The culture of election campaigning in postwar Western Europe allegedly has been shaped by a process of Americanization. In terms of political communication, Americanization has four distinct features: proximity of political marketing to commercial marketing, personalization and professionalization of campaigns, and media centered strategies. Based on an analyses of some European cultures of electioneering – Germany, Great Britain, and Italy – the main thesis of the paper is that the shared features are only to a smaller degree the results of American influences, but rather parallel trends due to structural commonalities like being medialized democracies in welfare and consumer societies, politically shaped by the Cold War context. The 1980s, however, meant a threshold: private media have risen across Europe and policy issues from the “new social movements” were pressured into the policy agenda. Although this has furthered the “Americanization” of European electioneering styles, at the same time several European elections point to an increased Europeanization of electioneering. On the whole, however, different national political cultures continue to modify and change American and European influences, creating local variations of campaigning.
Both dictatorship and democracy were essentially new concepts of political rule in Germany after World War I. It was true that suffrage had been increasingly extended after the revolution of 1848–1849, and more citizens (male citizens, that is) were entitled to vote in Imperial Germany than, for instance, in Great Britain. Dictatorship, too, was a new form of political control, at least in Germany. The term ‘people’ was to become a standard formula for the self-understanding of German politics after 1918. In its shades of meaning, it saw the people as a social organism, rather than as an ethnic community. ‘People’ referred to the many. It described the social commitment with which a good community was supposed to be built. An inquiry into Reichstag, and the German parliament and incidents and rebellions surrounding it concludes this article.
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