In a recent journal article published in German History, LSE professor Oliver Volckart considers how the bandwagon effect might explain the formation and dissolution of consensus in Holy Roman Empire policymaking. Focusing on the decision-making procedures of imperial diets, Volckart argues that consensus formed in superficial ways. Often, this meant that consensus around disputed issues dissolved, and policy measures did not establish long-lasting roots.
Among historians of the Holy Roman Empire there is agreement that consensus between the many estates within the empire was central to policymaking. For that reason, episodes of broken consensus offer glimpses into the political inner workings of the Empire. Imperial estates divided into three groups, called colleges, the elector, princes, and cities colleges. Together, the three colleges formed the deliberative body of the Holy Roman Empire, The Imperial Diet. Using the polling minutes of the princes’ college from the Diet of Augsburg of 1555, Volckart examines the way in which the college’s voting procedures fostered a superficial consensus among the estates.
The paper posits that consensus over disputed issues, at times, formed through a bandwagon effect. Since voting proceeded sequentially from the estate with the highest status to the lowest status, lower estates might choose to jump on the bandwagon by joining a preceding voter. Primary source accounts support Volckart’s position that the bandwagon effect might have been at play. One delegate of an Imperial Diet wrote that the system of voting allowed ‘one estate to join another or to inform and guide him.’
To test how the bandwagon effect operated within the Imperial Diet, the author runs a fixed-effects fractional probit model that established links between diverse characteristics of the estates and their votes. The intuition underlying the regression is that economic, geographic, and social characteristics that are unrelated to the political issues at hand but still have a systematic influence on voting represent the effect of extraneous motives. The paper used panel data from up to 45 estates over 46 rounds of polling.
The paper’s results reveal that the rank that a member of the princes’ college held did not have any significant influence on his propensity to imitate earlier voters. However, how wealthy an estate was played a vital role. The greater the revenue of an estate was the less inclined its members of the princes’ college were to vote like someone higher up in status. Economically weaker estates were less independent-minded. Volckart concluded that:
“many members of the college systematically failed to consider the issues at hand on their own merit. Rather, they were swayed by factors such as how much more revenue other princes received, by how far away they lived and by their personal status or family background.”
The paper elegantly blends early modern historical sources and modern empirics. Its conclusions prove that the voting procedure of the Imperial Diet facilitated the formation of consensus but did so on undeniably weak grounds.
Read the article in full here: Oliver Volckart, “Voting like Your Betters: The Bandwagon Effect in the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire”, German History, Volume 41, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 1–20,
