Centre – Call for Papers

Issue Theme: The gray zone of democracy. Elections between legality and legitimacy in Central Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries

Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2018

Contact: stred@mua.cas.cz

Publication languages: Czech, English, German

Journal Website:
http://www.mua.cas.cz/cs/stred-centre-casopis-pro-mezioborova-studia-stredni-evropy-19-a-20-stoleti-113

Full text of the journal: http://www.ceeol.com

Abstracts: http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl

Indexing: ERIH+, SCOPUS, CEEEOL, CEJSH

The democratization of European societies in the 19th and 20th centuries resulted in more than just expanded suffrage and stronger parliamentary institutions. The significance of the formal procedures connected to the implementation of expanded suffrage and the strategies for convincing the public that individual political camps used also changed. The rivalry inherent in the struggle over elections went beyond basic competition between political programs and into a „gray zone“ of practices, which may have been legal or at least immune from prosecution, but were nevertheless on the verge of legtitimacy. The strategies for maximizing electoral victories led to various types of campaigns – negative, of disinformation, and otherwise manipulative – as well as to backroom pressures to use election procedures to one’s advantage or to subsequent efforts to discredit the election results.
On the background of the speeches made during the election struggle, we can observe political behind-the-scenes and public debates over the definition of the standards of the voting rights law, deliberations about the electoral system, the usage of election geometry, gerrymandering , efforts to limit suffrage (determined by sex, age, education, or voters’ property ownership), and to use or abuse the verification procedures that were put in place due to the controversial tools used during election campaigns. All of these important areas of study contain a wide spectrum of separate topics, which will be the subject of the next issue of Střed/Centre. For the current issue, the editors welcome papers primarily on the transformation of election campaigns, the questioning of election results, as well as on gerrymandering , the targeted usage of voting systems and procedures, and on the verification of parliamentary elections in Central Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.