Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T09:16:14.394Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Communists and Democrats: Democratic Attitudes in the Two Germanies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Russell J. Dalton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

German unification has revived earlier scholarly debates about the nature of the German political culture and the ability of the nation to rise above its cultural heritage – now focused on the cultural inheritance from the German Democratic Republic. This article examines popular support for democratic attitudes as a prerequisite for successful political unification and the development of democracy in a unified Germany. Our evidence focuses on a study of democratic attitudes conducted in West Germany and East Germany by the Mannheim Research Unit for Societal Development in early 1990, with supplemental data from more recent surveys. We find that East Germans voice support for democratic attitudes that rivals or excels the expression of democratic norms in the West. The correlates of these opinions suggest that democratic norms in the East developed from an on-going process of counter-cultural socialization and from judgements about the relative economic strength of the Federal Republic.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , October 1994 , pp. 469 - 493
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Baker, Kendall, Dalton, Russell J. and Hildebrandt, Kai, Germany Transformed: Political Culture and the New Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Conradt, David, ‘Changing German Political Culture’, in Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, eds, The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1980).Google Scholar

2 Schweigler, Gebhard, ‘German Questions of the Shrinking of Germany’, in Larabee, Stephen, ed., The Two German States and European Security (New York: St Martin's, 1989)Google Scholar; Krisch, Henry, The German Democratic Republic: The Search for Identity (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1985)Google Scholar; Krisch, Henry, Politics and Culture in West Germany (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Institute for Social Research, 1988).Google Scholar

3 Merritt, Anna and Merritt, Richard, Public Opinion in Occupied Germany (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970).Google Scholar

4 Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Verba, Sidney, ‘The Remaking of the German Political Culture’, in Pye, Lucian and Verba, Sidney, eds, Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965).Google Scholar

5 Baker, et al. , Germany TransformedGoogle Scholar; Conradt, , ‘Changing German Political Culture’.Google Scholar

6 Kaase, Max, ‘Demokratische Einstellung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland’, in Wildenmann, Rudolf, ed., Sozialwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch für Politik, vol. 2 (Munich: Günter Olzog Verlag, 1971)Google Scholar; Gabriel, Oskar, ‘Demokratiezufriedenheit und demokratische Einstellung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 22 (30 05 1987), 32–45Google Scholar; Conradt, , ‘Changing German Political Culture’.Google Scholar

7 Dalton, Russell, Citizen Politics in Western Democracies (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1988), chap. 11Google Scholar; Inglehart, Ronald, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), chap. 1.Google Scholar

8 Sani, Giacomo, ‘The Political Culture of Italy’Google Scholar, in Almond, and Verba, , eds, The Civic Culture Revisited.Google Scholar

9 Richardson, Bradley and Flanagan, Scott, Politics in Japan (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1984), chap. 5Google Scholar; Richardson, Bradley, The Political Culture of Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).Google Scholar

10 Mueller, Wolfgang, ‘Politische Kultur und Parteientransformation in Österreich’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 84 (1984), 53–76.Google Scholar

11 Gunther, Richard, Sani, Giacomo and Shabad, Goldie, Spain After Franco: The Making of a Competitive Party System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Weil, Frederick, ‘The Sources and Structure of Legitimation in Western Democracies’, American Sociological Review, 54 (1989), 682–706.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Even from the outset, however, the SED pursued a policy different from their rhetoric (see Sandford, Gregory, From Hitler to Ulbricht (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Krisch, Henry, German Politics under Soviet Occupation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974)).Google Scholar

13 Krisch, , The German Democratic Republic, pp. 41–2.Google Scholar

14 Furthermore, periodic political events – the 1953 Berlin uprising, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the suppression of the Czechoslovakian reform government in 1968 and the on-going expulsion of political dissidents – reminded East Germans of the gap between the democratic rhetoric of the regime and the reality of politics.

15 Brown, Archie and Gray, Jack, eds, Culture and Political Change in Communist States (London: Macmillan, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Almond, Gabriel, A Discipline Divided (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1990), chap. 6Google Scholar; Tucker, Robert, ‘Culture, Political Culture, and Communist Society’, Political Science Quarterly, 88 (1973), 173–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Dahl, Robert, Polyarchy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Barber, Benjamin, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Pateman, Carole, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Kaase, , ‘Demokratische Einstellung’.Google Scholar

18 Prothro, James and Grigg, Charles, ‘Fundamental Principles of Democracy’, Journal of Politics, 22 (1960), 276–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCloskey, Herbert and Brill, Alida, Dimensions of Tolerance (New York: Russell Sage, 1983).Google Scholar

19 There is, however, some ambiguity over what is a ‘democratic’ response for item (i) (the interest of the entire people should always stand above the special interests of the individual). Empirically, this item is only weakly related to other democratic norms (see Appendix).

