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This account of institutional change and positional differentiation of senior officials in Germany's Federal administration is presented in five sections. Section I, ‘Senior Officials and the Reassertion of Political Authority’, is introductory and discusses the causes and implications of change in the organization and in the political and administrative roles of the senior civil service; changes identified include party politicization, parliamentarization and federalization of the national policy process, modernization initiatives, European integration, and unification. Section II gives a brief survey of the Federal senior ministerial personnel (looking at pay grade and rank, and centrality), and section III considers paths to the top, paying particular attention to the procedures for recruitment and promotion and the consequences of weak formal structures for personnel planning and development. Following on from the definition of political craft as a defining attribute of effective top officials, section IV highlights the central position of political coordination units as training grounds in the Federal administration and comments on the informal positional differentiation that they encourage. The discussion concludes in section V with an assessment of the implications of the partition of the ministerial bureaucracy between Bonn and Berlin.

This chapter explicates and captures the essence of the explosion of ‘election fetishism’ and ‘electoralism’ in the Arab Middle East. It prefaces this with a historicization of ‘electoralism’ in the pre-colonial and colonial period. Specifically, it critiques the phenomenon of ‘election fetishism’ during the 1998-2008 period. It argues that ‘election fetishism’ accounts for the routinization of ‘electoralism’ in the cluster of Arab states which have held elections since the 1980s, and for ‘parliamentarization’ in the Arab region. The chapter also seeks to critically assess the initiation of ‘electoralism’ in the Arab Gulf, The Occupied Territories Palestine, and occupied Iraq, noting the factors that vitiate such undertakings.

This chapter examines the role of national parliaments in the European Union. It first considers the general trend towards de-parliamentarization in the EU before describing the European situation by distinguishing three separate phases, in which the national parliaments have different functions: the transfer of sovereign rights from the Member States to the EU, the exercise of those transferred rights by the EU, and the implementation of European decisions by the Member States. The chapter then explores the question of whether the European Parliament is capable of compensating at the European level for the erosion of legislative authority at the national level. Finally, it discusses the proposal that the European Parliament be vested with the powers typically possessed by national parliaments as a solution to the EU’s legitimacy crisis and argues that full parliamentarization is not the answer.

This chapter argues that the European Union suffers from a legitimacy deficit and explains how it can gain acceptance from its citizens. In the beginning, there were good reasons for European integration. Approval was high, but that high approval has been lost. With respect to integration, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty marked the beginning of the EU’s weak acceptance. In the long run it fostered the spread of anti-European political parties. This chapter considers the various proposals aimed at bringing the EU closer to its citizens, including a full parliamentarization of the EU, before making its own recommendations: first, the European Parliament must be brought closer to the public; second, there must be clearer limits on communalization; and third, decisions with significant political implications must be re-politicized. The point is not to abandon constitutionalization, but to draw proper conclusions from the constitutionalization that has already taken place.

This chapter discusses the necessity of Europeanized elections and political parties. In textbooks on European law, political parties play no role, though the Lisbon Treaty affords them one. Currently thirteen parties enjoy the status of a European party under Article 10 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU), most of which are affiliations of ideologically like-minded national parties. This chapter first explains how elections work in Europe, and more specifically in the European Parliament, before comparing Euro-democracy with national democracy. It then considers the European Parliament’s powers of participation in European legislation and how the parties’ function of fostering European political awareness is undermined. It also examines the causes of the EU’s legitimacy deficit, along with a number of proposals including a full parliamentarization of the Union, before concluding with its own recommendations.