Pluralism, Conflict, and Legislative Elites in United Germany

Abstract

For a social scientist interested in the evolution of individuals' ideological values, Germany's division in 1949 and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 raise intriguing questions. To what extent have the socialist and parliamentary systems inculcated different ideological values in eastern and western Germans? Because of the centrality of political elites in maintaining political systems, especially in espousing system-conforming values, we examine eastern and western Berlin MPs' views toward one democratic core value, pluralist competition. Pluralist conflicts of interests represent a cornerstone of liberal democracies.' Any society that places a premium on individual liberties and democratic rights must permit its citizens and groups to compete peacefully for their share of influence in the policymaking process. However, some analysts attribute the failure of the Weimar democracy to the reluctance of German society to accept pluralist competition.2 While this assessment applies primarily to prewar Germany, the division and unification of Germany raises the question, how much eastern Germans support pluralist competition, given the absence of pluralist practices in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). We therefore analyze the impact of eastern MPs' regime experience on their views toward pluralism. Given Germany's history, it is important to assess the commitment of political elites to pluralist principles. But the significance of this topic reaches beyond Berlin and indeed Germany. Theoretically, the unique quasi-natural experiment created by Germany's division in 1949 and its unification in 1989 allows analysts to study an important component of political culture theory: are institutions able to imbue a nation's culture with those values that undergird political institutions? Specifically, has parliamentary democracy in western Germany instilled western MPs with pluralist values? Conversely, did the state-centered norms of socialist East Germany reinforce or create antipluralist views among eastern MPs? Germany's formal division in 1949 and its unification in 1990 may be used to shed light on the institution-culture nexus by examining the influence of two fundamentally opposed systems on MPs' evaluation of pluralist principles. We first discuss the importance of pluralist competition in liberal democracies and describe, using Dahrendorf's historical analysis as a guide, how pluralism has been viewed in Germany.3 We then formulate an institutional learning argument which suggests that, while eastern MPs are expected to hold antipluralist views,