Becoming Party Politicians: East German State Legislatures and the Decade Following Democratization

Extract

Becoming Party Politicians: East German State Legislatures and the Decade Following Democratization. By Louise Davidson-Schmich. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. 232p. $27.50.

The democratic transitions in Eastern Europe have inspired a host of research that utilizes these changes as a laboratory for examining the enduring question of how democracies can become or remain stable. In Becoming Party Politicians, Louise Davidson-Schmich provides a unique contribution to this work by examining the behavior of East German state legislatures since unification. Davidson-Schmich uses the unusual case of East Germany much to her advantage. Robert Rohrschneider and others have used the division of Germany after World War II as a means of examining how mass and elite public opinion was influenced by the experience of communism, but Davidson-Schmich wishes to know how legislators' political behavior is constrained when democratic institutions—specifically political parties—act at odds with their socialized opinions and preferences.