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The fall of the Berlin wall raised many questions about Germany and post-socialist countries. Given East Germany's authoritarian history, how democratic are its citizens now? What kind of democracy do they want a liberal or socialist democracy? What economic system do they prefer? How have they ...

The fall of the Berlin wall raised many questions about Germany and post-socialist countries. Given East Germany's authoritarian history, how democratic are its citizens now? What kind of democracy do they want a liberal or socialist democracy? What economic system do they prefer? How have they reacted to democratic and market systems since 1989? The book shows how individual institutional learning may be offset by the diffusion of democratic values. The author uses public opinion surveys to compare attitudes of MPs and the general public, and in-depth interviews with parliamentarians in east, and west Berlin to show the persistence of socialist views in the east as well as lower levels of political tolerance. Moreover, the book argues, these values have changed fairly littlesince unification. The author presents evidence and develops implications for other post-socialist nations, arguing that while post-socialist citizens do not yearn for the old socialist order, their socialist values frequently lower enthusiasm for new democratic and market institutions. The implications being that ideological values are primarily shaped by individual exposure to institutions and that democratic and market values are diffused only in specific conditions. More than just an analysis of German political culture, the book offers conpelling conclusions about the future of democracy in all post-socialist states. Robert Rohrschneider won the Stein Rokkan Prize for best book in comparative politics by a young scholar awarded by the International Social Science Committee of UNESCO.

From the time of Bismarck's great rival Ludwig Windthorst to that of the first post-World War II Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, the Catholic community in Germany took a distinctive historical path. Although it was by no means free of authoritarian components, it was at times the most democratic ...

From the time of Bismarck's great rival Ludwig Windthorst to that of the first post-World War II Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, the Catholic community in Germany took a distinctive historical path. Although it was by no means free of authoritarian components, it was at times the most democratic pathway taken by organized political Catholicism anywhere in Europe.

Challenging those who seek continuity in German history primarily in terms of its long march toward Nazism, this book crosses all the usual historical turning points from mid-nineteenth- to late-twentieth-century German history in search of the indigenous origins of postwar German democracy. Complementing recent studies of German Social Democracy, it links the postwar party system to the partisan traditions this new system transcended by documenting the attempts by reform-minded members of the old Catholic Center party to break out of the constraints of minority-group politics and form a democratic political party. The failure of those efforts before 1933 helped clear the way for Nazism, but their success after 1945 in founding the interdenominational Christian Democratic Union (CDU) helped tame political conservatism and allowed the emergence of the most stable democracy in contemporary Europe. Integrating those who needed to be integrated--the cultural and political conservatives--into a durable liberal order, this conservative yet democratic and interdenominational "catch-all" party broadened democratic sensibilities and softened the effect of religious tensions on the German polity and party system.

By crossing traditional chronological divides and exploring the links between earlier abortive Catholic initiatives and therange of competing postwar visions of the new party system, this book moves Catholic Germany from the periphery to the heart of the issue of continuity in modern German history.