The emperors’s desk: a site of policy making

Many familiar images depict emperor Franz Joseph as a disciplined and attentive desk worker. They conform with his self-description as "an independent public official". However, his pen- pushing activities were supported by the Cabinet Office. Its members registered and protocolled approx. 250,000 written presentations (Vorträge), which the emperor processed at his desk during the period of his reign. Our project uses the careful bureaucratic handling of these submissions by the Cabinet Office as its main empirical evidence. We understand the submissions as a kind of channel through which the entire government activities of the Habsburg monarchy can be made visible and accessible for the first time using a statistical policy field analysis. Our statistical analysis will be used to cast an analytical look over the shoulder of the emperor at his desk, where we will note the distribution of submissions across various policy fields and where we will track changes over time. This will provide us with a synoptic view on government activities in the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I. This comprehensive overview is still very top-heavy, however. In a second step we therefore select two policy areas for an in-depth analysis: infrastructure / technology and symbolic politics. They stand in for different approaches to resource distribution, both material and immaterial, and for different strategies for the political integration of the monarchy. We will retrace the bureaucratic and political trajectory of selected projects all the way up to the desk of the emperor. We are interested in particular in the agency of state and non-state actors and in the cooperation and networks of different actor groups. Against this background, we will take a closer look at the submissions in question. Text analysis will reveal the selectivity of the presentation. What aspects of the political process, the network analysis has reconstructed, were made available in the submission to the Emperor? What communication strategies proved to be successful, e.g. what were the main selling points for decorations and ennoblement? The final part of the project analyzes the Cabinet Office as a place of politics in its own merits. Its officials were involved in informal policy networks. This was especially true for its highly decorated director Adolf Braun, who determined the fate of this important institution between 1865 and 1899. The papers of Brown, which have not been systematically studied yet, contain his official correspondence, which brought him in contact with about 3,000 men and women from different walks of life and various parts of the monarchy. Members of the high nobility, who wanted to get a place in a convent for a family member turned to Braun as well as the daughter of a railway official, who wanted to achieve an improvement in the position of her father. A careful combination of text and network analysis will provide first significant insights into the logic of informal politics in the Habsburg Monarchy of the second half of the 19th century.

Our research project started with the ambition to shed new light on policy making in the Habsburg monarchy during the reign of Francis Joseph. Looking at the practices of decision making by the emperor we were able to revise substantially our view on monarchical rule. The role of the emperor has been described so far as active participation in the affairs of government, adapting to the changing political situation. Focusing on his pen-pushing activities, we are confronted with an emperor, whose desk was flooded with 135.000 individual cases related to the micro management of organizations, concerning the awards of titles and distinctions, an increase in pensions, the admission of married candidates to the study of surgery, but also the appointment of professors and the commutation of death sentences. The emperor was wasting his time with petty issues because he was reluctant to give up his monarchical prerogative. The expanding state apparatus forced him to cut back, however. Even before constitutional changes impacted monarchical rule, the rapidly expanding number of files resulting from the state building process had reduced the possibilities of monarchical control or active participation in government activity. The emperor was active at his desk, busy signing hundreds of thousands dossiers. But he was, at the end, the signing machine he really did not want to be, if we trust a remark he made in a letter to Prime Minister Koerber. He nodded through most of the files by accepting the resolution proposed by his ministries (76%). The second most frequent resolution (21.5%) was taking note of a submission, i.e. passive support of a proposal. A negative vote on a proposed resolution or an independent resolution was very rare, happening only in 1.1% of all cases. This is even true for the period of neo-absolutist rule, which forces us to rethink the position of the emperor within the policy making system of the Habsburg monarchy. The emperor had two important functions - beyond serving as the mere symbolic identification figure. He was the one who could use his staff to negotiate a compromise in politically conflictual decisions. This can be deduced from an extended processing time in the chancellery with a short decision making time. This consensus orientation does not correspond to the ideas of the emperor's personal regiment, but it is clearly expressed in statistics of his decision-making activity. In the constitutional state, the emperor was responsible for enforcing laws. At the same time, he was the only actor in these decision-making processes who could suspend the application of law in individual cases and make an alternative decision by way of clemency - in order to serve the ideas of justice of his subjects.