The Elections Cartel in Regierungsbezirk Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), 1898–1903: Ethnic Rivalry, Agrarianism, and “Practicing Democracy”

Abstract

In debates on the nature and degree of democratization in the Kaiserreich, the dynamics of rural politics have received perhaps less attention than they merit. Indeed, though the picture is more nuanced now, for a long period the ability of rural elites to dominate nonelites (a core aspect of these dynamics) was simply assumed, as was the relationship of this dominance to Germany's troubled democratization. In his 1943 workBread and Democracy in Germany, for example, Alexander Gerschenkron blamed Germany's entrenched and elitist aristocracy for this trait of bullying voters into antidemocratic politics spanning from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich. More subtly, the landmark 1966 study of Barrington Moore, Jr. noted the potential for an alliance between entrenched aristocracies and small peasantries, with each as reservoirs for antidemocratic (and potentially fascist) sentiment in several countries, with obvious application to the German case as well.