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.
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.
Ausgehend von Max Webers These von der protestantischen Erwerbsethik untersucht der Aufsatz eine unterschätzte und kaum erforschte Teilgruppe des Bürgertums im 19. Jahrhundert: Rentiers, also Bürger, die nicht arbeiteten, sondern sich entweder (häufig in relativ jungen Jahren) zur Ruhe gesetzt oder vielleicht auch niemals gearbeitet hatten; sie lebten von den Erträgen ihres Kapitals. Nicht nur ihre zahlenmäßige Bedeutung, sondern auch ihre gesellschaftliche Rolle vor allem im kommunalen Leben, in ehrenamtlicher Tätigkeit und Lokalpolitik verweist darauf, dass die bürgerliche Gesellschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts für ihr Funktionieren der Nichtarbeit bedurfte. Trotz einer kritischen Beobachtung durch Sozialwissenschaft und Literatur genossen die müßigen Bürger Ansehen. Davon ausgehend stellt sich die Frage nach der Bedeutung der Arbeit im bürgerlichen Leben generell. Der Aufsatz argumentiert, dass die (bürgerliche) Arbeit nach heutigen Verständnis sehr viel weniger „rastlos“ war, als das Max Weber und unser heutiges Verständnis nahelegt. Der Rentier als Ausdruck eines „mäßigen“ Verhältnisses zur Arbeit ist aber eine Erscheinung des 19. Jahrhunderts. Mentalitätswandel einerseits, der Rückgang der ökonomischen Chancen andererseits und schließlich der Erste Weltkrieg mit seinen inflationären Auswirkungen beendete eine typische bürgerliche Lebensform des 19. Jahrhunderts.
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