Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE ELECTORAL POLITICS IN AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME
- 1 Interpreting Wilhelmine Elections
- 2 Antisocialism and Electoral Politics in Regional Perspectivey
- 3 The Liberal Power Monopoly in the Cities of Imperial Germany
- 4 Reichstag Elections in the Kaiserreich
- PART TWO GENDER, IDENTITY, AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
- PART THREE LOCAL DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL CULTURE
- PART FOUR THE NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES
- Index
1 - Interpreting Wilhelmine Elections
National Issues, Fairness Issues, and Electoral Mobilization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE ELECTORAL POLITICS IN AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME
- 1 Interpreting Wilhelmine Elections
- 2 Antisocialism and Electoral Politics in Regional Perspectivey
- 3 The Liberal Power Monopoly in the Cities of Imperial Germany
- 4 Reichstag Elections in the Kaiserreich
- PART TWO GENDER, IDENTITY, AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
- PART THREE LOCAL DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL CULTURE
- PART FOUR THE NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES
- Index
Summary
What were elections about in Wilhelmine Germany? How did the parties fare? And what does this show about the German party system? Addressing these questions, even in a partial way, requires a combination of methodologies. These range from broad national level comparisons, to more detailed analysis of specific campaigns, to the breakdown of results into social-economic categories. Almost invariably, each of these involves complex statistical analysis.
Elections can be interpreted as being about one of three things: power, issues, or representation. How a political party views an election affects its strategy - whether to aim for targeted seats and not to contest others, to aim for the maximum popular vote, or to aim to control specific issues in such a way as to capture particular social groupings. These decisions are conditioned by the political system within which they occur and tend to be interrelated, so that the resulting strategy is a mixture of these elements with some particular weighting. Equally, how a historian views an election determines how the results are measured and evaluated. Like the politician, the historian makes a decision that is conditioned by how he or she views the political system within which the election occurred. There is a different methodology to suit each view of what is important about an election.
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- Information
- Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Modern GermanyNew Perspectives, pp. 17 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992
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