Electoral and Legislative Institutions During the First Wave of Democratization

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

It has long been a commonplace in political science that modern democratization has occurred through three historical waves (Huntington 1991). Subsequently, scholars have become increasingly concerned with democratization as an incomplete, ongoing, and reversible process (Tilly 2007), while indices such as Freedom House and Polity continue to classify regimes in terms of varying mixtures of democratic and non-democratic characteristics. Meanwhile, as the comparative study of democratic institutions has become increasingly sophisticated, it has continued to focus overwhelmingly on the “second” and “third waves,” generally ignoring democracy in the long era preceding the Second World War (Lijphart 2012). That tendency, however, has begun to recede, especially following the publication of Capoccia and Ziblatt’s seminal article “The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies” (2010). The purpose of this panel is to highlight several important contributions to that larger project, all of which apply innovative methods to the study of elections and legislatures during Europe’s “long nineteenth century.” Doing so strengthens our appreciation that simplistic, binary distinctions between regime types need to be disaggregated into individual, coexisting, democratic and non-democratic institutions and practices (Ziblatt 2006).

Democracy’s “first wave” (1820s to 1920s) was characterized in large part by the expansion of the suffrage for legislative elections. For example, universal male suffrage was firmly established in France and Switzerland by 1848; in the 1860s and 1870s, it was introduced in Germany and Spain, while the United States at least formally eliminated racial restrictions on voting; over the 19th century, the United Kingdom gradually reduced property restrictions on the suffrage; and, in the decades leading up to the First World War, countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Finland, and Norway introduced universal male and female suffrage, foreshadowing the more widespread inclusion of women in the 1910s and 1920s. Throughout this period, parties and legislatures experimented with a variety of new practices and organizational forms, as they attempted to reconcile democratic representation with effective legislation and governance.

Much of the recent work on democratic institutions in Europe during the first wave has concentrated on a handful of cases, in particular the French Third Republic (Cirone 2013); Imperial Germany (Leeman and Mares 2014; Mares 2015; Schröder and Manow 2014; Ziblatt 2009); the Weimar Republic (Debus and Hansen 2010); and the United Kingdom (Aidt and Franck 2013; Berlinski and Dewan 2011; Cox 1987). The contributors to this panel add to this growing literature, by delving into understudied cases, forgotten political practices, and underappreciated aspects of democratization. Cirone and Van Coppenolle’s paper, for example, examines lottery-based committee selection in the 19th century, using a micro-level dataset of French deputies, and linking the decline of that formerly commonplace procedure to the rise of cohesive parties in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, and Netherlands. Dewan, Merilainen, and Tukiainen reassess the impact class and social mobility had on voting behavior in the 19th-century United Kingdom, drawing on individual-level voting records. Hansen utilizes a complete dataset of speeches to the 1848-1849 Danish Constituent Assembly to assess conflict dimensions in the absence of formal parties. Finally, Howe, Szöcsik, and Zuber use the computer-assisted qualitative content analysis of Czech and German party manifestos to assess how the broadening of the suffrage in Imperial Austria effected the relative electoral success of appeals to class, national identity, and policy.

The application of current political scientific research methods to historical cases contributes to comparative democracy in several important ways. First, the prevailing emphasis on the second and third waves ignores a century’s worth of data on democracy and democratization, data that are increasingly accessible thanks to the growing possibilities for digitizing archival sources. Second, this line of research leads us to refine those methods in the face of issues, institutions, and practices characteristic of an earlier era. Third, it allows us to examine the impact of democratic institutions within polities that are not yet fully democratic, in a context where political democracy is not yet viewed as the global norm. Fourth, disaggregating institutions and practices helps us determine which mixtures of democratic and non-democratic features are stable over time, and which ones promote or hinder full democratization. Finally, this research forces us to reconsider democratic practices that have fallen into disuse, while requiring us to take a fresh look at institutions, such as consolidated party systems, that we tend to take for granted when studying late-20th and early-21st century democracy.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 15: European Politics and Society

Chair

• Pavithra Suryanarayan Johns Hopkins University

Discussants

• Henry Thomson Arizona State University

• Julian Gordon Waller George Washington University

Individual Presentations

• Bridging the Gap: Lottery-Based Procedures in Early Parliamentarization - Alexandra Cirone, Cornell University; Brenda Van Coppenolle, Leiden University

• Conflict Dimensions in Mid-19th Century European Parliamentary Bodies - Martin Ejnar Hansen, Brunel University London; Robert Klemmensen, University of Southern Denmark

• The Electoral Mobilization of Social Identities in Imperial Austria - Philip James Howe, Adrian College; Edina Szöcsik; Christina Isabel Zuber, University of Konstanz

• Class, Social Mobility, and Voting in the 19th Century - Jaakko Meriläinen, Stockholm University; Torun Dewan, London School of Economics; Janne Tukiainen, VATT