Preliminary Programme

Pre-World War One-Austria had a rich parliamentary history. While the first, revolutionary phase in 1848/49 ended soon with the forced disbandment of the constitutional diet through the imperial government, the second parliament, established in 1861, survived all internal and external challenges until the end of the old Central European order in 1918. Throughout its existence, this two-chamber parliament underwent major changes. It began as the – at least theoretical – parliamentary body of the whole Habsburg empire. Through the outcome of the war of 1866 and the following compromise with Hungary, it was reduced to represent the Western half of the double monarchy. While the upper house, the House of Lords, consisting of the adult male members of the ruling family, the highest representatives of the catholic and orthodox churches, the largest aristocratic land-owners and members for life appointed by the emperor, survived almost unchanged, the lower house, the House of Representatives, underwent major reforms. It started out as a general diet of the crownlands, its members chosen indirectly through the seventeen provincial diets. Since 1873, the house was elected directly by the voters, but it still resembled to a large extent a pre-democratic assembly of estates. Roughly one-third of the representatives was elected by the large land-owners, one third by the propertied populace of the cities and industrial towns, regulated through a strict tax census, and one third by the farmers and artisans from the smaller towns and villages, also excluding the non-possessing parts of the population. In 1896, a group of representatives was added, elected by universal male suffrage but small enough not to really disturb the established order within the parliament. Since 1907, the whole house was elected by universal male suffrage, by still holding on to the federal structure of the empire and the distinction between urban and rural areas.
These changes in the franchise, as well as the socio-economic developments had major impacts on the make-up of the house. Using the biographic data collected for all 3.500 members of the parliament, these changes will be evaluated on a prosopographic basis. The ultimate goal is a collective biography of the whole parliament. For now, preliminary results mainly for the lower house from 1861-1918 will be presented. Questions asked and hopefully answered regard the changes in the social, educational and professional background of the representatives, their political experience, pre- and post-parliamentary careers or involvement in professional bodies such as chambers of commerce and trade unions, or agricultural and cultural organizations. Hopefully, this will shed a new light on the old Austrian parliament above the traditional approach centered on the nationality question in the multi-ethnic Habsburg empire. (Show less)

From place of discussion the Hungarian Parliament became a place of work by the end of the 19th century. Instead of plenary sessions, decisions and laws were made behind closed doors in committees. Moreover, while plenary sessions resounded with scandals sparked off by the opposition, codification continued in the committees almost undisturbed.
This ambivalent situation helps to understand why contemporaries could speak about the Parliament simultaneously as a circus, a theatre (where the politicians intrigue) or as a law-factory and a voting machine.
The above mentioned institutional change „created” two types of professional politicians within the mass of MPs who practised politics as an avocation (part-time job).
(1) After the Austro–Hungarian Compromise of 1867, a fevered codification started, so the special committees became the most important forums of decision-making in the Parliament, where parties delegated their experts of a given problem.
(2) On the other hand, because of the Hungarian dominant party system the opposition parties weakened so their MPs could realise their ambitions by staging corruption scandals against the governments and by obstructing the legislative work. At the turn of the century we can find in the Hungarian Parliament several opposition representatives who voiced loud popular democratic slogans but were interested only in building their own career. (Show less)

The contribution aims to show that by the 1880s the modern parties (Liberals and Conservatives) are formed as patronage parties in Romania. Their acceptance as legitimate electoral institutions capable of governing is closely linked to their behavior as patronage. Parties as parties (not as ‘factions’ anymore) are accepted because they exist through patronage, it is their purpose and condition of existence. The patronage is both selective distribution of resources and means of production of consensus between the two rivals-partners and the limited electorate (both parties share the state and its functions) (Shefter. 1993). This contribution holds that state bureaucracy is not autonomous, but it is created by the two political parties and is subordinated to them.
The re-election percentage of the members of parliament is very high, but the Liberals and Conservatives do not seek for massive electoral mobilization, and they do not infringe on each other’s rival electorate. The paper thus inquires on the reasons for the hyper-ideologization of the Romanian public and political life, and the very low effective mobilization throughout the period 1866-1914. The paper aims to show that both the Liberals and the Conservatives share the same view on representation and the nature of the parliamentarian. National representation is the prerogative of a political class whose competence justifies its own independence from its constituents and the ‘people’. One must be able to become an MP. It is representation-as-mandate which is at work in the Romanian parliament and must legitimize the exercise of political power (Rosanvallon. 1998).
The analysis is based primarily on the reports of the prefects and police on the parliamentary elections, the press and the parliamentary archives. This contribution is part of a wider inquiry into the nature of the political regime of Romania from 1866 to 1914, the formation of modern political parties, the degree of 'politicization' of the electorate and the ‘professionalization’ of politics. (Show less)

The 1867 Compromise brought to Hungary both the resuming of the parliamentary activity, and the widening of the selection ground for the nation’s representatives, as a result of the Transylvanian MPs entering the Budapest Parliament. Thus, the political elite of this province was integrated into the one from Hungary and what differences might have initially existed slowly faded along the generations that succeeded until the Great War. The low historiographical interest shown so far towards some of the issues circumscribed by this topic, together with the promising perspective of a large scale prosopographical research (over 800 elite members) represented the two main reasons for approaching the subject.
Our paper aims at analyzing the composition and the peculiarities of the parliamentary elite from Transylvania compared to the one from Eastern Hungary (Banat and the so called Partium), along the entire timeframe of the dualism, in an attempt to identify the initial similarities and differences along with the changes brought in by the generation shifts. Social origin and wealth, ethnicity, denomination, geographical area of extraction, intellectual formation and career paths are the main aspects touched by our prosopographic inquiry. In both areas, the representatives’ body was mainly composed by noblemen, although at the beginning of the 20th century one can distinguish an obvious infusion of homines novi – bourgeois (parlor pinks included) and gentry descendants who became bureaucrats. Due mainly to the sources’ parsimony, the relation between the population’s ethnical and confessional structure (the ethnic differentiation and denominational fragmentation indexes), the electors’ body composition and the parliamentary elite membership represented until now an under-researched topic, a reason for us to pay special attention to it. The presence of MPs residing in other parts of Hungary, indicating an electoral algorithm imposed from the capital, can be easily traced in both areas, although it seems to be a little more accentuated in the South-Eastern counties (Banat). As for the intellectual formation and cursus honorum, the particular situation of Transylvania before 1867 imposes a comparative and diachronic analysis, in order to highlight the reorientation of the elite generations which made the Hungarians to be perceived as “a nation of jurists.”
(Show less)