As to the attractiveness of democracy and its alternatives, the image is mixed: Looking at the scatter plot (figure 6), there is apparently no reason for concern, as when compared with other Western societies, Germany comes off very well. The figure contrasts the share of people who think democracy is a good thing (ordinate) and the share of people who think, a dictatorship (be it a one-man rule or a a military regime) would be a good idea (abscissa).
Figure 6: Democrats and Authoritarians. Source: Dalton and Shin (2014), p. 107.
It is therefore no exaggeration to state that systemic alternatives such as a military junta or a regime with a strong leader (whatever that means) have paled into societal insignificance – even though it deserves mention that despite the longer democratic tradition in the West and despite the much-cited prevalence of authoritarian values in the East, a strong leader attains more acceptance in West German states.
Figure 7: Popularity of Alternatives to Democracy. Sources: European Values Survey 2008 (V225-V227), ALLBUS 2008, Emnid-Survey from March 2010.
The impression only alters when things are called as they are, namely a dictatorship. 5.3 percent of West Germans and 13.8 percent of East Germans prefer this kind of regime to a liberal democracy. Whether this points to an autocratic mentality in the East or a stronger social desirability effect in the West remains unclear. In any case, the most striking aspect is the strong appeal of a technocracy – that is a rule of experts, where economists, jurists, and social scientists have the say-so instead of elected politicians. This, in fact, is something we should worry about and something that might help in understanding the recent advancement of right-wing populist phenomena. On the one side, an expert rule does – as a matter of course – not qualify as a dyed-in-the-wool autocracy, a regime characterized by the lack of checks and balances. A technocracy, instead, would not come along with the abolition of free and fair elections or the monopolization of political power.
On the other side: 1) If it is a body of appointed experts, not elected politicians who exert political power over the demos, the chain of legitimacy is seriously damaged. Thus, from a normative point of view, an expert rule is a double-edged sword. 2) An expert rule converts the democratic “re-election mechanism” into a toothless tiger: Democracy rests upon the principle of accountability and the temporary use of power. In a technocracy, those who aim at being re-elected on a certain day do not exercise power, and those who exercise power – that is the experts – do not stand for re-election, which is why in this system the electorate lacks instruments to overcome irresponsive political decisions. Therefore, an expert rule is problematic with respect to its responsivity, too. 3) A technocracy cannot break the stalemate between “rational” decisions of the expert body on the one side and the public opinion on the other. Therefore, technocracies might end up in the insoluble paradoxical situation of a common good, yet unpopular policy, provoking large scale dissatisfaction and political unrest. Thus, an expert rule is also fraught with problems with respect to its persistence.
Why are technocracies so popular then? Their attractiveness is a consequence of three widespread misunderstandings. The first is: Political rule can and in fact must be freed from particular interests, from individual values, from power and irrationality. The second misunderstanding in society is that “good” political results (whatever that means) depend on the goodwill of the rulers, not the quality of political institutions. And the third challenge is the blatant lack of sound knowledge of the functional principles of representative democracy: In 1998 Germans were surveyed about their conceptions of parliamentarianism and their governmental system (Patzelt, 1998). 59 percent conceded to not know what federalism was, 14 percent made erroneous statements. 40 percent uttered mistaken ideas about the Bundesrat. 60 percent of the interviewees held the opinion that they get to hear of the Bundestag only insufficiently. 58 percent did not know where the parliament’s work takes place (besides the plenum). 33 percent favoured a presidential system over Germany’s parliamentarian one, which 21 percent deemed to be a deviation from the “normal” state. A majority of 57 percent could not come to terms with the fact that Germany’s government emerges from the parliament’s majority group. Two out of three respondents assumed that it is the opposition’s job to support the government; merely one out of two believed the critique of the government’s legislation to be a main task of the minority fractions. 54 percent of the respondents rejected party discipline categorically.
There exists another, more recent example that complements this impression. A recent survey by the Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach (IfD) revealed that about 25 percent of the Germans expect political parties to champion their political objectives without fuss and quibble, and without making any compromises (Petersen, 2016, pp. 2–4). Among supporters of Die Linke and the AfD, the share was even four out of ten. From the complementary perspective: Only three out of ten respondents argued in favour of the free mandate, whereas seven out of ten interviewees wanted the members of parliament to do what the electorate wants them to do. And to make things worse, there is a widespread and politically fostered disgust for individual particular interests in the sphere of politics, especially in the shape of lobbying, as well as compromise solutions – both of them being peculiar to parliamentarian democracy. Against this backdrop, the disenchantment with parliamentarianism in Germany and the popularity of the rule of experts does not come as a surprise. Rather, they are appearantly a consequence of misunderstandings, knowledge gaps, and false expectations.
5. THE SPLINTERED RELATIONSHIP WITH POLITICAL EXTREMISTS
The relationship with political extremists might be telling not only with respect to the general social acceptance of anti-democratic propositions, but also with respect to the legitimacy of political participation rights: if political freedom is not supposed to be an empty platitude, it must apply to those – and especially those – who are under suspicion that they could go to the extremes when exercising their rights. And who better to be appropriate for this than political extremists? So in short, the willingness of a society to concede political liberties to extremists (national socialists, racists, communists, religious fanatics) provides information about a society’s level of political liberalness.
Basically, the situation is disillusioning. Polling data create the image of a somewhat prohibitive German mindset. A majority of more than 90 percent is willing to deny extremists their right of assembly – with the prominent exception of communists, anarchists and autonomists and the like, who come off fairly well.
Figure 8: Refusal of Extremists’ Participation Rights (Freedom of Assembly). Sources: ISSP 2004 (V16), 2006 (V8), 2008 (V32).
As to German society’s attitude about extremism, we see something about right wing and religious extremism political scientists call a “cordon sanitaire” – that is the widespread willingness to resolutely distance from extremism. The fact that there is such a cordon sanitaire regarding religious and right wing extremists comes as no surprise – because of the threat to inner security from Islamist terrorism on the one side and the long shadow of national socialism on the other. However, there is barely such a cordon sanitaire regarding left-wing extremists, which caused Wolfgang Rudzio to diagnose an “erosion of the demarcation” (Rudzio, 1988) in German political culture years ago.
What did he mean by that? Immediately after World War II, when the Cold War began to loom, West German political culture was determined by a “cordon sanitaire” against political extremisms of various provenances – be it national-socialist (due to the burden of history), or be it communist (due to the struggle of the two systems). This did not begin to change until the 1970s, when new social movements sprang up like mushrooms and positioned themselves against nuclear energy, against the re-armament of Germany, against the set structures of university etc. In the course of these events that had their media hour of birth in 1968 various social movements of the political left began to band together in order to form a strong force, among them organizations of