Karlheinz Niclauss

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Karlheinz Niclauß (born January 19, 1937 in Bad Godesberg ) is a German political scientist and contemporary historian. He is regarded as an expert on the German form of chancellor democracy and on the history of the Bonn constitution. He also worked on the German party system and forms of citizen-oriented democracy.

Life

Karlheinz Niclauß studied political science, history, constitutional law and Slavic studies at the University of Bonn from 1956 to 1965. In 1965 he was promoted and supervised by Karl Dietrich Bracher dissertation The German-Russian Relations in the Period of the National Socialist Seizure of Power 1932-1935 to the Dr. phil. PhD . He then went to the Geneva University Institute for International Studies for a year . From 1966 to 1970 Niclauß was an assistant at the Department of Political Science at the University of Bonn. From 1970 he received a habilitation grant from the German Research Foundation and wrote a study on the establishment of democracy in West Germany for Bracher . He was then employed by a federal authority and held visiting professorships and professorships. From 1973 to 1977 he taught in this capacity at the Universities of Saarbrücken, Hamburg, Berlin, Paderborn, Trier and Bochum. In 1977 he was appointed lecturer and 1980 professor for political science at the University of Bonn. In 1998 he was advisor to the UK Neill Committee on The Funding of Political Parties and the Independent Commission on the Voting System under the direction of Lord Jenkins. In the winter of 2000/2001 he received a research semester from the German Research Foundation before he retired in 2002.

Works

Even after the study of the establishment of democracy, the emergence of the Federal Republic and its Basic Law formed a focus of Niclauss's work. In 1982 he dealt with this topic under the question of restoration or renaissance . Fifty years after the deliberations of the Parliamentary Council, he published his democracy study in a new version under the title: The Path to the Basic Law . The central thesis of this work is that the Basic Law came about as a compromise between two different concepts of democracy. The last publication by Niclauß on this subject is the Reclam volume Das Grundgesetz .

A second area of ​​work for Niclauss was the party system of the Federal Republic . In 1995 he presented a complete account of this, the second edition of which appeared in 2002.

The third working topic of Niclauß is the Chancellor's democracy . For this purpose he published his first study on governance from Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Kohl in 1988 . In 2004 the second edition followed for the period from Adenauer to Schröder and in 2015 the third edition about the governments from Adenauer to Angela Merkel .

Niclauß examines the government activities of the Federal Chancellors on the basis of five criteria:

  • the enforcement of the chancellor principle,
  • the leadership role of the chancellor in their own party,
  • the contrast between government and opposition,
  • the role of the chancellor in foreign policy,
  • the personalization and presence of the head of government in the media.

He thus presents a systematic interpretation of the Chancellorship that corresponds to the leadership studies in the Anglo-Saxon area. The criteria allow the governance of the successful head of government to be assessed, but also of the chancellor who is losing government power. "Chancellor democracy" thus becomes an analytical term and loses its meaning as a seal of quality for the respective incumbent. In the third edition, Niclauss also considers the development of a chancellor democracy in grand coalitions to be possible. For the reign of Kurt Georg Kiesinger (1966–1969) he had rejected the designation of Chancellor Democracy.

Teaching and research areas

Web links

Individual references and book publications

  1. ↑ Five ways to citizen-oriented democracy, in: Hans Herbert von Arnim (Ed.): Democracy before new challenges, Berlin 1999, pp. 160-168
  2. ^ Andreas Hillgruber : The Soviet Union and Hitler's seizure of power. A study of German-Russian relations from 1929 to 1935 by Karlheinz Niclauss, Max Braubach . In: Historische Zeitschrift 206 (1968) 1, 164–167, here: p. 164.
  3. ↑ Ulrike Quadbeck: Karl Dietrich Bracher and the beginnings of Bonn political science (= Nomos-Universitätsschriften, Geschichte, Volume 19). Nomos Verlag, Baden-Baden 2008, ISBN 978-3-8329-3740-9 , p. 376.
  4. ↑ Eckhard Jesse : Democracy versus dictatorship. Karl Dietrich Bracher's "Contemporary History Controversies" . In: INDES - Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft 3 (2014) 4, pp. 153–158, here: p. 158 doi : 10.13109 / inde.2014.3.4.153 .
  5. ^ Founding of democracy in West Germany. The emergence of the Federal Republic from 1945-1949, Munich 1974
  6. ↑ Restoration or renaissance of democracy? The emergence of the Federal Republic 1945-1949, Berlin 1982
  7. ↑ The way to the Basic Law. Founding of democracy in West Germany 1945-1949, Paderborn et al. 1998
  8. ^ The Basic Law, Stuttgart 2009 (Reclams Universal Library No. 18647)
  9. ^ The party system of the Federal Republic of Germany. An introduction, Paderborn u. a. 2002 (2nd edition)
  10. ^ Chancellor democracy. Bonn government practice from Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Kohl, Stuttgart 1988
  11. ^ Chancellor democracy. Governance from Konrad Adenauer to Angela Merkel, Wiesbaden 2015 (3rd edition)
personal data
SURNAME Niclauss, Karlheinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German political scientist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH January 19, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH bad Godesberg