Bismarck's Welfare State and Socialist Party Electoral Outcomes

This dataset supports a study examining the political consequences of introducing a welfare state for blue-collar workers in 19th-century Germany. The analysis uses a difference-in-differences design to show the socialist party benefited in elections due to the reform, with mechanism analysis pointing to the socialists' issue ownership. The dataset is associated with a paper by Felix Kersting, last updated in February 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyze the relationship between welfare state introduction and socialist party vote share using a difference-in-differences framework.
• Investigate the mechanism of socialist party issue ownership by examining their reformist stance adoption.
• Test for confounding effects by controlling for other political and economic channels related to the reform.

Strengths

• Dataset is associated with a formal academic paper employing a difference-in-differences research design.
• The study focuses on a specific historical policy intervention (Bismarck's welfare state) and its political consequences.

Limitations

• Specific data structure, column names, row count, and file formats are unknown from the provided input.
• The dataset's temporal coverage is implied to be 19th-century Germany, but exact years are unspecified.

Provenance

Source

ICPSR Harvested Dataverse, author Felix Kersting.

Collection Method

Presumably historical data gathered for academic research on 19th-century German politics and welfare policy.

Time Range

19th-century Germany.

Freshness

The metadata was last updated on 2026-02-23.

Geography

Germany.