Path Dependency and Party Organization: A Territorial Analysis of Germany’s CDU

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German political actors collaborated selectively with West Germany’s Christian Democratic Union to renew the CDU’s eastern party structures, capitalizing on or being constrained by history, geography, and culture.  Across the five states carved from the East German territory and their 100+ counties, the CDU quickly developed a very differentiated territorial presence that, once elections were underway, contributed to virtuous and vicious cycles for the party.  This paper deploys a historical-institutional approach to explain two key stages in the development of the eastern German party system.  First, it considers the process through which the Federal Republic’s CDU settled, organizationally speaking, the five states that were created from the GDR – a process that contributed to powerful virtuous and vicious cycles of party development for the following two decades.  Second, it analyzes how actors within the state and local party organizations reckoned with the forces of path dependency and positive feedback to either deepen their party territorial strengths or to change courses after disappointing state and local performances.