A Historical Approach to Case Selection: The All-German People’s Party

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Abstract

Recent scholarship has warned against the bias that emerges from reasoning backwards from the safety of knowing an outcome and thus treating past events as having been more predetermined than they actually were. Studies have highlighted the importance of a historically sensitive approach to periodization, concept formation, and collecting suitable data to test competing explanations (e.g. Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010; Kreuzer 2009; Møller 2017; 2018). This paper contributes to this “historical turn” in political science by adding a historical perspective on case selection and illustrating its value through an archival data-based study of an important and yet overlooked case in the development of Germany’s post-war party system.

The political union between Protestant and Catholic Christians has been an important innovation in Germany’s post-war democracy. For the first time, Protestants and Catholics came together in a major political party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The inter-denominational merger helped reconcile a long-standing societal division, overcome the political fragmentation of the center and center-right of the Weimar years, and contributed toward the consolidation of Germany’s post-war 2.5-party system. Knowing the political development of the last 70 years, we might be tempted to regard the merger between both denominations as a historical inevitability. Many classic studies have highlighted the normative desire to leave behind pre-war conflicts and the path-setting effect of early institutional restrictions on party competition when explaining the rise of the CDU and low levels of party system fragmentation. Recent work by historians, in contrast, has revealed a high level of uncertainty and contingency that characterized the relationship between Protestants and Catholics in Germany’s early post-war years.

This paper focuses on an under-studied political party that, at the time, caused significant concerns over a renewed political divide between Catholics and Protestants: Gustav Heinemann’s All-German People’s Party (Gesamtdeutsche Volkspartei, GVP). The GVP illustrates the importance of “reading history forward” when selecting our cases. Its result of only 1.2 percent in the 1953 election has made it look like an inevitable failure, reducing it to hardly more than a footnote in the party politics literature. However, in the early 1950s, many CDU leaders and political observers feared the disintegration of Catholics and Protestants into opposing political parties. Catholics supported Western rearmament, whereas many Protestants did not. Protestants also resented Catholics for their insistence on separate confessional schools and for their newly achieved dominance in post-war Germany. Heinemann’s prominence, rootedness in Protestantism, and role as a vocal opponent to rearmament makes the GVP’s 1953 result more puzzling than a retrospective perspective would suggest. Relying on archival data and process tracing, the paper reconstructs the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that provided Heinemann with initially favorable conditions for party breakthrough. Decisions on the timing of party formation and political strategies explain the GVP’s failure to seize the opportunity.

The article makes three contributions: First, it highlights a historically sensitive approach to case selection. A case selection strategy based on a party’s eventual election result or the snapshot of its previous electoral performances would have most likely missed the GVP. Missing such cases, however, risks biasing our conclusions. The background of the party’s leadership, its roots in political Protestantism, and established parties’ difficulties in addressing the salient inter-denominational conflicts made the GVP’s failed breakthrough surprising from a political opportunity structure perspective. Negative cases that include values on an independent variable that are positively related to the outcome are essential for inference (Mahoney and Goertz, 2004). Second, the paper underlines the importance of relevant negative cases to assess the effect of new or minor parties’ choices on their breakthrough potential. Finally, empirically, it is, to the best of my knowledge, the first study of the GVP in English.

The paper ends by suggesting that tracing public opinion, established parties’ positions, and institutional developments toward election day are better case selection strategies than reasoning backwards from parties’ eventual election result or looking at snapshots of previous election performances. Herbert Butterfield’s (1931: 6) verdict still stands: “Real historical understanding is not achieved by the subordination of the past to the present, but rather by our making the past our present and attempting to see life with the eyes of another century than our own.”

Author

• Matthias Dilling, University of Oxford