Introduction to Max Weber’s article ‘The “Threatening” of the Reich Constitution’

In May 1904 Max Weber published a short article in the Frankfurter Zeitung. It has gone unnoticed in the extensive Weber literature and it appears here in English translation for the first time. It is an important statement of Weber’s political views after his withdrawal from his active political engagement in the 1890s. He defends the Reich Constitution from attack and a possible coup d’état. He demands that the German Parliament (Reichstag) stand up to autocratic plans, closely linked to Emperor William II, to suppress democracy and voting rights. A constitutional conflict would require not a great statesman but an ‘unscrupulous idiot or a political adventurer’ who would undermine ‘all our institutions and the security of law for many generations’. The article marks the start (earlier than previously assumed in the literature) of Weber’s consistent championing of Parliament and democratic institutions.

Making the Case for Democracy

Political entrepreneurs put liberal democracy under pressure by fueling concerns and exploiting citizens’ fragile commitment to this system of government. As difficult trade-offs are made apparent in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, we investigate one communicative strategy that political elites who want to defend the principles and practices of self-governance in pluralist societies can pursue. We propose “democratic persuasion” as an actionable, theory-driven intervention to increase the resilience of citizens' commitment to liberal democracy. "Democratic persuasion" requires that legislators actively make the case for democracy and discuss inherent trade-offs while engaging existing doubts and misperceptions. We invited citizens on facebook to attend one of sixteen Zoom townhalls organized in collaboration with members of the German parliament. Each legislator conducted two town halls and we randomly assigned the townhall, where they employed "democratic persuasion". Results suggest that “democratic persuasion” increases support for liberal democracy among citizens in the short term.

The evolution of gender-inclusive language. Evidence from the German Bundestag, 1949-2021

Gender-inclusive language is an important issue in the struggle for political equality between women and men. Parliaments are an important site in this struggle as they both reflect and shape gender-relations in society. Based on a novel high-quality corpus of all its debates we study the evolution of gender-fair language in the German parliament, Bundestag, between 1949 and 2021. As a "gender language" with a grammatical gender, German offers ideal conditions to inspect semantically symmetric male and female forms of personal nouns. Our analysis of more than 2.5 million occurrences of 1,600 lemmas of personal nouns reveals that female forms had been virtually non-existent in debates before experiencing a dramatic increase since the 1980s. This evolution in language use has been induced by the gender, partisan affiliation and generational affiliation of MPs.

Developments in German Criminal Law: Speed Merchant or Murderer? The Ku’Damm Road Race Case and the New Criminal Legislation Regulating Illegal Motor Racing

The Regional Court of Berlin (Landgericht (LG) Berlin) was the first court in Germany to mete out a life sentence for murder—pursuant to § 211 German Criminal Code (StGB)—to two men convicted of killing an uninvolved driver whose car they hit while they were participating in an illegal car race on a public highway. Upon their convictions, the defendants appealed to the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof; BGH) claiming that they did not intend to kill the person and were thus acting without the necessary mens rea for murder. The question whether or not the case could be qualified as murder, and thus whether or not the existence of a killing with intent had been sufficiently proven by the LG Berlin, was the subject of several appeals and retrials. In its latest decision, the BGH confirmed the murder conviction of one of the defendants, while quashing the other defendant’s conviction and issuing a retrial. This case caused ripples amongst legal scholars as it called for the toughest possible sanctions to be imposed. However, whether the conduct qualifies as murder remains questionable. As a reaction to several similar cases of illegal car races in recent years, the German parliament subsequently passed a new law—§ 315d StGB—proscribing illegal vehicle races, thereby penalizing the participation, organization, or carrying out of an illegal vehicle race. Until that point there had been no provision criminalizing illegal racing.

Emotionen und Geschlecht im politischen Feld

What is the role of emotions in the field of politics? How important is emotional capital and what does doing emotional work mean? What role do gender and the body play in this respect? How are daily politics affected by the increasing relevance of social media? Does social media lead to new emotional stress? This book focuses on these and many more questions. It offers an insight into a political field from the sociological perspectives of employment and gender. To conduct the study on which this book is based, the author interviewed members of the German Parliament and can thus provide a vivid image of the emotional challenges posed by political work.

ACTUALIZATION OF THE CONCEPT PARTNER IN GERMAN VIRTUAL POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Scientific research is focused on identifying the means of actualizing the concept PARTNER in German virtual political discourse. First, the theoretical preconditions for the analysis of the concept PARTNER in virtual political discourse are considered. The views of many leading domestic and foreign scholars on the concepts of "discourse", "virtual discourse", and "concept" are analyzed to develop our interpretation of definitions of virtual discourse, virtual political discourse, and concept. Possible means of actualization of the concepts and the researched concept PARTNER, in particular, are clarified. The meaning of the lexical unit and identifier of the concept (the word Partner) is studied, and its synonymic row is described. 500 lexical items and phrases that form the empirical basis of the study were identified with the help of a continuous sampling method on the web pages of the German government bundesregierung.de and the German parliament bundestag.de. All empirical material is subdivided into groups that are filled inhomogeneously. The noun Partner is the first or second component of compounds, and some derivative words are also formed from it. The concept of Partner is elaborated by the use of definite verbs that name actions which can be taken both by a partner and others towards him to achieve a certain goal. The lexical unit Partner is combined with a large number of adjectives (the most frequent group), which are semantically divided into five subgroups. The "partner status" subgroup is the most filled one. Two more subgroups, such as "international/national relations" and "qualities of partners " have almost the same number of words. Examples of the use of selected lexical units in context are given, and a model of the nominative field of the concept PARTNER is constructed. Its nucleus is defined with a lexical unit and identifier, a nuclear zone containing synonyms of a nuclear lexical unit, compounds with the component Partner and derivative words, and periphery (free phrases with verbs and adjectives) included. The conclusions summarize the results of the study and outline the prospects for further research.

