The Politics of Sequencing Democratizing Reforms in Austria-Hungary

Why did some European countries democratize suffrage before establishing parliamentary responsible governments, while others followed the reverse path? I approach this question through the study of Austria-Hungary in the period from 1867 to 1914. Two imperial halves operated as largely autonomous political systems with separate parties, parliaments and governments. Yet, they had the same monarch, army, diplomacy, and were deeply economically integrated. Political reforms achieved in one of them regularly inspired demands for similar concessions in the other. Despite this, at the dawn of the Great War, Austria had universal male suffrage, while Hungary had one of the most restricted franchises in Europe. By contrast, Hungarian government had been made responsible to parliamentary majority, while Austrian government depended on the confidence of the Emperor.

I build on the theories emphasizing importance of intra-elite conflicts for democratization, but I show that elite conflicts produce different sequence of democratizing reforms depending on the structure of social cleavages they are embedded in. In Austria, regional and ethnic cleavages split the traditional elites, hampering party consolidation. This resulted in repeated extensions of electoral arena to try and resolve endemic intra-elite conflicts, but it also weakened the parliament. In Hungary ethnic unity facilitated elite cooperation in resisting Habsburg authoritarianism, but the fear of empowering non-Hungarian challengers also precluded suffrage reforms as a way of resolving elite conflicts when they did arise. In turn, these different cleavage structures followed from different manners of originally incorporating the provinces of the two imperial halves under the Habsburg rule.