The study analyses the social background of parliamentary candidates of Pest-Buda (and later, after 1873, Budapest) as well as their integration into the local and national political elite between the 1865 and the 1887 elections at the beginning of the Dualist Era in Hungary. The representatives and candidates under scrutiny are divided into two groups: members of the political elite on a national scale and public figures of local (district or municipal) significance. In this vein, the study examines whether candidates were able to achieve a political career on a national level regardless of their constituency affiliation, or did they remain anchored in the local community.Based on the candidate profiles, the municipal elections in the early Dualist Era can be divided into two distinct phases. In 1865 and 1869 candidates are more commonly nominated according to the expectations of mainstream politics, that is, according to their stance on the 1867 Compromise. As the establishment began to stabilise, however, other factors emerged. It became increasingly customary, for example, that certain candidates were nominated because of their ability to articulate the interests either of a district or of a professional or economic group. At the same time, the cultural and educational expectations from the candidate remained constant and so did that of their declared loyalty to the interests of the Hungarian nation – be that their participation in the 1848 revolution or identifying with the Hungarian national agenda of the age – and the ability to speak Hungarian. Besides these criteria it was an asset if the candidate came from county nobility (thus indirectly from national politics) or from among Buda/Pest burghers of local prominence: this was the prerequisite of successful election results in nearly all cases. The highest chance to win, however, was in the hands of those pro-government candidates who were members of both the national and the local Budapest political elite, but at the same time did not fail to maintain a strong negotiating power and advocacy on the constituency level.

Nincs absztrakt.

The study sheds light on some of the contradictions in the perceptions of electoral fraud in the Age of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy through a civil suit conducted in 1910 at the Royal Court of Budapest. In the focus of the lawsuit stood the dividing line between legitimate and illegitimate campaign expenditure and the three verdicts clearly suggest that contemporary judiciary practice had no unambiguous stance concerning the issue. Budapest attorney Manó Ság was the plaintiff, and Protestant pastor József Irsay the defendant. Both held Independence Party mandates in the house of representatives in the electoral cycle ending in 1910. The subject matter of the case was 4000 crowns, which Ság demanded to be paid by Irsay as recompense for the electioneering he had undertaken for the pastor. This means that although the case was not one of typical electoral fraud, the judges still had to present their views about questions of electoral arbitration because the question was whether it was legal to hand over sums of money to canvassers for campaign purposes. While the court represented one standpoint in this question, the court of appeal decided the opposite, and finally the supreme court ruled the original court decision. This process clearly indicates the Hungarian legal system’s uncertainty surrounding the legality of campaign expenditures and the fact that they were unable to establish a uniform judicial practice in this question. The study presents the contemporary regulations as well as the proceedings of the trials to demonstrate how these discrepancies between legal standards and everyday judicial practice manifested in the arbitration process of the judges.

Focusing on the 1878 parliamentary elections in Pest, the study examines the characteristics of the participants’ use of space from the selection of the candidates, through the electoral campaign events, and finally, during the election itself. It also addresses the physical distribution of election movements in the urban space, and the prevalence of using public, semi-public, and private spaces in election-related events. The election campaigns necessitated that the candidates make themselves seen in public spaces. Their primary means were posters calling to campaign events, flags distributed by committed supporters, and marches from busy squares across the constituency. Up until the threshold of the polling booth, even the ’masses’ that had no right to vote influenced the selection and support of candidates to some extent, however, in the booths the election was solely in the hands of actual voters. This, however, required substantial efforts both on behalf of the authorities and the parties that participated in controlling the use of space.