7 - Labor Scarcity, Rural Inequality, and Electoral Reforms: The Determinants of Electoral Reform in the Prussian Electoral System

Summary

Efforts to reform electoral institutions and reduce opportunities for political intimidation were not confined to national elections only; they were also on the agenda of subnational parliaments throughout the period until World War I. Electoral rules differed significantly across German regions (Mares and Queralt 2014). Many regions had much more restrictive suffrage rules than those in place at the national level. In these electoral systems, political efforts to end opportunities for electoral intimidation and provide stronger guarantees for voters' political autonomy went hand in hand with efforts to reform other dimensions of the electoral system. These included changes in the method of voting (from secret voting to open voting) and efforts to replace indirect voting with direct voting.

In this chapter, I examine political conflicts over the adoption of electoral reforms aiming to reduce opportunities for electoral intimidation in Prussia. Prussia was the largest state of the German Empire, and it comprised nearly two-thirds of the territory of Imperial Germany. Proposals to reform the electoral system along the dimensions discussed above were on the agenda of the Prussian lower house beginning in 1872. This chapter examines a quantitative analysis of the roll call votes on a subset of such bills in order to understand the economic and political determinants of support for changes in electoral rules and the composition of the political coalitions supporting reforms.

The study of electoral reforms in Prussia provides us with an ideal opportunity to reevaluate one of the most prominent explanations of democratization, which stresses the importance of rural inequality as an obstacle to electoral reform. Beginning with Alexander Gerschenkron and Barrington Moore, accounts of Germany's Sonderweg have invoked rural inequality as a factor that inhibited the adoption of democratic reforms (Gerschenkron 1946; Moore 1966). This explanation dovetails with recent theoretical accounts of democratization that emphasize how inequalities in the distribution of fixed assets act as barriers to democratic reforms (Acemoglu and Robison 2000; Boix 2003).