Suffrage Expansion Research Articles

Electoral Violence in England and Wales, 1832–1914

Abstract This article analyses over 19,000 articles from newspapers and parliamentary commission reports to reveal endemic electoral violence in England and Wales between 1832 and 1914. It offers a new understanding of the phenomenon in three main ways. First, the extent of election violence, which regularly featured major riots requiring police and military intervention, disturbances of the peace, and deaths, questions conventional understandings of Britain's comparatively peaceful political development through a century of gradual suffrage expansion, rising literacy and economic development. Second, the trajectory of the electoral violence, which peaked in the period after the Second Reform Act of 1867 rather than after the Great Reform Act of 1832, challenges the linearity of these accounts. Third, despite the recent historiographical emphasis on explaining electoral violence as a ritual expression of discontent, much violence resulted from elites strategizing to win elections. Electoral violence occurred disproportionately when and where it was most useful to candidates and parties, and often involved the previously overlooked figure of the ‘hired rough’: men employed to disrupt elections by force. We thus advance a political, rather than cultural, explanation for electoral violence.

Transition to broader-based politics: The role of suffrage extension in early 20th century Japan

The period of modern industrialisation is commonly characterised by gradual democratisation through enfranchisement and intra-elite competition between traditional landlords and emerging capitalists. This raises the question of whether the redistribution of de jure political power via suffrage expansion can catalyse the transition of intra-elite power structures, as reflected in political representation. This study explores the impact of suffrage extension, induced by the wartime tax increase in Japan during the mid-1900s, on the occupational composition of the House of Representatives. Employing a difference-in-differences approach, I demonstrate that the expansion of the electorate led to a significant decline in the seat shares of agricultural landlords, who initially constituted the dominant occupational group in the House. In consideration of the historical context, the overall findings suggest that suffrage extension likely played a crucial role in diversifying House politics away from a landlord-centred system.

The Electoral Impact of Newly Enfranchised Groups: The Case of Women’s Suffrage in the United States

How do newly enfranchised groups achieve representation of shared interests? I theorize that while suffrage expansion has the potential to sway electoral tides in favor of the newly enfranchised, s...

Introduction

Introduction Liette Gidlow, Section Guest Editor (bio) As the debate over ratification of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to enfranchise American women intensified after the Great War, both suffragists and antisuffragists believed that a great deal was at stake. Suffrage proponents promised that, armed with the ballot, women would tackle the great social issues of the day and usher in a new era of progress and peace. Antisuffragists, by contrast, worried that suffrage would damage women's elevated moral stature and threaten the very stability of life in the home. Now, in 2020, historians have the opportunity to reconsider those predictions using a century's worth of evidence. A hundred years out, what difference did the Nineteenth Amendment make? The Nineteenth Amendment is popularly celebrated for enfranchising half the population overnight and fulfilling the American promise of democracy. Two narratives, distinct but entwined, promote this perspective. In one version, aptly termed "the master narrative" by the historian Nancy Hewitt, the woman suffrage struggle started with Elizabeth Cady Stanton at Seneca Falls in 1848 and, after much struggle and sacrifice, succeeded with the ratification of the Anthony Amendment in 1920.1 In an alternative interpretation, the Nineteenth Amendment completed the American democratic project of suffrage expansion, a project that began in the early national period when states repealed freeholder restrictions and when a growing economy expanded property ownership and rendered them moot. The march toward full inclusion continued during the period of "Jacksonian democracy" when states granted "universal" suffrage to white men; traversed the color line with the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870; and concluded in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment brought women into the ranks of the voting public. Many historians, however, question both the framing and the tenor of these interpretations. They argue instead, for example, that woman suffrage was but one of many demands made by mid-nineteenth-century women's rights reformers, and often not their top priority; or that many aspects of women's lives and politics persisted across "the great divide" of 1920, emphasizing continuity, not change; or that electoral politics was but one tool women used to bring change to their communities. Some scholars [End Page 11] stress that alternative strategies, like labor mobilization and community organizing, sometimes yielded tangible results when voting did not or that some women, in particular African American women in the Jim Crow South, found that after ratification they still could not vote. Others further argue frankly that, on policy grounds, the Nineteenth Amendment was a bust: the voter turnout for women in the 1920s was low, the suffrage coalition splintered, and the newly enfranchised women failed to push through a fresh wave of progressive reform. In these interpretations, not much changed after women got the vote. The suffrage amendment—highly anticipated and hotly debated—landed with a thud.2 In this forum, women's history scholars with diverse areas of expertise navigate between a triumphalist narrative of progress and a dispirited narrative of failure. These essays, although varied in approach, share three common threads. First, they recognize the intersectional identities of the women whose stories they tell and offer interpretations that reflect these complexities. Second, they extend the field of vision both backward and forward in time—backward to recall a sense of contingency for historical actors who could not know that a federal woman suffrage amendment would be adopted, and forward to identify consequences of the amendment that may have taken decades to develop. Third, they interrogate the boundaries of the nation by considering internal "borders" created by processes of racial formation and settler colonialism, spaces that were incorporated into the nation but governed by what the political scientist Partha Chatterjee called "the rule of colonial difference."3 The authors in this forum also make the case that the significance of woman suffrage was not limited to women themselves. They illustrate how the question of women's right to vote was deeply implicated in the politics of white supremacy both before and after ratification. They highlight tensions that the amendment raised for women who, drawing on multiple sources of identity and affiliation, identified as members of communities instead of, or as well as, rights-bearing individuals. Individually and...

