Civil Law and Suffrage Organization, A Natural Experiment Approach

• In Event: From Past to Present: Women’s Political Mobilization and its Policy Impact

Abstract

This paper challenges T.H. Marshall's classic assertion that civil citizenship gives way to political citizenship. It provides evidence that the introduction of the French Code Civil--celebrated as the progenitor of civil liberalism in Europe, constrained, rather than facilitated, women's mobilization for political rights in Germany (and their broader political participation across Europe). It further develops a theoretical argument suggesting that the form of family hierarchy instantiated by civil law, whether it favors husbands or fathers, drives divergent patterns of women's political empowerment and especially the likelihood that they will mobilize for suffrage. When civil law creates hierarchies between husbands and wives, what I call viriarchy, it is less likely that women will mobilize politically. I test this theory with novel primary source data collected on women's suffrage organizations in Germany in the early 20th century by exploiting a natural experiment that occurred nearly a century earlier in the pre-unified German territories; a critical juncture with enduring influence on civil and political development. During the Napoleonic wars some, but not all, German territories were forcefully ``treated'' with French viriarchal civil law when Napoleon imposed the French Code Civil on conquered territories. The analysis shows that the prevalence of women's suffrage mobilization was significantly lower in areas forced to adopt the Code Civil than elsewhere in Germany. I additionally demonstrate using cross-national data that the negative influence of the Code Civil on women's political participation generalizes across Europe. This relationship is robust to a two-stage least squared regression in which civil law similarity to the French Code is instrumented by the degree of French intervention in a country during the Napoleonic wars.

Author

• Carissa L. Tudor, Princeton University