Introduction

Given that every elected national government in the 35-year history of the Federal Republic of Germany has been a coalition of varying political complexions and that the creation of an economically successful and stable social structure is often assumed to have resulted from the constant necessity for compromise by the participating parties, it might be expected that numerous studies of coalitional behaviour in the post-war Republic would now exist.

Whilst many aspects of the country's development have been studied in detail and several excellent and wide-ranging books written as a result (Baker et al. 1981; Conradt 1982; Doring and Smith 1982), both the formation and the maintenance of federal coalitions have been neglected as topics worthy of analysis by social scientists. Mass electoral behaviour, the establishment of a new ‘political culture’ and the policy outputs of the party system have all received greater attention, as have the roles and functions of the major political parties since 1949, the SPD (Social Democrats) and the CDU/CSU (Christian Democrats).

The third party in the system for most of the post-war period, the FDP (Free Democrats), has only rarely been investigated in any depth, although some aspects of its behaviour were highlighted in the different chapters of the book edited by Albertin (1980). Recent work on coalitions in the Federal Republic (Norpoth 1982; Schmidt 1983; von Beyme 1983) has looked more closely at the role of the FDP, but these analyses did not consider the party in terms of a coherent framework which emphasises the impact of ‘party factors’ in coalitional behaviour.