Together with Phil Howe (Adrian College) and Edina Szöcsik (University of Basel), this project studies electoral mobilisation in the Western (‘Austrian’) part of the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire between 1897 and 1911. The project has two goals: (1) to analyse the emergence, positioning and success of political parties in a democratizing multinational state and (2) to determine the circumstances in which nationalist mobilization dominates, given multiple alternative social identity categories parties could and did appeal to. The project also contributes the Habsburg Manifesto Data, consisting in a collection of election manifestos and party programmes of Czech and German historical political parties which were content analysed following standard practice in research on contemporary parties.
A first article (published in Comparative Political Studies) investigates whether nationalists succeeded through policy promises or identity appeal in Imperial Austria's first full-male suffrage elections in 1907. We find that group appeals to the nation and promises to improve its political and cultural status resonate very well with agricultural workers, whose economic sector was declining, but not with industrial workers, whose sector was on the rise. By contrast, offering social policy helps nationalists among industrial workers, but less clearly so among agricultural workers. This article shows that nationalist mobilization is not a mere distraction from class politics; rather, the politics of nationalism, class, and status are closely intertwined. The electoral and administrative historical data used, as well as a selection of the Habsburg manifesto data for 1907 is available from the Harvard dataverse.
A second article (published in Party Politics) studies the formation of cleavages across four elections held between 1897 and 1911, thereby adding evidence on "Lipset and Rokkan's missing case" (they mention, but do not analyse Imperial Austria in their seminal work on cleavage formation). Our results show that Lipset and Rokkan's cleavages also fit politics in the later Habsburg Empire. We use this article to present the full Habsburg Manifesto Dataset (HMD) covering electoral manifestos and party programmes across four elections. The HMD data is available from the Harvard dataverse and we will also create a repository for all the historical party documents. If you would like to get access to party documents in the mean time, feel free to send an email to Christina.