Jessen & Richter (Eds.) (4 page)

elections and plebiscites actually meant for the people at the time, and

what they meant for the exercise of dictatorial power depended upon spe-

cific historical circumstances.

When it comes to dictatorial means of dominance, many historians as

well as political scientists tend to concentrate on political institutions and

organizations such as the state bureaucracy and the ruling Party, mass

organizations, secret police forces, or mass media. With respect to elec-

tions, this perspective highlights the staging of the polls, the legal frame-

work, the ideological context, the ways to enforce the notorious 99 per

cent turnout, and also the faking of the results. It is in the very nature of

dictatorship that power is concentrated in the political center, and society

is controlled from above. So a top-down perspective on official narratives,

intentions, structures, and practices is self-evident and has been the subject

of several studies. However, we also need a bottom-up perspective. Al-

though the political agency of individual citizens—not to mention the

agency of collective actors—under dictatorial auspices was extremely re-

stricted, it was not meaningless. In our case, with respect to voting, every

single citizen to some degree was actively involved in a political ritual—

they had to act or react, to take part, or indeed refuse to do so. What ex-

actly does the overwhelming participation on polling day indicate? Compli-

ance? Resignation? Indifference? How did voters use the remaining scope

to act—staying away from the polling station for instance, or using the

voting booth or actively taking part in the nomination process? Even un-

der a dictatorship elections were a ritual of interaction between state and

society. The perceptions, options, and strategies of voters are of crucial

importance if we are to try to estimate the impact of the whole voting

process on the stability and legitimacy of the regime. A comprehensive

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picture needs a combination of top-down and bottom-up research ap-

proaches.

Although the outcome of elections and plebiscites in a non-democratic

environment rarely caused any surprise, historical reconstruction has to

look below the surface. Analytically it is useful to distinguish between at

least three general dimensions: firstly the institutional sphere of dictatorial

domination. This dimension obviously not only includes legally defined

bodies such as parliament, government, parties or
national fronts
, as well as the state administration, regulations on how to nominate candidates, the

electoral law, and the organizations and bodies directly involved in the

electoral process. It also includes the extra-legal, informal structures of

dominance—the Communist Party for instance, claiming supremacy over

all other political actors—politically controlled mass media, and secret

police forces all belong to this dimension. This institutional sphere of

“polity” usually attracts the greatest amount of attention from researchers

when it comes to elections in dictatorships.

Secondly, we have to deal with dictatorial dominance as social practice.

When thousands of Party activists went from door to door during a can-

vassing campaign, talking to virtually every potential voter, trying to per-

suade him or her, harassing him or her to go to the polls, elections as an

instrument of exercising power materialized on the level of face-to-face

interaction. The same occurred at pre-election meetings and of course

during the act of voting itself. In many cases these were highly ritualized

acts of communication, but ritualized interaction is also meaningful. Face-

to-face contact with a representative of the ruling Party may foster obedi-

ence, but could also be an opportunity to grumble, complain, or even to

bargain. Election campaigns and the polls themselves produced thousands

and thousands of occasions of direct social interaction and communica-

tion—we need to distinguish this process analytically from the institutional

structure.

A third dimension is that of the “culture of voting” in a dictatorial envi-

ronment. In their plea for an “historical ethnography of voting”, Romain

Bertrand and his co-authors in 2007 put forward the argument that the

institutionalization of the secret ballot produced different “cultures of

voting” (Bertrand et al., 2007). They did not bother about elections in dic-

tatorships, which typically did not have a secret ballot, but they also made

an interesting point for our case. The question of the cultural dimension

leads to the issue of the meanings different actors ascribe to the electoral

18

R A L P H J E S S E N A N D H E D W I G R I C H T E R

procedures and to the socio-cultural embeddedness of voting techniques

and practices. Also an election without choice—to take an example—ideal-

ized the isolated, individual, rational citizen, disengaged from loyalty to the

family or local commitments. Irrespective of the manipulative setting,

elections were very modern political technologies which stood in sharp

contrast to more traditional procedures of collective decision making. Also

the meaning and relevance of the
private
and the
public
, of the
secret
and the
visible
were dramatically affected by elections which pretended to be
free
but in reality were strictly under surveillance.

