Daniel Ziblatt

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

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 parliaments 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 frauds incidence is significantly related to a societys 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.

Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism

List of Figures and Tables ix Preface xi CHAPTER ONE: Introduction: How Nation-States Are Made 1 CHAPTER TWO: The National Critical Juncture: An Overview of the Dynamics of Regionalism and National Unification 18 CHAPTER THREE: The National Moment in Germany: The Dynamics of Regionalism and National Unification, 1834-1871 32 CHAPTER FOUR: The National Moment in Italy: The Dynamics of Regionalism and National Unification, 1815-1860 57 CHAPTER FIVE: From Strong Regional Loyalties to a Unitary System: National Unification by Conquest and the Case of Italy 79 CHAPTER SIX: From Strong Regional Loyalties to a Federal System: National Unification by Negotiation and the Case of Germany 109 CHAPTER SEVEN: Conclusion: The Politics of Federalism and Institution Building in the Nineteenth Century and Beyond 141 APPENDIX A: Prenational German and Italian States, 1850s-1860s 153 APPENDIX B: Origins of Federalism Data on Seventeen Largest West European Nation-States 161 Notes 167 References 201 Index 217

The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies: A New Research Agenda for Europe and Beyond:

This article lays the theoretical and methodological foundations of a new historically minded approach to the comparative study of democratization, centered on the analysis of the creation, development, and interaction of democratic institutions. Historically, democracy did not emerge as a singular coherent whole but rather as a set of different institutions, which resulted from conflicts across multiple lines of social and political cleavage that took place at different moments in time. The theoretical advantage of this approach is illustrated by highlighting the range of new variables that come into focus in explaining democracy’s emergence. Rather than class being the single variable that explains how and why democracy came about, scholars can see how religious conflict, ethnic cleavages, and the diffusion of ideas played a much greater role in Europe’s democratization than has typically been appreciated. Above all, the authors argue that political parties were decisive players in how and why democracy emerged in Europe and should be at the center of future analyses.

The Enduring Indispensability of the Controlled Comparison

Do controlled comparisons still have a place in comparative politics? Long criticized by quantitatively oriented methodologists, this canonical approach has increasingly been critiqued by qualitative methodologists who recommend greater focus on within-case analysis and the confinement of causal explanations to particular cases. Such advice accords with a welcome shift from a combative “tale of two cultures” toward mutual respect for research combining qualitative and quantitative methods in the simultaneous pursuit of internal and external validity. This article argues that controlled comparisons remain indispensable amid this “multimethod turn,” explicating how they too can generate both internal and external validity when their practitioners (a) craft arguments with general variables or mechanisms, (b) seek out representative variation, and (c) select cases that maximize control over alternative explanations. When controlled comparisons meet these standards, they continue to illuminate the world’s great convergences and divergences across nation-states in a manner that no other methods can surpass.

An Institutional Theory of Direct and Indirect Rule

Most governance arrangements involve spatial units with highly unequal powers, for example, a feudal monarchy and its principalities, an empire and its colonies, a formal empire and an informal empire (or sphere of influence), a national government and its subnational entities, or a regional government and its local entities. In this situation, the dominant unit (A) usually enjoys some discretion about how to institutionalize its authority over the subordinate unit (B). An important element of this decision concerns how much authority should be delegated to the weaker unit. The authors simplify this dimension of governance along a continuum of “direct” and “indirect” styles of rule. Why, in some cases, does one find a relatively direct (centralized) system of rule and in others a relatively indirect (decentralized) system of rule? While many factors impinge on this decision, the authors argue that an important and highly persistent factor is the prior level of centralization existing within the subordinate unit. Greater centralization in B is likely to lead to a more indirect form of rule between A and B, all other things being equal. The authors refer to this as an institutional theory of direct/indirect rule. Empirical analyses of this hypothesis are applied to patterns of direct and indirect rule (1) during the age of imperialism and (2) across contemporary nation-states. The article concludes by discussing applications of the theory in a variety of additional settings.

Does Landholding Inequality Block Democratization? A Test of the "Bread and Democracy" Thesis and the Case of Prussia

Recent cross-national studies have returned their attention to the structural determinants of political regimes, highlighting in particular the factor of as a decisive barrier to democratization. This article provides the first systematic test of such hypotheses at the microlevel and proposes a new account of authoritarianisms durability by examining the crucial case of pre–World War I Prussia. The article analyzes the results of a roll-call vote on a watershed piece of legislation that was defeated on the eve of World War I—legislation that would have democratized suffrage rules in Germanys largest state. When examined systematically, this historically and theoretically important vote reveals two surprising lessons: first, landholding inequality undercuts the prospects of democratization even holding income inequality constant. Second, the nature of elite competition and electoral considerations, shaped by the institutional configuration of nondemocratic regimes, can also thwart democratization, even when socioeconomic conditions may appear to make a society ripe for regime change.

