Voting for Hitler and Stalin: Elections under 20th Century Dictatorships

Voting for Hitler and Stalin: Elections under 20th Century Dictatorships

Language: English

Pages: 349

ISBN: 3593394898

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Dictatorships throughout the twentieth century—including Mussolini’s Italy, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, Poland, and East Germany—held elections. But were they more than rituals of participation without the slightest effect on the distribution of power? Why did political regimes radically opposed to liberal democracy feel the need to imitate their enemies? Offering significant insights into absolutist state governance, Voting for Hitler and Stalin thoroughly investigates the remarkable, paradoxical phenomenon of dictatorial elections, revealing the many ways they transcended mere propaganda.

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Subjugation or the demonstration of consensus? Certainly, the desire to gain legitimacy at home, but particularly abroad by implementing the “modern” procedure was a crucial factor. In addition to that, the adoption of Western election standards, probably, demonstrates the attractiveness of “modern” Western democratic values. (After all, the socialist idea had played a substantial part in implementing these values, far beyond the election procedure). Universal, equal, direct and secret elections.

A more detached approach also provokes the question as to why dictators, who believed in a whole new world, fell back on the western-democratic Australian Ballot, adopting its procedures such as uniform ballot papers, ballot boxes, voting booths etc., and did not use corporate forms of voting systems or indeed open acclamation. These considerations lead to the second point in favor of using a cultural history approach, namely that it facilitates the assessing of elections and voting from the.

The Reference Model: Elections in Democracies One often equates democracy with the existence of free elections. Thus, if in a former dictatorship a parliament is freely elected, the transition to democracy passes for being complete. However, the history of post-colonial Africa shows that it is not as simple as this. Democracy has proven not —————— 3 “Gestalt” refers to a transposable structure—for example, that of a parliamentary system of government or a totalitarian dictatorship.

21, d. 114, l. 3. 35 GARF, f. 5451, o. 21, d. 114, l. 9. 36 The unions also launched investigations in the barracks and dormitories that housed hundreds of thousands of new workers who had migrated to the cities during the industrialization drive. See GARF, f. 5451, o. 21, d. 114, l. 22. THE GREAT SOVIET PARADOX 163 completely changed its face.” For the first time in years, woolen workers actively participated in large, noisy “accountability” meetings. Of the more than 1,300 people elected to.

Vigilance”, and, in the end, the lack of interest in elaborating conclusive election programs opened the way to “hostile” and “backward” elements penetrating the trade unions.41 Even though, in actual fact, Party organizations frequently did influence elections,42 the Party leadership’s poor opinion of the cells’ ideological vigor did not miss the mark. Demands of trade union officials to stop “independent” actions of factory cells,43 protests reported from factories that “comrades from the.

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