20 Fieldwork for both studies was done by the respected German polling firm, Marplan. Prior analyses have shown that the East German survey over-represents Catholic and rural segments of the population. Attempts to weight for these demographic characteristics produces only minor changes in the overall aggregate results presented here; therefore we decided to present the unweighted results. Another test of the representativeness of the East German sample is the distribution of party support. The sample estimates are fairly close to the results of the March 1990 elections.

21 Weil, Frederick, ‘The Development of Democratic Attitudes in Eastern and Western Germany in a Comparative Perspective’, in Weil, Frederick, ed., Democratization in Eastern and Western Europe (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Weidenfeld, Werner and Korte, Karl-Rudolf, Die Deutschen: Profil einer Nation (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991)Google Scholar. The data for 1993 were provided by Max Kaase and Bettina Westle from a survey of political culture conducted by the EMNID institute; the survey included 1,014 respondents in the West and 982 respondents in the East.

22 Rohrschneider, Robert, ‘Report from the Laboratory: The Influence of Institutions on Political Elites' Democratic Values in Germany’, American Political Science Review (forthcoming).Google Scholar

23 Lipset, Seymour, Political Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960)Google Scholar; Pye, Lucian, ‘Political Science and the Crisis of Authoritarianism’, American Political Science Review, 84 (1990), 3–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huntington, Samuel, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).Google Scholar

24 For a discussion of the German case see Hauslohner, Peter, ‘Politics before Gorbachev: De-Stalinization and the Roots of Reform’, in Bialer, Seweryn, ed., Politics, Society and Nationality Inside Gorbachev's Russia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1989)Google Scholar. Recent studies of democratic values in post-communist Poland and Russia also discuss the potential role of socio-economic change as a factor supporting the reform movement; Inglehart, Ronald and Siemienska, Renate, ‘A Long-term Trend toward Democratization?’ (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1989)Google Scholar; Gibson, James, Duch, Ray and Tedin, Kent, ‘Democratic Values and the Transformation of the Soviet Union’, Journal of Politics, 54(1992), 329–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gibson, James and Duch, Ray, ‘Emerging Democratic Values in Soviet Political Culture’, in Miller, William et al. , Public Opinion and Political Transformations in the Gorbachev Era (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993).Google Scholar

25 Eckstein, Harry, ‘A Culturalist Theory of Political Change’, American Political Science Review, 82(1988), 789–804.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Pappi and Klingemann found that better educated West Germans in the immediate postwar period were initially more supportive of national socialism (see Pappi, Franz and Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, Politischer Radikalismus (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1972)Google Scholar; then with re-education this same group became more supportive of democratic values (Baker, et al. , Germany Transformed)Google Scholar. Similar patterns have been observed for other democratic transitions: see Weil, , ‘The Sources and Structure of Legitimation’.Google Scholar

27 Baker, et al. , Germany Transformed, chaps 1–2Google Scholar; Weil, , ‘Sources and Structure of Legitimation’.Google Scholar

28 Because the conflict versus order items in Table 1 display sharp differences between the two publics in 1990, one might question whether these specific items will perform in the same way as the general democratic attitudes battery. In response, one should first note that these items do load on a general dimension of democratic attitudes (Table A in appendix). In addition, we replicated the analyses from Table 2 using only the four conflict items and obtain essentially the same correlations. The following correlations for the Eastern sample are illustrative: income (r = 0.03), PDS sympathy rating (r = −0.29), and age (r = 0.15).

29 The lowest support for democratic values is expressed by individuals who have completed the ten-year polytechnic course or those who have not completed even primary schooling.

30 Respondents rated each party on the standard 11-point sympathy ‘scalometer’ that ranges from − 5 ‘reject’ to + 5 ‘sympathetic’, with 0 being the midpoint of the scale.

31 Kaase, , ‘Demokratische Einstellung’, p. 174.Google Scholar

32 Kuechler, Manfred, ‘Framing Unification: Issue Salience and Mass Sentiment, 1989–1991’, in Dalton, Russell, ed., The New Germany Votes: Unification and the Creation of the New German Party System (Oxford: Berg, 1993).Google Scholar

33 Because of the large number of economic questions the inclusion of all would create a multicollinearity problem for the regression analysis. Therefore, we selected evaluations of the FRG and GDR national economy as theoretically central measures of national economic perceptions, and feelings of relative deprivation as a measure of personal economic evaluations.

34 Friedrich, Walter, ‘Mentalitätswandlungen der Jugend in der DDR’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 16/17 (1990), 25–37.Google Scholar

35 Weil, , ‘The Sources and Structure of Legitimation’.Google Scholar

36 Kuechler, , ‘Framing Unification’.Google Scholar

37 Bauer, Petra, ‘Politische Orientierungen im Übergang’, Kolner Zeitschrifi für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 43 (1991), 433–53.Google Scholar

38 Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth, ‘Die Vorzüge der Freiheit stehen noch nicht in Mittlepunkt’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 30 09 1991, p. 13.Google Scholar

39 Kaase, , ‘Demokratische Einstellung’, pp. 150–6.Google Scholar

40 Kaase, , ‘Demokratische Einstellung’, p. 151.Google Scholar