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Voting: For the first five years of the Weimar Republic, the parties had to print
their own ballots—which naturally listed only their candidates—and then
either send them to potential voters by mail, hand them out at campaign
rallies, or press them into voters’ hands as they walked into the polling
places. The voters then dropped the party ballot of their choice into the
ballot box. Smaller parties balked at the expense and logistics of such an
undertaking, though, and Germans across the spectrum bemoaned the huge waste
of paper. In December 1923, the Reichstag passed a law that mandated
government-issued ballots for federal elections, with voters marking their
preference from a list of all of the parties. The introduction of these
ballots not only eased the actual practice of voting, but it also encouraged
citizens to see voting as an official function—perhaps even a patriotic
duty—rather than simply an extension of party activism. German voters turned out in remarkably high numbers throughout the Weimar
Republic. Over 80% of eligible voters cast a ballot in 1919, after which
voter turnout fluctuated in the mid- to high 70s during the 1920s, before
rising again to well over 80% of eligible voters going to the polls for the
Reichstag and presidential elections in the early 1930s. In addition to
national legislative elections, German voters also cast ballots in elections
for their regional legislatures (Landtage) and for
the German president, as well as in two nationwide referenda. The fact that
Germany has always held its elections on a Sunday certainly helped to boost
voter turnout by enabling people to find time to go to the polls. The Political Parties: Because Germany’s national legislature, the Reichstag, reflected proportional representation, voters cast their
ballots for a party, not for an individual candidate, and they paid close
attention to party platforms. The largest party throughout most of the
Weimar Republic, until July 1932, was the SPD (Social Democratic Party of
Germany, represented in pink on the interactive map), which
disproportionately represented skilled workers and supported policies on the
political left, including workplace regulation, a public safety net, and
city planning. Just to its right, the slightly left-of-center DDP (German
Democratic Party) drew significant support from educated professionals,
including many German Jews, and stood for constitutional rights, a secular
state, and social tolerance (because it never won a plurality of votes in
any district, the DDP does not have a color on the interactive map). In the
middle of the political spectrum, the Zentrum/BVP (Center Party/Bavarian
People’s Party, represented in brownish-black on the interactive map)
focused on protecting the rights of Germany’s Catholic minority and
generally leaned left on economic issues and right on questions of moral
regulation. These three parties together—the SPD, DDP, and
Zentrum/BVP—expressed the strongest support for Germany’s 1919 constitution
and democratic republic and came to be known as the “Weimar Coalition,” a
term that had begun to circulate by 1925. It should be noted, however, that
the Zentrum’s Bavarian sister party, the BVP, leaned much further right than
the other three parties, and its focus on preserving a degree of Bavarian
autonomy sometimes put it at odds with the coalition’s national agenda. The political parties to the right of the “Weimar Coalition” expressed
ambivalence or outright hostility toward republican democracy and tended to
draw their support from the self-consciously nationalistic middle classes,
particularly business owners and landholders in rural Protestant communities
in northern and eastern Germany. The center-right DVP (German People’s
Party, represented in lavender on the interactive map) expressed deep
misgivings about the republic at its founding, but the party gradually
softened its position and began to back the new constitutional order.
Indeed, its longtime leader, Gustav Stresemann, came to exemplify a
political type known as the Vernunftrepublikaner,
someone who recognized that the virtues of the democratic system outweighed
its shortcomings and thus merited defending. To the right of the DVP, the
DNVP (Germany National People’s Party, represented in purple on the
interactive map) vehemently and, in its early years, even violently opposed
the republic. Its stance shifted only subtly over the course of the 1920s,
as schisms and leadership changes alternately inched the party a bit closer
to the center and then lurched it even further to the extreme right. A whole
series of smaller far-right and right-leaning parties also began attracting
support in mid-1920s, one of which was the revolutionary ethno-nationalist
and antisemitic NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, represented
in brown on the interactive map), also known as “Nazis,” who achieved their
big electoral breakthrough in 1930. The parties to the left of the “Weimar Coalition” also expressed antipathy
toward the republic, and even tried to violently overthrow it, but
ultimately did not pose the same threat to German democracy that the far
right did, and they struggled to expand their voter base beyond a core of
mostly unskilled workers and sympathetic intellectuals, even during the
height of the Great Depression. The USPD (Independent Social Democratic
Party of Germany, represented in yellow on the interactive map) emerged out
of an antiwar faction within the SPD and then formed its own party in 1917
when it defied the SPD leadership by refusing to endorse additional funding
for the war. The USPD envisioned a postwar economy marked by collective
ownership and a postwar government guided by local workplace councils,
rather than an elected parliament. It briefly joined forces with the SPD to
guide Germany’s transition during the November Revolution in 1918, but the
two erstwhile comrades differed over the revolution’s direction and fell out
once again in late December. A subsequent schism within the USPD itself led
to its demise in 1922, when most of its remaining members voted to reunite
with the SPD after having already lost substantial numbers to the
Communists. That party, the KPD (Communist Party of Germany, represented in
red on the interactive map), meanwhile, boycotted the 1919 National Assembly
election, but then competed in the June 1920 Reichstag election and everyone thereafter, despite its
reservations about the merits of representative democracy. The apportionment of seats in the Reichstag: The nine above-mentioned parties comprised just the largest and most
important of the dozens of political parties that competed for seats at some
point during the Weimar Republic, and lots of parties never gained
representation at all. In the May 1928 elections, for instance, 37 parties
appeared on a ballot somewhere in Germany, but only 15 of them managed to
win at least one seat in the Reichstag. Each party got one seat in the Reichstag for every
60,000 votes that it received in a given electoral district, in accord with
the April 1920 Federal Election Law. Election officials then gathered the
leftover votes for the party (Reststimmen) from
several districts and lumped them together for a regional apportionment,
using the same formula of one seat per 60,000 votes, and they did this one
more time at the national level. Given that the number of voters varied from
election to election, so did the resulting number of seats in the Reichstag,
which reached a peak of 608 seats after the 84% turnout in the election of
July 1932. Once an election had determined how many seats each party would have in the
Reichstag, the parties filled those seats with
political stalwarts from a predetermined list. The first four names on that
list usually appeared on the ballot, underneath the party’s name, so that
voters had at least some idea of who would represent them. Anyone 25 years
of age or older could hold a seat in the legislature. Coalition Governments: Because so many parties participated in each election, no single party ever
won a majority of the seats. Two or more parties therefore had to join
together in a coalition and agree on a common policy agenda in order to form
a government and pass legislation, a delicate process that often demanded
more compromises than the parties were prepared to make. In those
situations, a minority coalition governed with the “toleration” of an
additional party or two whose added seats gave that coalition a majority.
Most national governments during the Weimar Republic were minority
coalitions, usually comprised of the DDP, Zentrum/BVP, and DVP, with the
toleration of either the SPD on the left or the DNVP on the right. The
Zentrum, in particular, played an outsized role in governing the Weimar
Republic, participating in every coalition until late summer 1932 and
providing half of the republic’s chancellors.
The provisional government in November 1918 lowered the voting age from 25
to 20 and extended the vote to women and soldiers for the very first time,
all of which added 20 million more eligible voters to the German pollbooks
for the January 1919 election. The April 1920 Election Law once again barred
active soldiers from voting, but, because the Versailles Treaty had so
severely restricted the size of the German military, this provision only
affected about 100,000 men per election.
Source: Design: Gabriel Moss (MossMaps) in collaboration with Erik Jensen, 2024.