An Introduction to Special Issue: The Causes and Consequences of Secret Ballot Reform

This article introduces a collection of papers that explore two understudied but critical questions of enduring concern for the study of democratization. Was the secret ballot driven by the same forces that drove the rise of democracy more generally? Did the secret ballot end electoral fraud, or was its effect merely endogenous to economic modernization more generally? This article provides historical context for the rise of the secret ballot, systematizing some of the complexities and ambiguities of the concept of the “secret ballot” itself. Second, we summarize the approach and some of the main findings of the papers in the volume, offering an outline of the broader lessons that emerge from the papers. Finally, we reflect upon the significance of a historical study of the secret ballot for technological and institutional reforms for contemporary democracy.

Does Decentralisation Make Government More Efficient and Effective

ABSTRACT In this paper we use a broad cross-national sample to test decentralisations relationship with two important indicators of the quality of governance: efficiency and effectiveness. Contrary to much of the conventional wisdom, we find that the effects of decentralisation are minimal when controlling for basic structural variables such as per capita GDP and degree of democracy. In addition we find that different types of decentralisation – fiscal, administrative, and political – have differing and sometimes opposing impacts on the quality of governance. Finally, we find that political decentralisation in particular is associated with higher government efficiency among high GDP per capita countries while it is associated with lower government efficiency among low GDP per capita countries.

Putting Humpty-Dumpty Back Together Again: Communism’s Collapse and the Reconstruction of the East German Ex-Communist Party

The collapse of communism did not follow any single path in east central Europe. In Hungary and Poland, the transition was marked by early negotiations between opposition elites and the ruling Com munist party. In East Germany and Czechoslovakia, the regimes fell victim to a sudden and quick implosion. In Romania and Bulgaria, internal coups replaced the ruling communist elite with other mem bers of the nomenklatura. The transitions away from communist rule diverged from each other in timing, manner, and degree.1 Just as the collapse of communism followed different paths, so too have the former ruling communist organizations of east central Europe. As the ruling parties faced the immediate demise of their regimes, all of them scrambled, trying to find different ways of saving themselves: some remained unabashed Communist parties (the Czech Republic), others aimed to transform themselves completely into Social-Democra tic parties (Poland, Hungary), while still others reconstituted themselves as amalgams of the new and the old (East Germany).2 In the immedi ate aftermath of communisms collapse, it is clear that no single path is inevitable for ex-Communist parties in the postcommunist world. To explain the different paths that each ex-Communist party has followed in the wake of communisms collapse would require an extensive cross-national program of study.3 What I propose to do here is less ambitious but more intensive. This paper explores the impact of new institutions and old legacies on the specific path of adaptation taken by the East German ex-Communist party (Party for

Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe One Hundred Years On

In the twenty years since communism’s collapse, scholars of postcommmunist Central and Eastern Europe have increasingly converged on the insight that long-run continuities reaching back to the nineteenth century are crucial in shaping some of the most important contemporary macro- and micro-level political outcomes in the region. Today’s political cleavages, political discourses, patterns of partisan affiliation, institutional choice, and the quality of democracy itself all appear to correlate to a remarkable degree with patterns from the “deep past.” To date, social scientists, however, have not sufficiently reflected on what might explain this finding and how to study the impact of the general phenomenon of the long-run in the region. This article makes two contributions. First, we contend that in general, long-run continuities may ironically be more important in contexts of discontinuous institutional change such as in Central and Eastern Europe since frequent institutional disjunctures paradoxically open chasms between formal and informal institutions, preventing gradual change and producing patterns of institutional mimicry to cope with institutional ruptures. This insight may travel to other contexts of weak institutionalization. Second, we reject efforts to identify “deep causes” of contemporary outcomes without specifying how intervening events and crises intersect with these longer-run patterns. The article resuscitates Fernand Braudel’s notion of the longue duree to propose a new cumulative approach to the study of the long-run that complicates accounts that too starkly juxtapose precommunist and communist-era “legacies” on the present and argues that scholars should study how these periods reinforce each other and jointly determine contemporary outcomes.