Service-based suffrage

One of the oldest notes on steampunk social science was written on my Samsung. It was last edited some time ago, but I'm fairly certain it dates back to December last year, before the Andalusada Scrapbook came into being.

Insert quotation here.

On the blog itself, I first mentioned it when I introduced Poland-Ruthenia, or if not then when I expanded it to its current form: "Following the Baltic republican lead, Poland-Ruthenia has been experimenting with service-based suffrage." - whence the name of this concept.

Service means citizenship

"The union of the Pomeranian state is the communion of its people."

In practice, service-based suffrage works something like Starship Troopers: the right to a say in state affairs is restricted to people willing to fight for it.

Conscription in Poland-Ruthenia

Poland-Ruthenia, the flagship of steampunk social science, has also experimented with conscript-based suffrage since the Burning Thirties. It's been much less successful than in Pomerania, in no small part because Polish-Ruthenian society simply works differently.

Pomerania is a plebeian state; it consciously rejects any and all noble titles. Poland-Ruthenia is not; the szlachta across centuries have consistently denied the Sejm the right to give their rights away to their lessers, and rather than abolishing the szlachta, reformers have instead tried universalizing them. At present, this means that everybody who serves in the military is granted a knighthood in service to the state; "Polish knighthood" has become a byword for meaningless honorifics.

There are at least a few reasons this doesn't work so well:

• Poland-Ruthenia already had a lot of very proud, very poor nobles. "Ennobling service" rubs a lot of them as devaluing the aristocracy they legitimately have by passing it out to a bunch of glorified serfs, embittering them and unintentionally pitting them against their new equals.
• The Angry Order and its ilk, meanwhile, are more than happy to return that hostility. At various points, a compromise has been proposed, creating new lower ranks granting new knights the legal rights of szlachta without aggrieving the petty nobility. The Zakonniks have consistently opposed all such proposals, on the grounds that the szlachta already actively reject equality for ennobled conscripts; new conscript titles would enshrine that discrimination in law.