Migrant populations and external voting: the politics of suffrage expansion in Central America

ABSTRACTRecent decades have seen an enormous expansion in the number of countries allowing their nonresident citizens to vote from abroad, and an emerging literature has sought to identify the factors that lead countries to adopt such external voting policies. This article contributes to this literature by examining the heretofore neglected cases of El Salvador and Guatemala, both of which have large expatriate populations and yet were slow to adopt external voting. I show that the eventual adoption of external voting in these cases was influenced by persistent emigrant lobbying for enfranchisement, the diffusion of an international norm of external voting, and partisan calculations. I also find that two factors largely overlooked in previous research – resource constraints and crowded electoral reform agendas – help account for long delays in policy change. Differences in the reform process across the two countries reflect the varying impact of norm diffusion across countries and differences in the countries’ political party systems.

Capital Meets Democracy: Representative Institutions and the Rise of Mass Suffrage in Sovereign Bond Markets

How compatible is mass democracy with financial capitalism? We examine this classic debate through the reaction of sovereign bond markets to the rise of mass suffrage in Europe and the Americas during the nineteenth century, which represented both the “first wave of democracy” and “age of capital”. Utilizing detailed panel data (1800-1920) on suffrage reforms and sovereign bond yields, we identify two distinct trajectories. In countries with strong pre-existing representative institutions, measured in terms of the frequency of meetings by representative assemblies during the eighteenth century, suffrage expansion had little impact on sovereign bond yields. In countries with weak pre-existing representative institutions, however, suffrage expansion contributed to large long-term increases in the premium that investors demanded to hold sovereign debt. The findings reveal how the strength of historically inherited representative institutions structured the threat of political uncertainty, instability, and expropriation posed by suffrage expansion, with important consequences for sovereign credibility in capital markets.

War and the political zeitgeist: Evidence from the history of female suffrage

Despite the upheaval associated with warfare, empirical evidence linking conflict with institutional development is limited. This paper examines the hypothesis that international wars accelerated democratization by fostering political inclusion. Employing survival analysis, I find that during the 20th century, nations engaging in external conflict were more than twice as likely to extend the franchise to women in the post-conflict period, even after controlling for other commonly cited determinants of suffrage adoption. I explore several potential mechanisms for this association and find evidence consistent with stories which connect war with increased national unity, ideological fervor, and international posturing. Finally, examining conflict-induced changes in sex ratios and female labor force participation suggests that the underlying determinants of suffrage expansion at the national and sub-national level differ.

War and the Political Zeitgeist: Evidence from the History of Female Suffrage

Despite the great social upheaval associated with state warfare, empirical evidence linking conflict with institutional development is limited. This paper examines the hypothesis that international wars accelerated democratization by fostering political inclusion. Employing survival analysis, I find that during the 20th century, nations which engaged in external conflict were more than twice as likely to extend the franchise to women in the post-conflict period, even after controlling for other commonly cited determinants of suffrage adoption. I explore several potential mechanisms for this association and find evidence consistent with stories which connect war with increased national unity, ideological fervor, and international posturing. Finally, examining conflict-induced changes in sex ratios and female labor force participation suggests that the underlying determinants of suffrage expansion at the national and sub-national level differ, implying that distinct theory may be needed to explain institutional change in each setting.

The Existential Threat: Varieties of Socialism and the Origins of Electoral Systems in Early Democracies

The origins of electoral systems in early democracies have received a great deal of attention in recent years, as scholars seek to explain why at the time of suffrage expansion some countries adopted proportional representation (PR) while others chose single-member plurality (SMP). This paper offers a systematic explanation of the choice of electoral systems based on the “existential threat” posed by rising workers’ parties after suffrage expansion, that is, the extent to which these parties threatened the institutions of capitalism and liberal democracy. Original historical research offers important correctives to the dominant scholarly narrative, revealing that PR and SMP were both novel systems at the time, devised to replace the “mixed” systems that prevailed in the predemocratic period. Both, moreover, were seen as elite safeguards that, through different mechanisms, would protect right parties from the impact of suffrage expansion. Mid-range analysis of 18 historical cases reveals that the choice ultimately turned on the different strategic advantages and time horizons associated with the two systems as well as the existential threat presented by new workers’ parties.

