Introduction: Institutional Change and Adaptation in a Stable Democracy

Abstract

Institutions have been at the centre of the discipline of comparative politics in Western Europe for most of the past 50 years. Contrary to the situation in the United States, there was a considerable number of countries on the Continent which did not experience a behaviouralistic revolution drawing scholarly attention away from institutional matters of politics. Germany was among those countries in which the classical institutionalism concentrating on the constitutional architecture of a system and the formal dimension of individual institutions remained particularly strong due to the tradition of Allgemeine Staatslehre.1 Early works on political institutions written by German political scientists often tried to gain an independent profile against the strong legacy of constitutional law by looking at institutions through the lenses of specific normative or idealistic concepts.