In this first part of the book, the focus will be on the individual parties, or groups of parties, and the long-term trends in voting patterns relating to them. Each chapter will contain an overview of electoral support for the party throughout the history of the empire; a consideration of the fluctuation of voters between that party and the others – always including among them the “parties” of the non-voters and the net new voters; a discussion of the confessional bases of support; and a presentation of the figures from the Wilhelmine era on class and confession. Although the overall structure of each chapter will stay the same, the specific results presented, the order of their presentation, and the discussion of their implications will differ slightly, taking into account the differing questions posed by the scholarly literature on each of the parties.

An ascendant party

Of all the political parties in Imperial Germany, the Social Democrats had the most dramatic electoral history. An insignificant splinter group – actually, two insignificant splinter parties – at the first elections in 1871, the Social Democrats received more votes than any other party twenty years later in the general elections of 1890. In 1912, at the last prewar elections, more than one voter in three cast his ballot for the SPD, which thus received more votes than any two other parties combined. Yet the history of the rise of the labor movement in German politics is far more dramatic than a bald recitation of the figures would imply.