Editor's choice Democracy, extension of suffrage, and redistribution in nineteenth-century Europe

Giovanni B. Pittaluga, Giampiero Cama and Elena Seghezza ()

European Review of Economic History, 2015, vol. 19, issue 4, 317-334

Abstract: The recent literature on democratization has traced this process back to the extension of suffrage. However, democratization concerns different aspects, not only the extension of suffrage, but also the extent of the powers of parliament. These two different dimensions of democracy are interdependent and can even be opposed. We show that the political elite may grant universal suffrage to counter pressure exerted by the bourgeoisie in favor of a widening of the powers of the parliament. By extending suffrage to the masses, the political elite makes it less advantageous for the bourgeoisie to seek a more powerful parliament. However, the entry, even in a parliament without powers, of representatives of the working class leads the political elite to ensure some form of redistribution. The historical experiences of some Western European countries during the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century confirm this thesis.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ereh/hev010 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:ereveh:v:19:y:2015:i:4:p:317-334.

Access Statistics for this article

European Review of Economic History is currently edited by Christopher M. Meissner, Steven Nafziger and Alessandro Nuvolari

More articles in European Review of Economic History from European Historical Economics Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().