The Constitution of the German Empire was fairly complicated, so I'm enlisting the help of this visual aid. At the top of the Government sat the Kaiser, who was a hereditary monarch and the Emperor of Germany and the King of Prussia as well as the Commander in Chief of the armed forces. He had the power to dissolve the Reichstag, make treaties and declare war. He also appointed the Chancellor, who was responsible for day to day running of the Government and the legislative programme. Beneath the Chancellor were the two legislative bodies of the Reich, the Bundesrat and the Reichstag. The Bundesrat was composed of delegates from each of the German States, roughly allotted by population, with Prussia at the top with 17 delegates. It could both propose and veto legislation. The Reichstag was elected by all males over 25, using a secret ballot, and had to approve all legislation. Each state also had its own regional assembly or Diet and was given control over local affairs such as health, education or policing, while the Imperial Government retained control over defence, foreign policy and other national issues. German citizens also had wide ranging freedoms such as freedom of the press and of assembly. The Trade Unions were also very influential.

On the face of it, the German Empire seems like any other federal democracy. However, there are several criticisms which can be made of the idea that the Second Reich was a free and fair liberal democracy. The first of these is that power was concentrated at the top. The Kaiser had the power to dissolve the Reichstag and fire and appoint the Chancellor as he saw fit. If the Chancellor and Kaiser worked well together, as in the case of Bismarck and Wilhelm I, then this was fine. However if there was a personality clash, as between Wilhelm II and Bismarck (leading to Bismarck's downfall and removal from office) then Government could be paralysed. The Chancellor also needed the support of the Reichstag to pass legislation and if a majority of Reichstag deputies opposed his legislative programme then this could lead to deadlock.

A similar criticism can be made that much of the power lay in the hands of the traditional aristocratic elite, the Junkers. Most of the high ranking Army and Navy officers came from aristocratic backgrounds. Additionally, elections to the local Prussian assembly used a three tiered system, where the votes of the wealthier citizens counted for more than the votes of the poor. Prussia also had 17 delegates to the Bundesrat, almost three times as many as the next largest state, Bavaria. Legislation could be vetoed in the Bundesrat with 14 votes, so Prussia had the unique ability to veto any legislation which was not to its liking. Finally, Reichstag deputies were not paid a wage, so only people who had enough money to live without a wage, or could be supported by another organisation such as the trade unions, could realistically become deputies.

Finally, the army held a large amount of power. Soldiers swore allegiance to the Kaiser as opposed to Germany and all males were conscripted into the army for a short period of national service. Officers, both regular and reserve, held high status in German society. As the Commander in Chief of the Army, the Kaiser could also in theory operate independently of the Reichstag.

In conclusion, Germany was 'free' on paper, but actual power was concentrated at the top. However, there was a high degree of political engagement and left wing parties in the Reichstag certainly made life difficult for various Chancellors.

The actual text (translated) of the constitution can be found [here](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_German_Empire#III.FEDERAL_COUNCIL(BUNDESRAT)

For further reading on domestic politics in the Second Reich I'd recommend:

James Retallack, Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1996)

John Rohl, The Kaiser and his Court (1994)

Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire (1985)

This is an incredibly difficult question to answer as the nineteenth-century Germans themselves were somewhat unclear as to how to classify their state. The Kaiserreich possessed a hybrid political system with a national parliament elected by universal suffrage, an executive authority that had little responsibility to that parliament, a federal system of largely monarchical states, and a judiciary that was socially conservative, but zealously guarded both the rule of law and was no catspaw of the central government. Among the largely Protestant German professoriate, this heterogeneous conglomeration meant that the Kaiserreich was a symbol of a "Third Way" between the Republicanism of France and absolutism exemplified by tsarist Russia. However, things looked less rosy for those Germans that had to operate within this political system, and by the twentieth century the shortcomings of the system were the cause of persistent grumblings along the whole political spectrum of German politics.

One of the key issues surrounding this classification of the Kaiserreich for historians is the issue the extent and scale of the democratic character of the German state. There are two historiographic answers to the question of "how democratic was Imperial Germany" and both lay out persuasive points for both a soft affirmative and the negative.

In the postwar 1950s and 60s, the Bielefeld-school led by Hans-Ulrich Wehler painted a coherent picture of Germany’s trajectory towards illiberal dictatorship and racism. Wehler in particular emphasized that Bismarck subverted democratic processes that retarded political development. Termed either Caesarism or Bonapartism by Wehler, he argued Imperial Germany's executive branch (both the Kaiser and the Chancellor) bypassed electoral checks and oversights so that innovations like universal male suffrage ended up meaningless. While it was not an absolute monarchy, Wehler asserted that Bismarck was able to use nationalism as a tool to craft an authoritarian state and undermine constitutional checks and balances. Later historians like James Sheehan and Wolfgang Mommsen contended that German structural problems, such as the nation’s vast regional diversity and divergent political and economic developments, contributed to a gradual narrowing of liberalism’s chances to achieve meaningful political success in the united Germany. Mommsen argued that despite the existence of universal male suffrage in the federal Reichstag, the state governments, especially Prussia which had a restricted three-tiered franchise and was the largest state, could block any meaningful chances of political reform. By the same token, John Röhl argued that the latent strength that the Bismarckian constitution gave the German executive allowed it to operate with a degree of relative autonomy from the Reichstag and when coupled with an erratic personality like Wilhelm II, the results were an authoritarian mess. To many of these historians, the failure of the 1848 Revolutions represented a turning point that failed to turn in that it was a chance to cement national sovereignty inside a parliament. This failure contributed to an aberrant path within Germany's political development (called by historians the Sonderweg).

