The transition to globalized knowledge economies in recent decades have accelerated economic and social change across the globe.1 European democracies have been no exception to these developments. They have experienced rapid structural changes to their economies, increased social inequality, new social cleavages (see, for example, Chapter 11) and growing ethnic diversity resulting from migration. These changes have had political repercussions, including growing support for politically extreme challenger parties and the rise of populist political entrepreneurs in many countries (Iversen and Soskice 2019; Proaño, Peña and Saalfeld 2019; de Vries and Hobolt 2020). Some authors have even argued that the nature of partisan conflict itself has changed. While traditionally most European party systems were dominated by a socio-economic conflict between left-wing parties supporting tax-funded expansion of the welfare state and Keynesian economic policy and right-wing parties advocating a free-market economy (Laver and Hunt 1992), new voter coalitions have emerged (Hillen and Steiner 2019) and, in some cases, new challenger parties have been found to exploit a new ‘universalism-particularism’ dimension in political conflict (Häusermann and Kriesi 2015). Where it has become politically relevant, this additional dimension of conflict has added further complexity to political competition in European democracies.

On January 6, 2021, angry supporters of the outgoing president, Donald Trump, stormed the US Capitol building, harassed members of Congress and staff, and mocked democratic symbols. The protestors violently expressed a widespread sentiment among Republican voters that the election was rigged, and that Joe Biden should not be sworn in as the new president of the United States. If democracy depends on the support of those who voted for the losing party to accept the result of the election as legitimate, the events on Capitol Hill showed that this “losers’ consent” (Anderson et al., 2005) is crumbling. Although the degree of polarization in the United States is severe, other advanced democracies face similar challenges. A substantial number of citizens feel that the political system has deep flaws, that politicians have lost touch, and that political decisions do not reflect the preferences of the majority anymore. The chapters in this book highlight the pervasiveness of these problems across a variety of institutional and political settings well beyond the United States.

Political parties, as Strøm (2000, p. 180) maintains, are generally ‘the most important organisations in modern politics’. Along with co-operative federalism and parapublic institutions they constitute one of the three crucial ‘nodes’ of the ‘semisovereign model of governance’ Katzenstein (1987) developed to analyse patterns of policy-making in the Federal Republic of Germany. Not only do parties in this model serve as links between citizens and elected officials at the regime level (cf. Poguntke2002; more generally Müller 2000), they also connect the various tiers, arenas and corporate actors in the Federal Republic's decentralised state contributing to a peculiar mix of competitive and co-operative elements (cf. Holtmann 2000; Leonardy 2001; Renzsch 2000). As for political parties, this model is generally characterised by ‘the conjoining of the party-run state with statist parties’ (Katzenstein 1987, p. 377) and, more specifically, by a number of structural attributes that he believes to have profoundly influenced the formulation of centrist policies, which tend to be adjusted incrementally and largely irrespective of the party-political composition of the federal government of the day (Katzenstein 1987, p. 39).

This chapter seeks to map and analyse continuities and change of relevant structural attributes of the German party system at all three levels conventionally emphasised in the literature: (1) party in public office, (2) party as organisation and (3) party in the electorate, following the triad famously suggested by Key (1964).