A cultural history perspective on elections in dictatorships also prom-

ises to be a rewarding one because the stability and legitimacy of political

institutions are created not least by symbolic representation (Stollberg-

Rilinger 2005; 2008; Chartier 1988; Vorländer 2005; Biefang 2009). Al-

though historians were inspired by the
cultural turn
of the recent decades, and developed new areas of research within an extended concept of politics as a socially and discursively produced practice, research into elections

has remained relatively untouched by this. At the most one will find exam-

ples in studies on the 18th and 19th century—for example, in the innovative

work of Frank O’Gorman, who investigated the symbolic dimension of

elections in England (O’Gorman 1989, 1992, 2000; see also Vernon 1993;

Bensel 2004). Also inspiring is the work carried out in Early Modern Stud-

ies. In view of the completely different electoral practices in the pre-mod-

ern period, research on this period developed a much broader understand-

ing of the issue, and questions relating to materiality and performance were

integrated into the analysis much earlier (Stollberg-Rilinger 2001). Al-

though cultural history approaches have been employed in the analysis of

elections in the 19th and 20th centuries by authors such as Malcolm Crook

or Thomas Mergel, they have not yet been used to analyze the features of

elections without choice (Crook and Crook 2007; Bensel 2004; Anderson

2000; Kühne 1994; Mergel 2010; 2005).

The advantages of employing a cultural history approach are threefold:

first of all, a “cultural” and “historical-ethnographic” approach can lead to

a certain level of “alienation”. Thus, rather than simply judging elections

held in dictatorships against the western-democratic standard paradigm,

and thereby condemning them, we are led to question their system-specific

function and the significance ascribed to them by the different participat-

ing actors. This draws attention to the question as to whether all elections,

including those taking place within a liberal-democratic context, in fact

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always contain elements of discipline. Thus, individual, secret ballots can

be seen as de-legitimizing alternative forms of collective political expres-

sion such as demonstrations, petitions, street protests, or the traditional

charivari (Bertrand et al., 2007b, 12). A more detached approach also pro-

vokes the question as to why dictators, who believed in a whole new world,

fell back on the western-democratic
Australian Ballot
, adopting its procedures such as uniform ballot papers, ballot boxes, voting booths etc., and

did not use corporate forms of voting systems or indeed open acclamation.

These considerations lead to the second point in favor of using a cul-

tural history approach, namely that it facilitates the assessing of elections

and voting from the viewpoint of performance and materiality. The fact

that on election day almost one hundred per cent of the electorate made

their way to the polls was a powerful symbol of consensus and demonstra-

tive proof of loyalty, even if many only did so reluctantly and involuntarily.

The interpretation of elections as a ritual opens up a view on the way

dictatorial systems function because “rituals assert normative standards of

belief and behavior and thus the boundaries of what may be deemed so-

cially and politically acceptable” (O’Gorman 2000, 164; see also Edelman

1964; Land 1981; Rytlewski and Kraa 1987; Bizeul 2000; Crewe 2006).

Looking at it in terms of materiality, however, it becomes clear to what

extent power is exercised, distributed or denied by means of ballot papers

and the ballot box. Ballot papers or voting booths may indeed be con-

structed by people and represent social value systems, but to refer to

Latour’s terminology, they can also be analyzed as “actants”, which

develop their own dynamics (Latour 1995, 14; see also Schatzki 2003, 89).

The inclusion of materiality and technology into the approach can be

linked to Foucault’s concept of power, which then leads to the third point

in favor of a cultural history approach. As with Latour, in Foucault’s theory

material objects are allocated a role in social practices: architecture, ma-

chines, bodies, technology or the gaze can create power relations (Foucault

1977). This complex concept of power also includes the observation of

interaction from
above
and
below
. Therefore, power is to be interpreted as social interactions among those who rule, as well as between the rulers and

the ruled, between discourses, objects and structures. For all the impor-

tance that political pressure and coercion played in the elections in dicta-

torships, they were productions whose impact was due to the fact that all