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The Politics of Limited Pluralism? The Case of West Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Klaus von Beyme
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THERE IS NO OTHER WEST EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY AS HIGHLY SUSPECT throughout the world so far as the extent of its tolerance towards deviant marginal groups is concerned. This is one of the reasons why West Germany is a good case for testing certain propositions about the theory of pluralism in general. In political science terminology pluralism has mostly been used in the restricted way of a certain stage of public philosophy, i.e. in the sense of ‘interest group liberalism’ propagating and perpetuating the faith that a system built primarily upon group bargaining must be perfectly selfcorrective and must have confidence in the balancing impacts of ‘overlapping memberships’ and contervailing powers. The ‘bias of pluralism’ in political science2 included a restriction of the notion ‘pluralism’ to interest groups. It was the highly disputable attempt to sum up all the forms of emancipation movements and their counterforces in the concept of ‘group’, thus equalizing them, and to line up all the cleavage lines which developed at different times of modern history (movements for religious autonomy, nationalism, conflicts between cities and countryside, class struggles etc.) and which had some impact on the formation of party systems, to compete in one arena.

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Government and Opposition , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1978 , pp. 265 - 287
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Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1978

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