Date Published:
Feb 1, 2009
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.
Notes:
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