Standard work on the Bundesrat published

"To what extent do party politics override the interests of the federal states in the Bundesrat? The lack of official documentation of the voting behaviour of the state governments in plenary sessions has so far prevented meaningful answers to this question. The DFG project "Party politics in the Bundesrat. Analysing the Votes in the Committees of the Bundesrat" has overcome this empirical deficit. Roland Sturm, Senior Fellow at IParl, together with Markus Müller, Patrick Finke and Antonios Souris, has analysed tens of thousands of documents on the committees of the Bundesrates as part of the DFG project, thereby opening up a new research approach to its functioning and decision-making. At the centre of the project is a new dataset with information on more than 51,000 committee decisions, which has been deposited in the Harvard Dataverse and is freely accessible there.

After the research results were presented and discussed with experts and students at a conference jointly organised by the Bundesrat, the IParl and the DFG project in Berlin at the end of last year (link to event report), the final publication "Parteipolitik im Bundesrat. The Bundesrat and its committees" has now been published by Nomos Verlag. The analysis of the new committee data shows that parties have established coordination routines to influence decision-making in the Bundesrat. However, party conflicts are rather rare and are detected in around 12 per cent of all committee decisions. A systematic overlaying of national interests by party politics therefore does not take place in practice. The data analysis is supplemented by case studies, for example on the behaviour of the "small" parties, on decision-making in the Legal Affairs Committee and the Finance Committee or on the role of party political motives in the legislative initiatives of the Bundesrat. In these case studies, processes of party politicisation are examined in detail and traced on the basis of specific proposals.

The volume not only offers unique insights into the workings of the Bundesrat, but also provides starting points for academics and students working on questions of federalism and parliamentary research or policy analysis. Further information on the publication and a reading sample are available on the publisher's website."