Research / Christianity and democracy

Christian democracy in Germany – an insight into the English-language scientific literature

Christian Democratic politics is commonly associated with the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) in Europe. Although the federal elections are approaching, a topic that deserves plenty of attention in its own right, it is also crucial to understand the past decade of Christian democracy in Germany. This article would like to contribute to this effort by providing an insight into three relevant English-language research articles on the topic.

Christian democratic politics is commonly associated with Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, Christian Social Union (CSU), not just in Germany but throughout Europe (and even the world) as well. It is always easily justified to focus on the expectations and possible political outcomes when the date of the forthcoming federal elections is approaching - in the case of Germany, September 26. This responsibility belongs to political scientists, country specialists, and journalists[i] who closely follow German party politics and employ measures of quantitative political science to analyze party polls, candidates, and other significant topics. This overview does not elaborate on these issues. Rather, its ambition is to present some valuable products of the scientific literature which focuses on German Christian democracy in the past ten years. Although one could rightly assume that there is an immense amount of English-language literature on the topic based on its political relevance, this is not the case. Naturally, not all of them are included in this summary, but this overview will present three articles to provide an insight into the different paths of researchers' perspectives. Two articles (the first and the third) come from recent years and focus on party politics. The second one presents a more historical perspective but displays some vital dilemmas of Christian Democratic politics. This article will highlight, 
interpret, and comment on the central idea of these articles

 

[i] POLITICO German election 2021 subpage. In: Politico. https://www.politico.eu/germany-election-2021/ (2021. 08. 20.)

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