After an extended period of major political upheaval and remarkably low regime stability before the Second World War, Germany has become one of the most stable democracies in western Europe. A great deal of this success has traditionally been put down to the Federal Republic's specific brand of political institutions. More recently, however, the same institutions have been criticized for their marked propensity to produce gridlock and political immobility.How much change and adaptation has there been behind the widespread perception of the `eternal stability' of the Federal Republic's institutional system? What effect have German unification and European integration had on the performance of the core political institutions, and how well prepared is the German polity to face the challenges of the twenty-first century? The views of nine distinguished German scholars are assembled in this volume, and they offer their assessments of the German political core institutions from a broad historical perspective.