The Political System of Germany

“Grotz and Schroeder’s book is an encompassing analysis of the German political system. In an unprecedented effort, it provides extensive information grounded in democratic theory, and provides a detailed account of multi-level governance in the largest EU member state. I whole-heartedly recommend it to students and scholars alike.” —Arend Lijphart, University of California, San Diego, USA “A comprehensive, theoretical informed guide to German politics. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the origins, performance, and challenges facing one of the world’s most important democracies.” —Daniel Ziblatt, Harvard University, USA, and WZB Berlin, Germany and co-author How Democracies Die “Far from being merely a factual guidebook to the German political system – though it also does that job as thoroughly as anyone could want – this is a thoughtful and theoretically driven account of how contemporary German democracy works, and the challenges it faces. Many readers will already have some knowledge of individual parts of this complex system, but to understand it fully one needs to know how all those parts interact – or occasionally fail to do so. To achieve this, one needs look no further than Grotz and Schroeder.” —Colin Crouch, University of Warwick, UK, and External Scientific Member, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, Germany This book offers a systematic, theory-based, and empirically grounded introduction to the political system of Germany. Compared to other textbooks on government and politics in Germany, it has two particular benefits. First, it analyzes the individual dimensions of the German political system from a uniform theoretical perspective based on the well-known distinction between majoritarian and consensus democracy. Second, it particularly explains how political decision-making in the multi-level system takes place, including the local, state, federal as well as EU levels. This way, the book provides a comprehensive, detailed, and clear picture of how German democracy is organized and how it works. Florian Grotz is Professor of Comparative Government at the Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, Germany. Wolfgang Schroeder is Professor of the Political System of Germany at the University of Kassel and Fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), Germany.