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the electorate.
Only twice in forty years did elections cause a change in the party having the plurality of seats in the Bundestag. The difficulty of successful appeals to the voter in turn explains the temptation of the opposition to collaborate with the government in private.
These obstacles to the role of the opposition weaken the incentive of the opposition parties to press for the further opening of the parliamentary process to public scrutiny. They encourage a public perception that the governmental process consists of an obscure collaboration among members of an established political elite insensitive to the public will. They impair the performance of parliament's most distinctive function in a democratic political system: representing the political public.
If this is the principal liability on the balance sheet of the accomplishments of the Bundestag, it is a liability shared with most other democratic parliaments. Reducing that liability will require in Germany, as elsewhere, the growing sophistication of the electorate and of the mass media on which the electorate depends. Democratic political leaders are likely to respond to the rising expectations of an increasingly educated public, one that accepts political conflict as a norm of democratic conduct. In the last twenty years there has been unmistakable evidence that the connections between parliament and public are growing stronger.
Conclusion
In the quotations with which I opened my remarks, Ernst Cassirer observed that "insight into history would be fruitless and ineffective if we were to understand it only as knowledge of that which is past, that which has happened, that which has been done." (6) In that spirit I do not intend this assessment to be principally a backward look at the forty year history of the Bundestag. I intend it, rather, as a contribution to our understanding of a valuable institutional heritage. It is a part of the European parliamentary tradition that can be traced back to the Middle Ages. It is a particularly influential example of its kind. In historical perspective it is clearly the product of a far longer history than these forty postwar years. It has the marks of institutionalization characteristic of far older parliaments, the influence comparable to the most established assemblies in the western world, and the adaptability of the most vital. In a nation whose politics have caused its citizens great shame, the German Parliament should be a source of genuine pride. This anniversary of its re-establishment might well be an hour of commitment to its continued vitality as the organizational manifestation of the noblest ideals of German political thought.