4 - Reichstag Elections in the Kaiserreich

Summary

“Even the vote is a rifle, and ballots are also bullets.” With this martial declaration, the democratic Volkszeitung joined the political campaign in the summer of 1867 preceding elections to the North German Reichstag. In the nineteenth century, election campaigns were evidently considered highly significant. This can be seen clearly in the fact that even election contests in other states were keenly observed and attracted detailed commentary. Obviously the close inherent connection between “representation, political domination, and legitimation” was recognized at the time, to the point where general questions about political participation were broadly perceived as election issues by the contemporaries of Bismarck, Marx, and Nietzsche. Yet the present state of historical research on elections seems to stand in peculiar contrast to this observation. It would be an exaggeration to claim that electoral research today stands at the center of current historical study. To be sure, such research continues to play an important role in debates about the foundations of political authority and the character of political systems in the nineteenth century. Rarely, however, are elections themselves the object of systematic historical research. For this reason, electoral research tends to be associated with the names of individual scholars, who frequently proceed independently of research trends and regularly attract the attention - if not even the admiration - of their colleagues. This was evident following the early death of an especially promising scholar interested in Wilhelmine elections, Stanley Suval.