Voting is the life's blood of any democracy, the primary mode by which power is systematically and periodically transmitted from the societal community to political leadership. It provides a nation's citizens with the much needed opportunity to judge past and pending governmental policies and to express their mutual desire for continuity of collective action or for an orderly transition to other principles and goals. Even more importantly, in a healthy democracy an election and the campaign that precedes it act as symbolic proof that partisan conflict and parochial loyalty need not be harmful to the effective functioning of the state or to the solidarity of the polity as a whole. At the very same time that factional strife is allowed to reach its peak in the hectic weeks and days prior to any balloting, countervailing integrative forces are continuously at work to remind voters of the more generalized institutional consensus that binds them as actors in a single political community. In essence, the partisan upheavals inherent in the electoral process become a source of strength and not weakness in any firmly institutionalized democratic system.

It was such expectations of renewed political vigor and civic solidarity, something so desperately needed by a city and a country suffering an unexpected defeat in war and the subsequent upheavals of revolution, that in large part led Hamburg liberal democrats and moderate socialists to welcome the introduction of universal suffrage in the Weimar Republic. Neither had ever accepted the Prussian-like three-class voting system introduced in the Hanseatic city in 1906, and each had made its immediate elimination its foremost political demand. Now with the ballot in the hands of all local residents 20 years of age and older, liberals and socialists alike believed Hamburg to be back on the road to civic freedom and popular government that had characterized the political development of Western Europe since at least the French Revolution.