OP509 Do They Care? Debates About Nursing And Health Technology Assessment In The German Bundestag

IntroductionOpposition parties in Germany are allowed to send formal requests to the government to control actions and pass important political debates to the parliament. These formal requests include a comprehensive analysis report issued by the scientific service of the German parliament. A systematic overview of these reports would support a deeper understanding about healthcare topics and assessments discussed by parties in the highest German decision body, particularly in the field of nursing.MethodsWe conducted a review using the German parliament “Bundestag” database for all formal requests since 1949. To systemize the formal requests we performed a quantitative category analysis using descriptive statistics.ResultsWe identified 26,197 formal requests with 146 reports related to nursing issued between 1978 and 2019. The 146 reports related to nursing accounted for 0.54 percent of all requests. Almost 30 percent of these requests were related to recruitment and qualification. The second major topic, with 15 percent, was financing of the nursing sector. Of all 146 formal requests in the history of the Bundestag, 55 percent (n = 81) were issued in the last 10 years.ConclusionsNursing is an emerging topic in the German parliament, highlighting the demographic shift in Germany and the growing pressure in the nursing care sector. Health Technology Assessment bodies should be informed and work together with the scientific services of parliamentary bodies. This would support a more transparent and evidence based healthcare system, aside from lobbyism.

Multiplicity, hybridity and normativity: disputes about the UN convention against corruption in Germany

In 2014, Germany became the 173rd state to ratify the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) – after more than ten years of disputes in the German parliament. To make sense of the protracted debates about ratifying UNCAC, the article follows the recent introduction of Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology to International Relations (IR). I argue that this approach opens new avenues for researching normativity in hybrid arrangements of multiple, overlapping orders of worth and through ongoing tests of the right evaluation of a situation. I show that the belayed ratification of UNCAC in Germany was the result of the hybridity inherent to norms against corruption. In the debates, members of the German parliament relied on competing normative inventories to translate the term ‘public official’ to the German context and to settle the meaning of corruption. This article contributes to IR norm research by unpacking normative multiplicity and contradictions that undergird international norms and disputes about them.

The revenge of the village? The geography of right-wing populist electoral success, anti-politics, and austerity in Germany

This paper discusses the geography of the electoral successes of the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the national election to the German parliament in September 2017. Unlike other studies that reduce the electoral pattern to differences between “the city” and “the country,” we do not accept the empirical observation of an urban-rural divide as a sufficient explanation. By doing so, this paper proposes a theorization of the urban and the rural as social relationships that can be dialectically differentiated through the all-encompassing urbanization process and which materialize through space. This approach draws on Henri Lefebvre’s work on urbanization and his understanding of “the urban” and “the rural” and integrates it with Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of “the provincial” to better characterize “the rural” as a form of social relationship in which the culturally familiar, authenticity, and a lack of difference and reflection dominate. Recent theoretical discussions of anti-politics—understood as both a mode of making political claims and a political strategy that negates arguments, negotiations, and compromise, starting instead with absolute, non-negotiable positions— inform this paper as well. Based on this theoretical foundation, we argue that the rural is the breeding ground for anti-politics and AfD votes. A discussion of three places where the AfD was particularly successful supports our argument: the more peripheral, small-town administrative district of Western Pomerania-Greifswald and the two large-city districts of Mannheim-Schönau and Pforzheim-Haidach.

Uncovering interest group participation in Germany: web collection of written statements in ministries and the parliament

This article discusses web collection of interest group statements on bills as a data source. Written statements allow the identification of actors active in policy-making as well as those actors’ positions, lobbying coalitions and issue saliency. These data also can contribute to the measurement of interest groups’ influence on legislation. Taking web collection from the German parliament’s and ministries’ web pages as an example, we demonstrate the collection process and the merits and limitations of employing written statements as identificatory data. Our analysis of statements submitted by interest groups, private firms and policy experts to four federal ministries and the respective parliamentary committees in the years 2015 and 2016 reveals differences between parliamentary and ministerial consultations. Although ministries have invited written statements for fewer draft laws than parliamentary committees, they received far more statements from interest groups. The reason is that German ministries often issue open calls, in which all actors are given the opportunity to comment on legislation, whereas the German parliament invites selected interest group representatives and other experts. As a further result, ministries are mostly contacted by business groups, whereas parliamentary committees use their gatekeeper function to balance interests.