Vote with your feet
Voting with your feet is a saying . It describes situations in which a person's decision can obviously be read from their (possible) movement .
Either she approached a situation (customer in a shop, joining an association) or away from there (migration to the competition, emigration ). Or she deliberately refrained from leaving a situation (remaining in the association despite a scandal, in a country despite poor conditions) or approaching it (demonstration, an election on Sundays).
origin
The phrase goes back to the voting procedure in the ancient Roman Senate. The newly enrolled senate members (conscripti) were not allowed to take part in the discussions of the patrician senate members (patres), but only “vote with their feet” (pedibus in sententiam ire).
The phrase was also used by the Russian communist leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin , who called his multiple exile in Switzerland a vote “with his feet” against the tsar.
Use in connection with the construction of the wall
In the weeks leading up to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, West German journalists and politicians, not without ironic reference to Lenin, described the swelling abandonment of the German Democratic Republic as voting with their feet against the communist regime there .
Individual evidence
- ↑ vote that. Duden .de, accessed on September 20, 2014 .
- ↑ cf. Mommsen, Theodor: Roman history, 1st volume, 2nd book, 1st chapter . tape 1 .
- ↑ Josef Müller-Marein : voting with the feet. Die Zeit , June 21, 1961, accessed on September 20, 2014 .
- ↑ Patrick Major: Panic at the closing of the gate and building the wall. “Flight from the republic” as a symptom of the second Berlin crisis . In: Burghard Ciesla , Michael Lemke, Thomas Lindenberger (Eds.): Die for Berlin? The Berlin crises in 1948: 1958 . Metropol, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-932482-27-1 , p. 222