methods? Why were German conservatives less effective than French ones in fending off the challenge posed by fascist and peasant insurgent movements that arose in the 1920s and 1930s?In answering these questions, the book engages new institutional theories and longstanding party literature to demonstrate that the electoral conduct of parties is structured in equal parts by socioeconomic and institutional constraints. The book's interdisciplinary focus sheds a critical light on the exceptionalism of purely historical accounts and reductionist and universal claims of ahistorical political science theories.Marcus Kreuzer is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Villanova University."


Preface
In writing this book, I became deeply indebted to history. History came to my rescue for the ‹rst time in early 1989. During that winter and spring, glasnost and perestroika toppled not just communist regimes but also most proposals that had been carefully drafted for the dissertation-writing seminar in which I participated at Columbia. Witnessing the emergence of brand-new liberal democracies and free markets quickly jaded my enthusiasm to contribute yet another study on how the Greens were going to solve the solid-waste crisis and reform bureaucratic parties. Yet this newfound excitement quickly yielded to the sobering realization that CNN-style headline history lacks the data sets, the secondary sources, and the distinct outcomes required for the effective deployment of the methodological apparatus that modern social science demands. Faced with the predicament of joining the ranks of transitologists, I was rescued by history a second time when somebody pointed out that the very same issues that kept us rushing for the newspaper each morning had made their historical debut in interwar Europe. The possibility of studying democratization through historical examples offered a tempting solution to the methodological problems posed by analyzing the present day transitions to liberal democracy. The passage of 70 to 80 years provided distinct outcomes and voluminous political histories that together enabled the formulation of a theoretically informed, methodologically self-conscious comparative study.
The political histories of interwar Europe offered more than just redress to methodological problems. They also suggested two key factors affecting the fate of interwar democracies. First, they placed an inordinate amount of attention on political parties. This emphasis might be explicable by the fact that interwar democracies lacked corporatist arrangements, constitutional courts, or supranational organizations, which nowadays act as rival channels to parties for the representation of societal interests. Much more than nowadays, interwar parties were the principal game in town for assisting citizens, voluntary associations, and economic interest groups to voice their interests and for keeping politicians, bureaucrats, and generals accountable. In short, interwar parties constituted the principal democratic fulcrum on which societal actors could leverage their political in›uence. Second, the general importance of parties stands in striking contrast to the actual leverage they offered citizens in different countries. In some countries, parties acted like voter-oriented, innovative entrepreneurs, while in others they behaved like inert, inward-looking bureaucratic behemoths. This difference in the willingness to innovate and take risks was particularly pronounced across French and German parties, which is one reason (further reasons are listed in the introduction) that I concentrate my analysis on these two countries. Interestingly enough, the centrality of parties and their entrepreneurialism increasingly emerge as themes in the analysis of postcommunist societies; thus, we might indeed learn a few lessons from history.
While history inspired this book, it did not readily divulge compelling explanations. Many strictly historical explanations were either unnecessarily exceptionalist or complex in accounting for the differing innovativeness of parties and the varying leverage they offered societal groups. On this front, the vast American literature on Congress and its rapidly growing comparative offspring provided invaluable insights. It gratifyingly integrates formal institutional analysis with rational choice models and provides extremely compelling and empirically thoroughly tested accounts of how formal representative institutions structure the choices of political actors. This literature provided the indispensable theoretical road map for piecing together the innumerable but highly scattered references about political institutions made by historical monographs. Once these institutional fragments were linked together, it became apparent that institutional incentives were key for explaining the varying innovativeness of parties.
These efforts to trespass back and forth between history and political science would not have been possible were it not for the support that I received from many different sources. I obtained generous ‹nancial support from the Canadian Social Science Council, Canadian Institute for Peace and Security Studies, Columbia University, DAAD (German Academic Exchange), Council for European Studies, Mellon Foundation, and Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna, and Villanova University). The MTA's Capital Improvement Funds are to be thanked for restoring the tracks and rolling stock of New York subways to the point where I could actually get some work done on my daily rides to and from Brooklyn. I received intellectual advice and much-needed moral support from Mark Kesselman, Lisa Anderson, Jeffrey Olick, and Robert Paxton, who also generously served on my dissertation committee. I would like to thank Chuck Myers, Kevin Rennells, and Eric Dahl for their help in preparing the ‹nal manuscript. Mark Lichbach, in turn, used all his intellectual breadth to situate the argument more comfortably in the different theoretical literatures from which it draws. Mark Zacher kindly and persistently nudged me to get done and reminded me that scholarship is equal parts perspiration and inspiration. I counted 20 singled-spaced pages of comments I received over the years from anonymous referees. The best way I can thank them is to point out that their comments delayed the manuscript's completion by over two years. Were it not for their many small and large criticisms, this would have been a different book. Thanks also to Comparative Politics for permission to reprint parts of "Electoral Institutions, Political Organization, and Party Development: French and German Socialists and Mass Politics," vol. 30, no. 3 (April 1998): 273-92, and Social Science History for permission to reprint "Money, Votes, and Political Leverage: Explaining Electoral Performance of Liberals in Interwar France and Germany," vol. 23, no. 2 (summer 1999): 211-40. In navigating the perilous waters of interdisciplinary scholarship, support was at ‹rst dif‹cult to ‹nd but ultimately all the more generous and rewarding. Stathis Kalyvas had just traveled these dif‹cult waters and shared his lessons as well as recommendations of ‹rst-rate Mediterranean restaurants. As a long-standing and accomplished practitioner of historically grounded social science, Ira Katznelson reassured me that doing history is not only okay but also of profound intellectual signi‹cance. Finally, the comments of Peggy Anderson were unrivaled in their insightfulness, subtlety, and above all thoroughness. They helped retrieve insights from muddled passages that even I could no longer retrace; they added invaluable historical nuances; and their wit and kindness always served as a welcome morale booster. Maybe her generous style of commenting explains why it has been such a pleasure to read the works of her fellow historians.
Books rest on more than just ‹nancial patrons and intellectual mentors. The interest and perseverance propelling this endeavor would have been unthinkable without my parents, Harald and Edda Kreuzer. I owe them deeply for their constant encouragement, persistent support, and early reminder that intellectual curiosity has payoffs far more rewarding and lasting than even the most lavish Wall Street salary. My wife, Pam Loughman, on the other hand, deserves credit for her gentle insistence that I periodically ignore my work and appreciate the other joys of life-a task recently made easier by the arrival of Lucas and Julia. As my editor in chief, Pam helped guide me through more than just the stylistic complexities of the English language.