Towards Post-Democracy or Complex Power Sharing? : Environmental Policy Networks in Germany

Abstract

This article rejuvenates the power structure perspective in the analysis of policy networks. At the theoretical level it links policy analysis to the debate on post-democracies and power-sharing. Whereas the latter perspective emphasizes a great variety of democratic political systems and corresponding structures of power sharing, the former makes the assertion that the current political-economic development would lead to an erosion of democratic structures. Both frameworks are used to check the post-democracy hypothesis within the German policy-making context. The paper proceeds in three steps. After a short outline of the debate on post-democracy it compares empirical analyses of policy networks in Germany in the early 1980s and in the 2010s. The results of this empirical analysis then is interpreted in a power structure and power-sharing perspective. It concludes that the policy actor system in current environmental and energy policy-making in Germany is hardly reducible to the post-democratic power dyad consisting of only the business elite and the governmental executive, but is much more differentiated and pluralistic.