№ 2 - 2009
Kashirskikh O.N.
Political Parties of Germany in the Context of the Modernization of Political Communication

The political parties system in Germany, in the opinion of many experts, is in a crisis. This crisis’ characteristic feature is the quantitatively decreasing party base (number of party members). Mediatization in politics is stated, amongst others, as a possible cause for the said crisis. The presented study poses for its aim to verify validity of this hypothesis and to find out the nature of the interaction between the media system and the political parties system in Germany. It is theorizing the subject of this investigation in the context of the discussion about the modernization of political communication that proves to be the main methodological tool of this research. Afterwards the resultant data is being differentiated by institutional and sociocultural analysis of the German party system, which is a necessary step in order to answer the question of whether the German political system is appropriate for the formation of media-centered party strategies («going public»).