Universal, Unequal Suffrage: Authoritarian Vote-Seat Malapportionment in the 1907 Austrian Electoral Reform

Wakounig, M. and Beham, P. "Transgressing Boundaries: Humanities in Flux." (Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2013)

29 Pages Posted: 19 Feb 2013 Last revised: 21 Apr 2015

See all articles by Henry Thomson

Henry Thomson

Arizona State University; Arizona State University (ASU) - Center for the Study of Economic Liberty

Date Written: February 19, 2013

Abstract

Leaders of undemocratic regimes allow elections in order to co-opt powerful groups in society and secure their own grip on power. However, they do not allow fair elections. They manipulate the electoral system in order to over-represent the geographic areas, and the groups within them, to whom they wish to allocate political power. This is done via the mechanism of malapportionment, by which electoral districts in the privileged areas are assigned a greater share of legislative seats than their share of the population. Analyzing the introduction of universal male suffrage in Austria in 1907, I show that this reform did not lead to universal, equal suffrage and that malapportionment under authoritarian regimes does not run exclusively along an urban-rural cleavage. Instead, reform resulted in an electoral system which perpetuated the under-representation of ethnic minorities in the lower house of the Reichsrat and the over-representation of the rural German-speaking population and urban Polish elites. This solved the regime’s problem of controlling urban unrest by satisfying demands for electoral reform, while at the same time maintaining the predominant political position of German and Polish groups in Cislethania via more subtle manipulation of the electoral system.

Keywords: malapportionment, Austria, electoral systems

Suggested Citation

Thomson, Henry, Universal, Unequal Suffrage: Authoritarian Vote-Seat Malapportionment in the 1907 Austrian Electoral Reform (February 19, 2013). Wakounig, M. and Beham, P. "Transgressing Boundaries: Humanities in Flux." (Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2013), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2220787 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2220787

Henry Thomson (Contact Author)

Arizona State University ( email )

Tempe, AZ
United States

Arizona State University (ASU) - Center for the Study of Economic Liberty

United States

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
123
Abstract Views
1,107
Rank
362,090
PlumX Metrics