Around the 1980s, newer generations of historians began to question the determinism and pessimism of Bielefelders and other historians. One of the landmark books questioning the Sonderweg''s teleological aspects was Blackbourn and Eley's The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany. What this book did is examine many of the assumptions of earlier historians and the veracity of their claims of German illiberalism. One aspect that Eley and Blackbourn dissect is using "the West" especially Great Britain as a paradigmatic model for Imperial Germany's lack of democratic development. They contended that such comparisons drew upon a simplified picture of British politics and ignored areas in which German democratic institutions were stronger than the British case. Margaret Lavinia Anderson's Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany extended this critique further than Blackbourn and Eley. Her central thesis is that despite Bismarck's antidemocratic intentions, the more Germans participated in democratic elections, the better they got at them. She turns some of the comparisons of Germany with the West on their head by arguing that Imperial Germany lacked such things like "Rotten Burroughs," (safe electoral districts), voter restrictions, and voter patronage systems that were endemic within the allegedly paradigmatic Britain and Western democracies. Anderson argues that the archaic monarchical order was not strong enough to prevent German from experiencing mass democracy, but hindered development enough that “hot family feuds” of the German national community erupted in repressive measures such as the Kulturkampf or the anti-socialist legislation. One of the astute observations Anderson made was that the supposedly archaic political institutions upheld by the Bielefelders were in a constant state of flux. The tiered franchise system for the state elections appeared increasingly out of step with modern developments in the twentieth century. The southern German states (Baden, Bavaria, and Württemberg) had actually instituted universal suffrage in state electoral reforms of 1904-06. Prussia was the main hold-out to this trend, but the explosive growth of Berlin made the prospects of Prussia being a stronghold for conservative Junker interests increasingly tenuous. Furthermore, the very existence of the tiered franchise provided Germany's left-wing political parties a viable issue with which to attack the government. The German court system, although clearly very socially-conservative, was also very independent of the central state and proved to be an unlikely ally of left-wing parties during electoral disputes.

The challenges raised by Anderson and other recent scholars like Dieter Langewiesche have not gone unanswered by those historians who see Imperial Germany as fundamentally undemocratic. Volker Berghahn challenged Anderson in an essay in Central European History accusing her of focusing too much on minutia and losing the larger picture of the political trajectory of modern Germany, which eventually led to the Third Reich. James Retallack has likewise challenged Anderson's notion that Germany was a " 'democratic' monarchy" and that there were significant bastions of authoritarianism within the Kaiserreich. Retallaclk's research into German conservativism as well as Saxon elections shows that there was some degree of a pushback against universal suffrage and mass politics. By the same token, Wolfgang Mommsen has described the Kaiserreich as a system of "skirted decisions" in which the central state tried to put off the inevitability of mass politics which institutionalized a degree of dysfunction within German politics.

So this historiographic debate leaves the question of "how democratic was Imperial Germany?" open. The larger point of the above detour into German historiography is that there is no sure consensus among historians as to whether the Kaiserreich was democratic or not. Wehler, Berghahn, Anderson, Röhl, Sheehan, Mommsen, Eley, Lerman and slew of other historians have taken the above to argue either Germany was undergoing a process of democratizing or had significant structural impediments mitigating against it. Such a rich vein of historiography on this question and that makes a basic answer yes or no answer tricky because the question of what is democratic can be highly subjective.

This subjectivity can be dangerous if it is unexamined as it leads to distortions in understanding the past. Part of the crux of the matter depends upon how one defines "democratic." For example, if one defines democracy and citizenship as for the benefit of all citizens irrespective of gender, then Imperial Germany fails along with every other major Western democracy (save New Zealand and Australia) prior to the First World War because national women's suffrage was not present. Moreover, while France and the UK had arguably had a healthier relationship between the executive and political parties than Germany in the latter nineteenth century, French and British democracy also presided over large imperial domains whose inhabitants had no real political constituency in either London or Paris. While Bismarck's anti-socialist legislation was certainly illiberal, such repression was far from unique even within the democracies of this period. The French Third Republic also passed anti-anarchist laws, the lois scélérates, and the US enacted a program of surveillance of suspected anarchists in the aftermath of the McKinley assassination which provided a prologue for the Palmer raids of the First Red Scare. By the same token, while the Kaiserreich's attitude towards its Polish and other non-German minorities was far from liberal, it did not indulge in the systematic disenfranchisement upheld by violence as in the Jim Crow South. German Poles may have been subject to discrimination in land-ownership and language rights, but they were not systematically disenfranchised and often were a crucial power-bloc in the Catholic Centre Party in Silesia and Prussian Poland.