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Const Polit Econ (2009) 20:160176
DOI 10.1007/s10602-008-9058-0
ORIGINAL PAPER
Dalibor Roh
Published online: 22 August 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract In this paper, we seek to identify causes of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We note that great salience was attached to issues of self-governance and autonomy of the numerous ethnic groups living within the Empire. From a public choice perspective, the Empire was an over-centralised state and there were clear gains from federalising it. However, such federalisation was not feasible because of the collective action problem arising in bargaining with the central government. Furthermore, the move towards the war economy and the empowerment of the executive state provided the last drop leading to the exit of ethnic minorities from the monarchy and to the ultimate demise of the Empire.
Keywords Austro-Hungarian Empire Centralisation Ethnic fractionalisation
Collective action problem
JEL Classication D74 D72 N43 N44
1 Introduction
Why did the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrate? Was it simply because of external pressures related to the military defeat in World War I or was it because of deeper institutional problems of the dual monarchy? So far, this question has been investigated mostly by historians.1 Nevertheless, we believe that a rational choice-based perspective can shed a new light on the issue and can help us better
1 See, e.g., Stadler (1968), Sked (1981) or Gerschenkron (1977).
D. Roh (&)
St Antonys College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6JF, UK e-mail: [email protected]
Why did the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapse? A public choice perspective
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Why did the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapse? 161
understand the nature of political processes which were taking place in the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy.
This paper touches partly upon the circumstances of democratisation in the Austrian part of the Empire, in which universal male suffrage was introduced in 1906. Most importantly, we seek to clarify why Austrian democracy did not consolidate. One of the reasons has to do with the fact that democratisation as such had not addressed the most salient issue of the public spherethe problem of relations between different nationalities within the Empire. In addition to that, the number of different ethnic group in Austrian politics was trapped in a collective action problem. Specically, the structure of the bargaining processes within...