West Germany’s liberal rights guaranteed citizens no definitive voice and hollow elections into customer-touting.
Evidence
According to the widespread interpretation of the Federal Republic’s Basic Law, citizens were assured personal protection and personal freedom through an extensive catalogue of fundamental, liberal rightsbut legally the people had no means to express its will definitively on any specific issue. The only opportunity to participate in politics at the federal level was in the elections to the Bundestag. But the Bundestag had lost power to the executive, to the bureaucracy, and to political parties influenced by various lobbying organizations and groups with vested interests. The ineffectiveness of the elections was therefore obvious, and they had been degraded by the techniques of electoral campaigning into a mere touting for customers. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 577
Categorization
- SHARE: A precise, quotable account of how Bundestag elections lost real power to executive, bureaucracy, and lobbies — good for a constitutional-law or political-theory friend.
- XREF: connects to: Postwar German elections were degraded into mere customer-touting — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2339
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Postwar German elections were degraded into mere customer-touting — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2339
Broader Connections
- Postwar German elections were degraded into mere customer-touting
#expands(0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2339