The Bismarckian constitution was a purposely vague and opaque document that divided powers in a rather haphazard manner. The Reichstag was one of the organs of state that was simultaneously empowered and muzzled by the imperial constitution. The result of this constitutional arrangement was that while the parliamentary body had limited political political power it also possessed growing symbolic power that became harder for the chancellery to ignore.

The greatest single asset working in the Reichstag's favor was its control over the purse-strings of the state. Articles 69 through 73 of the constitution gave the Reichstag an important role in the oversight of the budget. The Reichstag had to approve the yearly budget and this became the source of much tension between the parliamentary body and the chancellery-led executive. One of the flaws of the Bismarckian system that the Iron Chancellor did not fully anticipate was the explosive growth in the size of the state and its ever-increasing need for revenue. The 1871 constitution had envisioned excise and other forms of indirect taxation as sufficient for the state, but this was inadequate given the growth of the modern state in the industrial era. The constitution granter the local Länder the right to direct taxation as a sop of sorts to conservative agrarian interests and the various minor German monarchs. This arrangement placed the chancellery in a bind in that it could not alter the system without alienating one of its major bases of support, and a number of Reichstag deputies knew that they could press their advantage at budget time. Revenue from loans thus became one of the major sources keeping the state running and this made the Reichstag a major player in this contentious issue. This ensured that Bismarck and his successors always had to deal with their parliamentary subordinates. There were limits even when nationalism managed to trump parliamentary prerogatives with the military budgets. Funding for the army was done not in perpetuity, but on a seven year basis. An Äternat (eternal budget) was something Bismarck and other chancellors dreamed of, but recognized was an impossible goal given that the Reichstag would never give up its best political card.

Yet the power of the Reichstag over money was only the most palpable example of its role within the Kaiserreich. It could and did pass legislation on various issues. Legislative battles were not entirely the results of conflicts between the chancellery and parliament. Recent research by Michael Gross and other historians of the Kulturkampf has shown that Bismarck's anti-Catholic legislation found a good deal of support among the Reichstag's largely protestant liberal Fraktions who continued the Kulturkampf after Bismarck had wanted to end it. Likewise, the Reichstag was essential in allowing the anti-socialist legislation to lapse by refusing to renew it in 1890. The Catholic Centre party also was able to organize something of a loyal opposition among "Third Germany" against the Prussian domination of the federal state. Universal suffrage and national election campaigns exerted a powerful symbolism post-1871. This was one of the factors that transformed the Reichstag from a toothless rubber-stamp into it one of the central symbols of the political ship of state. For all the authoritarian tendencies of the Bismarckian system, the sanctity of the electoral ballot remained sacrosanct. Champions of the vote had an unlikely ally in the German judiciary. While nationalists and older jurists dominated the German legal system there was a strong tradition of a Rechtstaat (society of laws) that meant German judges would side on the rule of law over arbitrary powers of the executive. Various political parties soon learned to push back against any anti-democratic moves by the central and local governments. This became even more salient after the lapsing of the anti-socialist decrees and the explosive growth of the SPD into one of the largest German political parties. The SPD's leaders were obviously not going to be invited into the central government, but they were not a factor that could be ignored by the chancellery either. The mobilization of the SPD's voters showed that there was an increasingly strident component of the German body politic that recognized that the Reichstag was a symbol of national sovereignty. Voting for a party that was largely ideologically-opposed to the existing system was a powerful message German voters sent.

The SPD though was not wholly antithetical to the Kaiserreich as its voting for war credits in 1914 demonstrated. The growth of the Reichstag as a major German institution meant that its deputies became part of the system. The Berlin social scene became one of the unofficial network centers between the Reichstag and various central organs. Tirpitz in particular recognized the potential of the Reichstag as an ally for his expensive naval programs. He often invited deputies, even some from the SPD, to tour shipyards and other naval facilities. The admiral's courting of the Reichstag helped pave the way for the funding of the various naval bills. And although Reichstag deputies could not serve within the central government and retain their seats, they could function as leaders within associational organizations like the Navy League or the German Colonial Society. These organizations not only mobilized the public, but they added a further element of soft power to the Reichstag's various deputies.

Historians are rather divided though on how democratic or parliamentary the Kaiserreich was in 1914. Volker Berghahn, James Retallack, Wolfgang Mommsen, and especially J. C. G. Röhl have argued that the Reichstag still could not transcend the authoritarian nature of the constitution despite its growing powers. The war confirmed the irrelevance of the institution and its dependence upon the good will of the executive according to this critical vein of the historiography. Other historians like Margaret Lavinia Anderson and Thomas Nipperdey are more optimistic about the growth of parliamentarianism within Germany and argue that the chancellery had more or less recognized that the Reichstag was a reality in this system. The war represented less of an example of the fragility of the Reichstag but rather extraordinary circumstances in which the parliamentary body lost power like all of its contemporaries did. Sandwiched between these poles are historians like David Blackbourn who accede to the points of Anderson et al, but whose research has shown that some of the anti-democratic and authoritarian tendencies were found among the Reichstag's deputies. The importance of Reichstag deputies in the various military and nationalist associations demonstrates the extent to which the Reichstag contributed to the authoritarian character of the Kaiserreich. The labyrinthine division of powers and authority granted by the constitution added a further layer of difficulty in determining the level of power the Reichstag actually possessed. Yet it was not some pliant and irrelevant non-entity typical of dictatorships like the Supreme Soviet of the USSR or other the GDR's Volkskammer.

Sources

Berghahn, Volker R. Imperial Germany, 1871-1918: Economy, Society, Culture, and Politics. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005.

Jefferies, Matthew. Contesting the German Empire, 1871-1918. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2008.

_. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

Müller, Sven Oliver, and Cornelius Torp. Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013.