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  • The CDU and the Politics of Gender in Germany: Bringing Women to the Party
  • Ronald J. Granieri
The CDU and the Politics of Gender in Germany: Bringing Women to the Party. By Sarah Elise Wiliarty. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xvi + 267. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-0521765824.

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has been the ruling party in postwar Germany for many of the last sixty years, a symbol of postwar Germany’s success in building a centrist democratic state based on broad-based catchall parties (Volksparteien). Yet it continues to puzzle scholars. Although a conservative party with its roots in the Catholic west and south, it is currently led by a Protestant woman from the east, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and its social policies over the decades have reflected a curious mixture of traditionalist conservatism and progressive reform. Sarah Wiliarty attempts to explain these apparent complexities in a sophisticated study of the relationship between the CDU’s internal organization and its policy positions, based on wide reading in the relevant literature and interviews with key actors.

Developing her own explanatory model, the “corporatist catch-all party,” Wiliarty offers a convincing structural analysis of the CDU. She defines a “corporatist catch-all [End Page 217] party” as one that departs from the “classic” catch-all model developed by Otto Kirchheimer and others, in the creation and management of distinct interest groups within the party (workers, businessmen, young people, regional organizations, and women): “existing theories of party organization tend to inappropriately pit activists against party leaders when in fact internal party groups may be based more around policy orientation than around position in the party hierarchy” (18). Furthermore, policy in a corporatist catch-all party “tends to emerge from the interplay of internal interest groups, as opposed to the party’s founding ideology, strategic interaction with rival parties or the independent initiatives of party leaders” (220). Each of these groups has a defined leadership and function, and their relations allow some groups to form dominant coalitions and thus advance their own particular agendas.

In the case of the CDU, the Women’s Union (Frauen Union) became the forum within which Christian Democratic women could develop their policy priorities and turn them into legislation. After offering brief background chapters on party theory and the history of the CDU, Wiliarty proves her point through an analysis of the CDU’s policies on three “women’s issues”: abortion, family and parental support, and internal gender balance. She demonstrates how the Women’s Union maneuvered itself into being the dominant coalition within the party during the late 1970s, and thus was able to move the CDU to adopt positions on those issues that, though not necessarily the same as those advocated by the more feminist Social Democrats or Greens, nevertheless moved beyond the “Kinder, Kirche, Küche” social model associated with postwar conservatism.

One of the book’s most notable strengths is its creative and potentially very useful model. Readers from other disciplines may find the framework a bit schematic, but Wiliarty offers an admirably clear and convincing example of structural political analysis. Also laudable is her decision to conclude the book with brief comparative discussions of Christian Democratic parties in Austria, the Netherlands, and Italy, as well as the French and Hungarian Socialist parties, to see how her corporatist catch-all model can be applied in a variety of political contexts. Her conclusions convincingly suggest the utility of her model, which deserves the attention of other scholars working in the field of party research.

The book does have a few weaknesses. One is the notion that scholars can best measure women’s influence in a party by looking at “women’s issues.” Wiliarty anticipates this concern, admitting that “conservative women are not feminists” and that they “have their own policy preferences, distinct from both feminist women on the left and Christian Democratic men” (221). But she makes uneven use of that insight. A chapter charting the rise of Angela Merkel, which shows how Merkel skillfully used the structures of the corporatist party to advance so quickly, suggests a different way to appreciate the role of corporatism in the CDU. Merkel...

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