Ethnicity and Regionalism in the Imperial Austrian Party System, 1867-1914

This paper examines the relationships between ethnicity, regionalism, and other societal cleavages in explaining parliamentary elections and behavior in Imperial Austria from 1867 to 1914. A comparative analysis of demographically varied districts under progressive expansion of the suffrage reveals that ethnic identity was by no means the overwhelming determinant of electoral choices, as revealed by patterns of electoral participation, strategic voting on the district level, violations of the “M+1 Rule,” the distribution of votes between 1st-place, 2nd-place, etc. candidates, and support for multi-ethnic parties. Furthermore, a plausible claim can be made that voting across ethnic lines was commonplace. Regarding the Austrian party system, politics was a highly local affair rather than a war between unified nationalist camps, and party system cleavages reflected the full array of societal interests, not merely ethnicity. The extreme localism of Austrian parties resulted from very small parties’ ability to strategically concentrate their support more effectively than their larger counterparts. Further, the hyper-fragmentation of the party system that resulted was not unique to Austria at the time, and can be attributed to a lack of incentives for party system consolidation rather than to ethnicity as such. This in turn reflected a larger political game in which a lack of formal government accountability combined with specific rules of parliamentary procedure to encourage obstructionism. Although obstructionism regularly undermined normal legislative activity, it simultaneously served as an informal minority veto while ensuring that the significant legislation that did get passed had the support of a broad, multi-ethnic majority, thereby giving policy-making a more consensual character. The surprising lesson is that ethnic group politics, even in a particularly unlikely case such as Austria-Hungary, can be effectively steered in constructive directions by institutional means.