There are some member states of the Confederation for which this is the case. There are others which are radically democratic and others which are corporate dictatorships etc.
All this is important on the local level, and thus of course carries weight on the Confederation level, but there is no standard of nobility. There are representatives from each member-state, which may be, according to the structure of those, nobles, but there is no recognized nobility on the interstellar level.
It is more akin to the UN than to any single nation-state today. Representatives are selected by local governments as they see fit, be they democracies, aristocracies or monarchies.
Yes, but you don't have to, and neither is there any strong evidence that feudal or otherwise hereditary structures are prevalent.
I would actually, if I had to compare them to something, compare the intra-party elections to those in China or the later Soviet Union. Or you could even take a party in a democratic country as an analogy, for the sake of that ignoring its role in a larger system.
That is a totally different thing than the property (in this case equalling land) of nobles. Furthermore, don't go assuming that what holds true for the US is equally true for other countries. Most members of the German parliament are not millionaires (though entering parliament confers a certain wealth in itself) and definitely don't generally come from rich families.
Ex-Chancellor Schröder was born into poverty, started out as a worker and a shop clerk, and clawed his way to higher education and eventual political career. Chancellor Merkel is the daughter of a middle-class pastor. Ex-Chancellor Kohl grew up as the son of a low-tier civil servant etc.
I doubt it. It's immaterial to the Traveller discussion, but in the German parliaments you will generally find teachers, professors, lawyers and civil servants.
I actually have no idea about the situation in the US, but here, the "dynastic" factor simply isn't there. Maybe that has something to do with the German political system being radically shaken up several times in the last 200 years, while the US political system developed and matured quite continously. Maybe it is also important that the SPD was such a steady factor in German politics.
Oh, that's absolutely true. But that doesn't make them a nobility in any way I would define the term. There is no link of (landed) property and power, there is no hereditary system of power in place, there is no distinction by blood to 'commoners'. It can be called an oligarchy, a party bureaucracy etc.
Suitable analogies would rather be the Chinese systems, both modern and pre-modern, or the Soviet system, as mentioned above.
Of course analogies only go so far. Compared to those, the Solomani are a lot more heterogenous and have much stronger federal elements.
A lot higher, of course, at 78 percent.
50 percent would be seen as some kind of catastrophe of the system, I guess. Even the 78 percent are an all-time low.
No... she wasn't. Frankly, you seem to have a somewhat simplified picture of her biography and of the GDR political system. Their system of dealing with dissenting political views was not based on forcing them into the SED, but to allow "independent" parties, which were kept irrelevant by election manipulation.
This is not relevant to Merkel, as she only became actively involved with politics in 1989. As the daughter of a clergyman and as a christian, she was of course deemed politically unreliable before. She was an active member of the FDJ, the youth organization of the GDR, but she was mistrusted for her dissenting views. She was thus neither total conformist nor rebel.
In comparison to the Solomani situation: Party membership was not universal, nor of course was it coupled to "racial" attributes. There was a lot less diversity on the governmental level.
The Solomani party is both more and less than the political organizations in contemporary one-party-states are. But it is not a system of nobility.
Regards,
Tobias
