How Women Shape the Course of War: Women’s Suffrage and the Election of 1916

Abstract

Studies have shown that across time and place, women, on average, are less supportive of the use of force than men. This implies that extensions of the franchise to women provide an opportunity to evaluate theories of democratic constraint on foreign policy decision making. In this article, we theorize democratic constraint on war and peace, arguing that it is a common latent constraint on elite actions and an active constraint when one party is pre-committed to a foreign policy position. We use the extraordinary—yet unexplored—case of the 1916 US presidential election to identify the democratic constraint on foreign policy and of women’s votes in particular. This case represents an early step of women into the electoral realm at the national level and provides unique evidence of leader selection due to changes in public opinion because of the uneven extension of women’s suffrage to US states. Reelected on a platform of: “He kept the United States out of war,” Woodrow Wilson would fail to avoid war in Europe, but he did pursue cooperative policies with Mexico that very likely prevented a second Mexican-American war.