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from the members of the U.S. House of Representatives, whose ability to gain repeated re-election depends on satisfying non-partisan constituency interests that are highly varied and that must be cultivated by each member in his or her own way. It is this difference between the "home style" of members of Congress and the "Basis-stil" of the members of the Bundestag that explains the difference between a Congress of individual entrepreneurs and a Bundestag that is a parliament of parties.
But institutionally more important than this difference in the way that members of the Bundestag and members of the U.S. House gain repeated re-election is the fact that both sets of members are successful in doing so. At the end of the tenth electoral period the average seniority of the members of the Bundestag exceeded ten years, a level of experience greater than that of the French and British parliaments and even than that of the U.S. Congress. That length of experience, combined with the small number of new members entering after each election, means that a clear boundary exists between members and non-members, that the institution is not easily penetrated by inexperienced newcomers. The high average length of tenure is, in the Bundestag, as surely a sign of its institutional stability as Professor Nelson Polsby found it to be in the United States Congress at the turn of this century.(2)
Obviously the parliamentary career is attractive as a profession rather than being merely an avocation. The existence of a relatively stable membership facilitates the growth of stable ways of doing business within the institution. This brings us to a second sign of the institutionalization of the Bundestag: its distinctive procedures and the informal norms governing its members' conduct. A parliament with stable membership, like all social organizations, has what Professor David Truman calls "its own group life."
Truman said that "it has its standards and conventions, its largely unwritten system of obligations and privileges. (3) Werner Blischke described these "unwritten rules in the German Bundestag" as a continuum "that stretches from ordinary courtesy to the rules of procedure to the unwritten constitution. 11
(4) The existence of these unwritten rules and their stability is demonstrated by the assimilation of the most recent party to enter the Bundestag to its ways of conducting its business.
11
When the Greens became a parliamentary party six years ago they were distrustful of parliamentary procedure and initially intent on using their position in the Bundestag merely as an auxiliary instrument to further their extraparliamentary objectives. Nevertheless this new party found it possible to use the generous rights of the minority embedded in German parliamentary procedure to advance their aims. In so doing they abided by that procedure. The other parties declined to