unwillingness to give the people too much of a voice in their ‘democracy’ after
the war. The device of a ‘constructive vote of no confidence’ (discussed above,
p. 218, with reference to the change from the Schmidt to the Kohl governments)
was designed to preclude the perpetual lack of effective government in the
Weimar Republic, when successive chancellors were unable to find majority
support in parliament and eventually were forced to rely on presidential decrees
to promulgate legislation.
However important the constitutional provisions of the Federal Republic, a
number of other factors were equally, if not more, important in explaining the
stability of West German democracy. One of the most central is undoubtedly the
success of the West German economy, on which more in a moment. Other
factors have to do with changes in the nature of political parties, and in the
relationships between certain economic interest groups and the political system.
Obviously, the range of the politically permissible was initially constrained by
the Allies after the war, and, as indicated above, was partly determined by
constitutional provisions. But the parties themselves developed into rather
different sorts of vehicle for political interests than pre-Nazi German parties. On
the one hand, the CDU/CSU developed, to adapt a phrase describing the British
Labour Party, into a relatively ‘broad church’ incorporating both Protestants and
Catholics, and embracing former Nazis with little hesitation (Adenauer even
including them in his cabinet). On the other hand, the SPD radically changed its
political colours after its resounding election defeat in 1957, and at its 1959 Bad
Godesberg Conference unceremoniously dumped the Marxist-influenced
rhetoric it had proudly proclaimed for so many decades. The SPD now sought to
compete with the CDU/CSU as an all-embracing
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