Navigating Conflicting Incentives: Discursive Strategies of Political Parties in Germany’s Cooperative Federalism

Federal systems create complex institutional settings that foster and encourage cooperation while also enabling self-serving and even opportunistic political behavior. Focusing on parliamentary discourses, we argue that political parties can navigate these conflicting incentives skillfully, employing a set of five distinct discursive strategies that integrate both the need for cooperation and the possibility of self-interest. Leveraging a qualitative content analysis of 212 German parliamentary debates and 4,524 manually coded statements, we demonstrate that the use of these discursive strategies is shaped by parties’ level of integration into federal institutions. The data reveal that parties which are more strongly involved in intergovernmental bodies uphold a more cooperative discourse, while refraining from confrontational strategies toward federal institutions and actors. We also find that the linkage between the vertically integrated party system, which incentivizes co-partisans to stick together across levels and constituent units, and multiparty coalition governments, counteracts federal blame games.