IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v103y2009i01p1-21_09.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Shaping Democratic Practice and the Causes of Electoral Fraud: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Germany

Author

Listed:
  • ZIBLATT, DANIEL

Abstract

Why is there so much alleged electoral fraud in new democracies? Most scholarship focuses on the proximate cause of electoral competition. This article proposes a different answer by constructing and analyzing an original data set drawn from the German parliament's own voluminous record of election disputes for every parliamentary election in the life of Imperial Germany (1871–1912) after its adoption of universal male suffrage in 1871. The article analyzes the election of over 5,000 parliamentary seats to identify where and why elections were disputed as a result of “election misconduct.” The empirical analysis demonstrates that electoral fraud's incidence is significantly related to a society's level of inequality in landholding, a major source of wealth, power, and prestige in this period. After weighing the importance of two different causal mechanisms, the article concludes that socioeconomic inequality, by making elections endogenous to preexisting social power, can be a major and underappreciated barrier to the long-term process of democratization even after the “choice” of formally democratic rules.

Suggested Citation

  • Ziblatt, Daniel, 2009. "Shaping Democratic Practice and the Causes of Electoral Fraud: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Germany," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 103(1), pages 1-21, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:103:y:2009:i:01:p:1-21_09
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003055409090042/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Michael Albertus & Victor Gay, 2017. "Unlikely Democrats: Economic Elite Uncertainty under Dictatorship and Support for Democratization," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 61(3), pages 624-641, July.
    2. Florian M. Hollenbach, 2021. "Elite interests and public spending: Evidence from Prussian cities," The Review of International Organizations, Springer, vol. 16(1), pages 189-211, January.
    3. Buggle, Johannes C., 2016. "Law and social capital: Evidence from the Code Napoleon in Germany," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 87(C), pages 148-175.
    4. DUBE MAKUWERERE Langton, 2020. "Autocracy, Institutional Constraints and Land Expropriation: A Conceptual Analysis of Land Redistribution in Zimbabwe," Journal of Public Administration and Governance, Macrothink Institute, vol. 10(2), pages 327349-3273, December.
    5. Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson, 2017. "The Emergence of Weak, Despotic and Inclusive States," NBER Working Papers 23657, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Fukumoto, Kentaro & Horiuchi, Yusaku, 2011. "Making Outsiders' Votes Count: Detecting Electoral Fraud through a Natural Experiment," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 105(3), pages 586-603, August.
    7. Maja Adena & Ruben Enikolopov & Maria Petrova & Veronica Santarosa & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, 2015. "Radio and the Rise of The Nazis in Prewar Germany," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 130(4), pages 1885-1939.
    8. Koenig, Christoph, 2015. "Competence vs. Loyalty: Political survival and electoral fraud in Russia’s regions 2000–2012," Economic Research Papers 270014, University of Warwick - Department of Economics.
    9. Koenig, Christoph, 2023. "Loose Cannons: War Veterans and the Erosion of Democracy in Weimar Germany," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 83(1), pages 167-202, March.
    10. Jason Seawright, 2016. "The Case for Selecting Cases That Are Deviant or Extreme on the Independent Variable," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 45(3), pages 493-525, August.
    11. Timothy Frye & John Reuter & David Szakonyi, 2012. "Political Machines at Work: Voter Mobilization and Electoral Subversion in the Workplace," HSE Working papers WP BRP 08/PS/2012, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
    12. Tella, Rafael Di & Rotemberg, Julio J., 2018. "Populism and the return of the “Paranoid Style”: Some evidence and a simple model of demand for incompetence as insurance against elite betrayal," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(4), pages 988-1005.
    13. Ingo Rohlfing, 2014. "Comparative Hypothesis Testing Via Process Tracing," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 43(4), pages 606-642, November.
    14. Aidt, T.S. & Jensen, P.S., 2012. "From Open to Secret Ballot: Vote Buying and Modernization," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1221, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    15. Koenig, Christoph, 2019. "Patronage and Election Fraud: Insights from Russia’s Governors 2000–2012," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 433, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    16. Isaías N. Chaves & Leopoldo Fergusson & James A. Robinson, 2009. "He Who Counts Elects: Determinants of Fraud in the 1922 Colombian Presidential Election," NBER Working Papers 15127, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Derek Beach & Rasmus Brun Pedersen, 2018. "Selecting Appropriate Cases When Tracing Causal Mechanisms," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 47(4), pages 837-871, November.
    18. Mvukiyehe, Eric & Samii, Cyrus, 2017. "Promoting Democracy in Fragile States: Field Experimental Evidence from Liberia," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 254-267.
    19. Raphaël Franck, 2018. "Judicial impartiality in politically charged cases," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 29(2), pages 193-229, June.
    20. Derek Beach, 2016. "It's all about mechanisms – what process-tracing case studies should be tracing," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 21(5), pages 463-472, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:103:y:2009:i:01:p:1-21_09. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/psr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.