Holtz-Bacha, Christina. "Government communication in Germany: Maintaining the fine line between information and advertising." Government Communication: Cases and challenges. Ed. Karen Sanders and MarÍa JosÉCanel. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 45–58. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 29 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472544629.ch-003>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 29 September 2021, 19:27 UTC. Copyright © Karen Sanders, María José Canel and Contributors 2013. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 3 Government communication in Germany: Maintaining the fine line between information and advertising Christina Holtz-Bacha lthough there are overarching trends that pose challenges for modern Agovernment communication, it can only be understood against the background of the specific features of the political and the media system of a certain country. Their structures and processes provide for a specific systemic environment and thus influential factors that help to explain similarities and differences of government communication among countries. The political and the electoral systems Germany has a parliamentary system. On the national level, only the parliament (Bundestag) is elected by the people. The president is the head of state but has mainly a ceremonial function and is not elected directly by the people. The most influential figure in the German political system is the chancellor who is the head of the government. The chancellor is elected by the parliament and has always been of the party that received the highest percentage of votes in the election. The political system is dominated by parties which are mentioned in the German Constitution where they are assigned an important role in 46 GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATION: CASES AND CHALLENGES the formation of the popular political will. In fact, the selection of electoral candidates lies almost completely in the hands of the parties. The party landscape had traditionally been dominated by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) which together garnered 80 to 90 per cent of the votes in parliamentary elections until the end of the 1980s. One of them usually formed a coalition government with the Free Democrats Party (FDP). The advent of the Greens in the early 1980s and the Left (Die Linke) during the 1990s reduced the power of the former big players. A grand coalition between the CDU/CSU and the SPD existed only in two terms since 1949 (1966–9 and 2005–9). With the diminishing power of the former big parties, coalitions of three parties may become the model of the future. The election of 1990 initiated the gradual decline of the big parties. For the first time, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats did not accumulate more than 80 per cent of the votes. Presently, the national parliament is composed of representatives from five parties.1 Since the election in 2009, Germany has been governed by a coalition of the Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats under Chancellor Angela Merkel who has been in office since 2005. Another distinctive feature of the German political system is federalism which provides for a decentralization of power. Some political fields (e.g. education, culture) lie completely in the legislative competence of the 16 states (Länder) that make up the Federal Republic. At the national level, they are represented in the Federal Council (Bundesrat) which participates in the federal legislation. Germany’s electoral system is a mixed-member proportional system giving each voter two votes: with the first vote, a party candidate in the constituency is elected, and the second vote is given to a party list. The number of seats a party gets in the Bundestag depends on the amount of second votes. During election campaigns, all parties therefore primarily try to solicit second votes while campaigning in the constituencies is mostly left to the individual candidates. Because only the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) usually have a chance to win the constituency and a first vote cast for a small party therefore risks being a ‘lost vote’, an increasing number of voters have split their vote and given their first vote to a candidate of one of the ‘big’ parties and their second vote to a smaller party. Germany’s media landscape is characterized by the private press on the one side and a dual broadcasting system of public and commercial broadcasting on the other. Daily newspapers reach an overall circulation of 19.4 million issues (2010) providing for 279 issues per resident over the age of 14 (Zeitungsdichte, 2010). A daily circulation of about 3 million issues makes the tabloid Bild-Zeitung the most popular newspaper in the country. About a handful of nationally distributed newspapers, among them the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung, are GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATION IN GERMANY 47 regarded as quality newspapers and together with the political magazines Der Spiegel play the role of agenda setters for other media and for the political elite. The majority of the newspapers, however, have a regional or local reach. The television market is divided almost equally between the traditional public service channels and their commercial competitors. More than a hundred channels are on offer but the market is nevertheless dominated by a small number of channels. The wide choice has led to a fragmented market leaving the most popular channel with an average reach of only 12.5 per cent (in 2009, RTL and ZDF) (Zuschaueranteile, 2010). Overall, concentration is a characteristic of the newspaper and the broadcasting market, barely constrained by regulation. In almost 60 per cent of the districts, newspapers have a local monopoly (Schütz, 2009). Two conglomerates, the RTL group and the ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG, both offering several channels, dominate the commercial television market. In general, German media enjoy a high degree of freedom, guaranteed by the Constitution and upheld by the Constitutional Court. In recent years, media freedom was occasionally compromised by attempts of the authorities to identify leaks and by disputes over privacy. According to the classification of Hallin and Mancini (2004), the German media system tends to the ‘North/Central European or Democratic Corporatist Model’ featuring three characteristics which ‘include the simultaneous development of strong mass-circulation commercial media and media tied to political and civil groups; the coexistence of political parallelism and journalistic professionalism; and the coexistence of liberal traditions of press freedom and a tradition of strong state intervention in the media, which are seen as a social institution and not as purely private enterprises’ (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, pp. 195–6). German journalists mostly adhere to a non-partisan role model that puts neutral and precise information first (Weischenberg, Malik & Scholl, 2006, p. 102). The development of media use over the past years reflects the changes that have taken place with the introduction of digital media and the internet in particular. While the use of television has been pretty stable with an average of 220 minutes per day, radio and newspaper use have gone down to 187 and 23 minutes. Since about the mid-1990s, the use of the internet has risen steeply and reached 83 minutes in 2010 (All figures: Engel & Ridder, 2010). The development of government communication and its legal background The central institution for government communication in Germany is the Federal Press and Information Office (FPIO). It was established in September 1949 directly after the first parliamentary election in the newly founded 48 GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATION: CASES AND CHALLENGES Federal Republic of Germany. At that time, barely five years after the end of the Second World War, the experience of 12 years of state-controlled media and propaganda was still fresh and overshadowed the new office for government information policy. The structures of the democratic, but unstable Weimar Republic (1918/19–1933) only partially provided a model for the organization of government communication (see Walker, 1982, pp. 79–80). During its first years, the Press and Information Office was part of the chancellery but soon developed into a separate institution. In September 1958, its director received the status of state secretary, one level below a minister, and the Press and Information Office became directly subordinate to the chancellor (see Hofsähs & Pollmann, 1981, pp. 24–5). It has the status of a supreme federal authority. However, Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was dissatisfied with what appeared to him as the press’ negative attitude towards the work of the government and sought better ways to organize public support for his policy. Therefore, a parallel structure was built up that was supposed to develop public relations for democracy in the wider political sphere, addressing constituencies beyond the media (Weiss, 2006, p. 100). Visible expression of the concept was the founding of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Demokratischer Kreise [Consortium of Democratic Circles] (ADK) in 1951, a joint venture of political interest groups successfully engaging in public relation activities in favour of the government and also of Adenauer’s Christian Democrats. The ADK was only dissolved in 1968 under pressure from the SPD when the party became a partner of the CDU/CSU in a grand coalition (Kunczik, 1999; Weiss, 2006). From the early years of the Federal Republic, German governments, independent of their ‘colour’, again and again used the resources of the FPIO without keeping the government’s and their parties’ interests separate. That applied, for example, to opinion research for which the office concluded contracts with polling institutes at the beginning of Adenauer’s chancellorship (1949–63; Kruke, 2007, pp. 74–9). Conflicts also arose over adverts in the print media and brochures that came close to or could definitely be regarded as electoral advertising.