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Parliamentarism in Western Germany: The Functioning of the Bundestag

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Gerhard Loewenberg
Gerhard Loewenberg*
Affiliation:
Mt. Holyoke College
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Extract

Although universal male suffrage as the basis for a representative assembly existed in Germany half a century earlier than in Great Britain, the Reichstag never occupied as important a position in the German constitutional order as the House of Commons did in the British. Neither in its representative function of integrating the community (in Friedrich's terms), nor in its deliberative function as a lawmaking and supervisory body, did the Reichstag ever achieve the significance that would warrant describing the German system of government, either under the Second Empire or the first Republic, as a parliamentary system. The popularly elected Reichstag under Bismarck, in form so advanced for its time, existed under a constitutional system whose “artfully manufactured chaos” permitted, in reality, the exercise of authoritarian government with little parliamentary interference. When, during the latter years of the first World War, the Reichstag demonstrated an increasing ability to call governments to account, this apparent development of a parliamentary system gained a fleeting constitutional recognition during the last days of the Empire and paved the way for the provisions of the Weimar Constitution under which the Government was to be responsible to the Reichstag. Nevertheless, the republican Reichstag never actually fulfilled its constitutional functions, and in difficult times fell victim to the habits of the authoritarian past, manifesting themselves in the autonomy of the army and the bureaucracy, and the irresponsible behavior of the political parties and the President. “Surely the new constitution granted the Reichstag unquestioned leadership in the formation of policy,” a political analyst of the Weimar epoch has written.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , March 1961 , pp. 87 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1961

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References

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5 The number of deputies can be increased by the election of deputies in single-member constituencies in excess of the number to which a party is entitled by proportional representation. Three such “superproportional” victories occurred in the election of 1957 and the third Bundestag therefore consists of 519 members. Although the members representing Berlin officially have no vote in the House, they do vote in its committees and in their party groups, in the election of the Bundestag President, and when the House acts as part of an electoral college in the selection of the Federal President and of half the members of the Constitutional Court. They take part in debate, may introduce bills, and otherwise participate fully and influentially in all the activities of the body.

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31 See Die Welt, November 6, 1957; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 31, 1957; and Die Welt, November 13, 1957, respectively.

32 Arbeitsordnung der CDU/CSU Bundestagsfraktion, 2. Bundestag (mimeographed, n.d.), para. 10, sec. 2.

33 Ibid., para. 13, sec. 1.

34 Geschäftsordnung der Fraktion der SPD im Bundestag (n.d.)

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