Americanization of the German Election Process

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Communications - Intercultural Communication, grade: 1,0, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (IWK), course: Hauptseminar Interkultur USA-Deutschland, language: English, abstract: Zum Regieren brauche ich nur Bild, Bams und Glotze" Bundeskanzler a.D. Gerhard Schrder

The elections to the German Bundestag in the last years seemed to have shown one thing clearly: the election campaigns are increasingly changing. Personalization and professionalization are just two of the keywords who dominate the campaigns not at least since the "Media Chancellor" Gerhard Schrder won the election in 1998. Like no chancellor before him, he relied on his impact of the media and his own popularity, which was always well ahead compared to his party. With the introduction of the first TV duels between the two top-candidates in German history of television in 2002, many observers came to the conclusion that there is a transformation of "national elections" to "chancellor elections". The reasons for many analysts seem to be obvious. One of the much-discussed is the spill-over of Americanization from German society to the politics. But what means the Americanization of German election campaigns and which characteristics can be found? Or have these developments rather to be seen as a modernization-process that has occurred at first in the United States?
The goal of the following work is to discuss and debate these questions, and subsequently to analyze the level of Americanization on the basis of the developments in television-debates ahead the German Bundestag elections.
To reach this, the paper starts with an overview of Americanization as a cultural transfer process followed by a discussion of the characteristics of Americanization in the political communication. Thereafter the question of modernization or Americanization is reviewed. The second chapter examines the history of television debates in the