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).

This chapter begins the empirical investigation of the production of electoral irregularities in German elections by analyzing the variation in electoral irregularities perpetrated by employees of the state. Electoral intimidation by state employees was pervasive in German national elections. The majority of the petitions submitted to the electoral commission of the Reichstag invoked electoral irregularities committed by employees of the state (Klein 2003). The ubiquitous presence of state employees as well as the brutal nature of their harassment and intimidation of voters added an unusually harsh character to nineteenth-century German elections. The identities of the employees of the state that supplied electoral services to politicians varied significantly across German regions. In Prussia, Landräte and policemen played a pervasive role in elections. The former cumulated important political responsibilities, serving as both the collectors of taxes (and assessors of tax liabilities) and making decisions on who was conscripted into the Prussian army. In Saxony, a region that experienced very high levels of electoral irregularities, policemen were ubiquitous in elections. By contrast, in southern German states such as Baden or Württemberg, where the electoral intervention by public employees was lower, mayors were the actors who occasionally trespassed against the provisions of the electoral law and engaged in the electoral intimidation of voters.

I begin this chapter by developing a number of hypotheses about the political considerations of politicians and employees of the state, and the incentives for the former to demand and the latter to supply electoral services conflicting with the provisions of the electoral code. In particular, I examine the relationship between political competition and the production of intimidation in German national elections.

In prewar Germany, a silent process of democratization took place during the final decades of the nineteenth century. This process unfolded through a series of piecemeal reforms of the administration of elections that attempted to provide better protection of voter autonomy. Questions about the size of the ballot, the size of the urn, the location of the urn in the voting place, and whether election officials should shake urns before counting ballots carried large political weight. Both opponents and supporters of changes in electoral institutions understood that these micro-regulations in the administration of the electoral process had profound consequences not only for political competition and the relative strength of different parties, but also for more abstract ideals such as electoral freedom.

Empirically, this book examined how this process of electoral reform un- folded in Germany between 1870 and 1912. The adoption of reforms in this electoral authoritarian context resulted from the confluence of two distinct transformations. First, economic changes such as labor scarcity and increases in economic heterogeneity raised the costs of electoral intimidation for private actors. Secondly, in political terms, the rise in strength of parties that lacked access to the repressive state apparatus and to the economic actors with the means to engage in electoral intimidation contributed to an increase in the size of the electoral coalition that supported reforms. The adoption of legislation that protected electoral secrecy, I showed, had important consequences for the rise in political strength of the largest opposition party: the Social Democrats. These reforms also had more indirect consequences for different parties on the right and facilitated the formation of an electoral coalition supporting the adoption of proportional representation.

In what follows, I consider and reflect on the contributions made in this book and their consequences for other cases of democratization. I begin in Section 10.1 by discussing the broader methodological contribution of this study to comparative historical analysis.

In Chapters 1–4, I presented an account of the main forms of electoral irregularities that were present in German elections. The most important actors engaged in the perpetration of electoral intimidation were state employees and private actors. I presented a range of hypotheses about the political factors affecting the candidates' demand for electoral support from employees of the state and private actors. The decisions of state employees and private actors to supply electoral services to candidates were not entirely costless and were constrained by the range of political and economic conditions in a district. In Chapter 2, I developed a number of hypotheses about the most significant constraints on the electoral involvement of state employees and private actors. The actions used by those agents during elections violated a number of provisions of the German electoral law, which provided opportunities for candidates who lost their races to contest the outcome. Many contemporary observers of German electoral practices noted the intense legalism in the contestation of elections.

In this chapter, I subject the hypotheses about the economic and political determinants of electoral irregularities to a quantitative test. The dependent variable for the analysis includes all of the reports of electoral irregularities submitted by the parliamentary commission of the Reichstag (Wahlprüfungs-kommission), whose goal it was to establish the validity of the electoral outcomes. This complete dataset of electoral irregularities in German national elections during the period between 1870 and 1912 can be found in two separate historical sources. A study by Klein includes a collection of this data based on historical records assembled by the electoral commission of the German parliament (Klein 2003: 501–511). More recently, Robert Arsenschek and Dan Ziblatt created a new dataset of electoral irregularities in Imperial Germany that differs only in minor ways from the original data published by Klein (Arsenschek and Ziblatt 2008).

FROM SUFFRAGE EXTENSION TO THE PROTECTION OF VOTERS' AUTONOMY

The process of democratization that unfolded in European countries during the nineteenth century involved multiple dilemmas of institutional design. The first question concerned the scope of political suffrage. The transition from restrictive to extended suffrage took place in different countries either through the adoption of piecemeal changes in the scope of the franchise or through dramatic extensions that enfranchised nearly all citizens. Reforms enacted in Britain exemplify the first approach. There, the expansion of suffrage proceeded gradually. The first Franchise Act, enacted in 1832, extended the scope of suffrage from 5 percent to 7 percent of the population. The second Franchise Act, enacted in 1867, extended the scope of suffrage to 16 percent of the population (Cook 2005: 68). By contrast, both France and Germany adopted electoral reforms expanding the share of the enfranchised population suddenly and dramatically. In Germany, the electoral law adopted in 1870 introduced universal suffrage for men. Similarly, France adopted universal male suffrage in 1799. Although France reverted to censitary voting during the Restoration, it restored full universal suffrage for all male voters in 1848.

A second question on the agenda of democratizing countries concerned the mode of voting. An important dilemma that underpinned electoral reforms throughout the nineteenth century was whether voting should be open or secret. Although secret voting triumphed – an outcome that from the perspective of the twentieth century appears to have been inevitable – its adoption was by no means unambiguous (Buchstein 2000). What is remarkable about nineteenth-century deliberations concerning the adoption of the secret ballot is that significant theoretical and practical ambiguity existed as to whether secret voting provided better protection for voters against intimidation than open voting would. Both methods of voting had prominent defenders at the time, and the political coalitions favoring either secret or open voting were extremely heterogeneous. Opponents of the secret ballot included successors of the Jacobins; conservatives, like Lord Russell and Otto von Bismarck; Catholics, such as Ludwig Windthorst; and liberals, such as John Stuart Mill (Buchstein 2000).