Party Politics in the German Bundesrat. Voting behaviour in the Bundesrat Committees.

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The party politicization of the German Bundesrat has been an important topic of both research and public discourses on the functioning of political institutions of the Federal Republic. Yet, any empirical analysis faces the challenge of the largely missing documentation of individual votes by federal states (‘Länder’) governments in the plenary sessions. For revealing Bundesrat decision-making, we suggest focusing on its committees, which carry out most of the substantive work and register the individual voting behavior of the ‘Länder’. Based on more than 50.000 votes since German reunification, which we have transferred from the official committee protocols to a novel dataset, we scrutinize the party influence on Bundesrat decisions. Beyond the general evaluation of the data, we contextualize our findings by providing interviews with practitioners as well as detailed case studies, dealing with specific policy fields and actors such as small parties. Within the scope of a possible project extension, we aim at deepening our research agenda. On the one hand, we plan a content analysis of Bundesrat opinions on draft bills proposed by the federal government as well as European Union policy proposals. On the other hand, we seek for an historical evaluation of the Länder votes in the committee on Legal Affairs.