Compromise or Conflict: Party Coalitions in the German Reichstag and Democratic Backsliding

The breakdown of democracy in Weimar Germany has been attributed to many factors. One commonly cited issue is a fragmented party system with weak and unstable coalitions due to a “fundamental politicization” of the political process beginning during the Imperial Period, which resulted in the stigmatization of cooperation and lauding of ideological purity (Mannheim 1967, Retallack 2011). We argue that, in fact there did emerge consistent patterns of cooperation in the Imperial Reichstag, however, the persistence of the “regime” question altered the typical left-right patterns of cooperation and led to coalitions that were not effective on key policy questions. Using a novel historical dataset of roll call votes from 1871 to 1919, we build networks of legislative coalitions and examine the structure of these network and the role of different legislators in order to understand patterns of cooperation. We focus in particular on legislators’ centrality and brokerage scores and compare these network statistics on 3 key policy dimensions: state, economy, and regime questions. Through our original dataset and innovative use of network analysis, we offer novel evidence for the importance of coalition cohesiveness to democratization.