Complete Reichstag Election Dispute Dataset, 1871-1914

This dataset includes electoral fraud data on every electoral constituency for all thirteen national parliamentary elections in Imperial Germany’s history (between 1871 and 1914). Each constituency-year is coded 1 or 0 depending on whether or not the constituency became the subject of an official investigation for the Reichstag’s Election Investigation Committee. If the committee deemed that the election in a constituency in a particular year was possibly subject to some form of malpractice or fraud and thus needing investigation, the constituency receives a score of 1. If the committee decided that elections in a district in a year did not need investigation, the constituency receives a score of 0. The data also records the gross number of petitioned cases during the entire 1871-1914 period (including multiple investigations of the same seat in a single year) and the net number of seats investigated, excluding the multiple investigations of a single disputed seat within a given year. The source for these scores is the Reichstag Parliamentary Minutes (Stenographische Berichte, 1871-1914) as originally collected for research by Robert Arsenschek