Single-issue politics

As interested parties or - pejoratively - clientele parties (similar to Max Weber: " Patronage Party " ), such political organizations referred to, whose program is individual to the representation - especially economic - interests of their followers limited. The interested party can be distinguished on the one hand by the Popular Party, in which different social strata and occupational groups are represented. On the other hand is also a distinction between clientele party and a party program, in which the ideological orientation identity.

In the political system of the Federal Republic of Germany interested parties played a certain role ( Federation of expellees - BHE ) in the early days. Currently is observed a slow rise of the Pirate Party or family party, there are also other as yet hardly significant groupings. To prominence came the Gray Panthers, an interested party of pensioners who, however, was in 2008 formally dissolved and split into two smaller groups after the discovery of years of fraud by the management of the party and the following recovery claims had those forced into bankruptcy. At the same time, several new interested parties of seniors who some have several thousand members founded (eg, RIP), but are so far not gone in Leadership elections results in the range of less than one percent.

While the opposition parties are considered major parties since the 1950s, the SPD has evolved in the 1960s and 70s by an interested party of the working class and the small staff to a people's party. The FDP is considered " strong medium- interest party " or even as " clientele party," a trend that has been reinforced since the end of the social-liberal coalition. In particular, the interests of organized medical profession and pharmacists as well as real estate agents have been since then represented by the FDP. In contrast, the Greens are usually primarily as topics or party - classified as Program Party - at least initially. The Pirate Party Germany joined in 2006 expressly as a theme party.

In the Weimar Republic the interest parties had 1924-1930 in some cases more than 10 % of the vote. They represented the interests of the middle class ( economy 's Party), the inflation injured party (People's Party of Right ) or agriculture ( Land League, Christian- National Peasants ' and Country People's Party, Bavarian Farmers' Association ). After 1930, they lost their voters for the most part to the NSDAP.

In the electoral sociology interested parties of the Weimar Republic by many voters on the way from the bourgeois parties (DDP, DVP, DNVP ) were elected to the NSDAP are therefore often referred to as " intermediate hosts ".