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The complexity of issues requires expert advice, which the Bundestag has organized into a considerable parliamentary bureaucracy. Consistent with the practice of all effective parliaments, it has developed a complex decision making process that has many stages and requires a level of professional mastery that makes it difficult for outsiders to comprehend. That complexity cannot be avoided, if five-hundred and nineteen individual members divided among four parliamentary parties and twenty-one committees are to be capable of making collective decisions that play an independent role in the governmental process. But that complexity is an impediment to a better understanding of parliament by the public, and stronger public support for the institution as such. The dilemma is hard to escape.
To be sure bureaucratization and procedural complication are maladies of many modern parliaments, particularly of those that aspire to high influence. However, the German parliament is probably less resistant to these maladies than are the parliaments of the United Kingdom, France, and the smaller European democracies, where the tradition of public deliberation in the plenary meeting of the House is more firmly established. The principal antidote to this malady is a further development of the public phases of parliamentary work, the nourishing of public interest in parliamentary deliberations and of the confidence of political leaders in their ability to explain themselves to that public. This is the special mission of the opposition, whose role in all democratic political systems deserves the closest attention.
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Allow me in conclusion to turn for a moment to the role of the parliamentary opposition and the critical question of the relationship of the political public to its parliament. The concept of "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition," first articulated in the House of Commons in eighteen twenty-six, is one of the truly important innovations in parliamentary history. It provides the focal point within parliament for an orderly transfer of power from one set of leaders to another. If that transfer can be determined by the will of the electorate, it permits the frustrations of the mass public to be expressed in effective political change.
Three substantial obstacles stand in the way of such a role for the opposition within the Bundestag. First, the opposition does not necessarily consist of a single party. Second, the opposition parties are tempted to try to influence the terms of legislation in the legislative process in the Bundestag, thereby cbscuring their distinctive policy position. Third, proportional representation makes the electoral system sluggish, impeding the dramatic shifts in the parliamentary strength of the parties that can occur in France and Britain in response to normal change in the party vote of