Consensus, conflict and democracy in Germany

Abstract

Based on a 1996 representative sample survey of the voting age population in West and East Germany, the article deals with a problem which had a well‐defined place in pluralist theoretical thinking, but was hardly dealt with on empirical grounds: consensus and conflict as elements in individual belief systems. The conceptualisation of the problem, owing much to work by Bettina Westle, is based on a democracy scale developed by the author and Rudolf Wildenmann in the late 1960s. This scale has since then been replicated in surveys of the German voting‐age population both in the West and (since unification) in the East in regular intervals. A fourfold typology is derived combining both consensus and conflict. The analysis shows that being above average both on the conflict and the consensus dimension, the liberal‐pluralist type corresponds most to ideals of a democratic citizen: more supportive of the democratic ideal, more sceptical of political violence, more involved in politics and less authoritarian. By contrast, emphasis only on the conflict dimension turns out to be much less conducive to a democratic position, with weaker support for the democratic ideal and an above‐average affinity to political violence.