The census system of the post-1867 Kingdom of Hungary was unfavourable to many of the non-Hungarian nationality, because franchise was based on the income tax of the person. According to the 1874 election law, which remained unchanged until 1918, only the upper 5.9% to 6.5% of the whole population had voting rights.http://www-archiv.parlament.hu/fotitkar/angol/book_2011.pdf, p. 21 That effectively excluded almost the whole of the peasantry and the working class from Hungarian political life. The percentage of those on low incomes was higher among other nationalities than among the Magyars, with the exception of Germans and Jews who were generally richer than Hungarians, thus proportionally they had a much higher ratio of voters than the Hungarians. From a Hungarian point of view, the structure of the settlement system was based on differences in earning potential and wages. The Hungarians and Germans were much more urbanised than Slovaks, Romanians and Serbs in the Kingdom of Hungary.
