Democracies at war

Yes, without the Great War some kind of 'Borggårdskrisen' (this is Swedish history, yet I can't remember the exact name. Typical) analogue might happen in Germany. But, as I said, Germany had something of an counterpart to the PM from the House of Lords: The Chancellor was most often from the largest party in the Prussian parliament, and that one had a less democratic franchise then UK and US ones.

You are quite right.

My point is that the franchise in Germany as a whole was wider than the US or the UK. That the executive was appointed does not make the state less democratic as my example of the Australian Constitution shows. Nor does the fact that British PMs had come from the Lords lessen its claims to be democratic.

Similarly, the United States executive consists of two elected officials who originally were political opponents! The remainder of the executive are appointed not elected. Does this make the US technically not a democracy?

In all representative democracies the struggle between the executive and the legislature is ongoing and results in the evolution of the system. The most important part of the political evolution of representative democracies is however the increasing widening of the franchise and the willingness of the electorate to press its rights. This is exactly what was happening in Germany in 1914.
 
In which democratic state was the executive seen as less powerful than the legislature? I mean in reality not theoretically.

Uh?

Constitutionally, in Australia the executive is not required to be drawn from the legislature, although in custom and practice it always has been. In the US the executive is not drawn from the legislature and only the top two executive positions are even elected!

This is irrelevant. The point is that the ultimate composition and control of the executive had a very limited - almost non-existant - relationship to voting behaviour. To bring America up as an example that fits the pattern of Wilhelmine Germany is ludicrous, as the American President is fully accountable to national voters, as you know full well. To say that this also applied to Caprivi or von Bülow is disengenuous. They weren't even members of a political party ffs.

Although Germany in 1914 had an unelected executive, my understanding is that the legislature had to ratify its decisions and had the exclusive constitutional power to raise taxes including the taxes required to wage war.

The Government and the Reichstag had very different positions in relation to each other than those in modern Germany or any other European democracy. In particular, I suggest that you examine the position of the War Ministry in the Second Reich, which was almost entirely politically and financially independent of voting behaviour. Foreign Affairs more generally was another realm of policy which was essentially a province of unelected elites.

The old mantra of democracy being 'Government of the people, by the people, for the people' (however simplistic or flawed it may be) is a useful guide here; by anyone's standards, Wilhelmine Germany falls down on two of those categories, and arguably all three.

In the real world, the German legislature was accruing more and more influence and real power before the war. It would only be a matter of time before it would flex its political muscles and defy the Kaiser by passing and enforcing laws he did not approve of.

This is rather a different argument from saying that Germany was a democracy in 1914.

and the relative power of the executive vis a vis the legislature is not a definition of whether a state is democratic or not.

I'm not actually arguing this. What I'm arguing is that governments should be formed on the basis of voting behaviour, and their compositions should be broadly in line with electoral results. If people don't have ultimate control over their government, then how on earth can any system be considered a democracy? The whole basis of liberal democracy is that people should have both representation and control of their own destinies through voting. (either directly or indirectly.) If that was even remotely the the case in Wilhelmine Germany, then you would have had a Socialist as Chancellor in 1912 instead of 1918.

Oh, and franchise is a rather pointless measure of democractic integrity, taken singularly. The USSR had a pretty extensive franchise, or so I hear.
 
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OTOH 1914 countries of Europe and America can hardly be called democratic as it limited franchise to men only.

Which brings out 2 variables of this argument, definition of democracy and definition of war.
 
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