Reading History Forward: The Origins of Electoral Systems in European Democracies

This article reexamines the reconfiguration of electoral systems in European democracies in the first age of democratization. Rather than asking why some countries maintained the status quo whereas others “switched” to proportional representation (PR), the author argues that both single-member plurality (SMP) and PR were departures from the predemocratic electoral institutions in most of Europe. At the time they were introduced, SMP and PR were understood as two functionally equivalent alternative safeguards of the position of right parties against the consequences of suffrage expansion. The choice of either system depended not on the level of threat that democratization posed (because both were designed with this threat in mind) but instead on the compatibility of each system with right parties’ preexisting broader strategies to contain the rise of socialist parties. The author illustrates these points by analyzing two paradigmatic cases: the United Kingdom, the first to formally adopt SMP, and Belgium, the first to adopt PR. This perspective provides new insights into the overall process of democratization.

Making Sense of Suffrage Expansion and Electoral Institutions in Latin America: A Comment on Colomer's “Tiger”

In his article “Taming the Tiger: Voting Rights and Political Instability in Latin America,” Josep Colomer proposes to go beyond the “singlecountry stories… typical… of the existing historiography” on Latin American elections and politics and to develop instead “an explicitly comparative, theory-driven analysis, which is more characteristic of the social sciences literature.” I am all for such comparative analysis, although I would guard myself from belittling the achievements of historians who have examined national experiences in painstaking detail or the merit of a highly analytical comparative history such as that presented in Eduardo Posada-Carbó’s recent work (2000). But theory-driven comparative analysis is difficult to do well. One has to know the historical experiences one is comparing very thoroughly, and one has to know how to develop the concepts that will build the theoretical argument in a dialogue with the evidence. The result should be to provide a better understanding of the evidence in ways that even those who know the histories well will find both useful and illuminating.

The Look within: Property, Capacity, and Suffrage in Nineteenth-Century America

Wishing to see the trajectory of American history as progressive and democratic, historians have ignored the complexities of suffrage expansion in the nineteenth century - especially the interrelation of exclusion and inclusion. This Note looks at the trajectory of suffrage reform from the late eighteenth century to the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment and argues that reformers were obsessed with the inner qualities of persons. Whereas the eighteenth century had located a person's capacity for political participation externally (in material things, such as property), the nineteenth century found these qualities internally (in innate and heritable traits, such as intelligence). Both enfranchisement and disenfranchisement reflected this change of perspective, this look within.

Suffrage Expansion and Legislative Behavior in Nineteenth-Century Britain

The importance of suffrage expansion to the formation of “modern” political parties—and with them mass representative democracy as we know it today—is widely recognized. Nonetheless, most of what we know about the link between suffrage expansion and democratic politics concerns only the electoral arena. The major comparative studies of party development (Weber 1946; Duverger 1955; LaPalombara and Weiner 1966), for example, have stressed how larger electorates led to more elaborate and centralized extra-parliamentary organization, to “populist” campaigning styles, and to the promotion of socialist parties. This study concerns the legislative effects of extending the suffrage. Although we focus on nineteenth-century Britain, parts of our argument pertain to other cases.

Suffrage Expansion and Legislative Behavior in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Suffrage Expansion and Legislative Behavior in Nineteenth-Century Britain

To “Educate their Volition to Dance in their Chains”

The second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries in Western Europe mark a period of suffrage expansion, the development of mass party organization, and effective incorporation of the newly enfranchised citizenry into political life. The resulting realignments of the interwar period form a backdrop against which the current discussion of realignment takes place; yet this very discussion begs the question of stability as well as the dynamics of the preceding realignment. Path models of these processes in Britain between 1885 and 1950 show the fundamentals of realignment emerged in an earlier period, 1885-1910, crystallized in the 1918 election with suffrage expansion, and remained stable until 1945-1950, when the first signs of weakening appeared. Latent variable partial least squares (LVPLS) constructs dynamic path models of the mobilization, partisan realignment, and social bases of politics. The results are tested further with maximum likelihood (ML) methods.

On being informed

Although the principles of democracy have commanded near universal assent, at least since World War II, its modern history is still brief, fragmented, and inconclusive. Unfortunately, the familiarity of the first point has often served to distract attention from the importance of the second. That "we are all democrats today" may say something about our good intentions, or about our conceptual confusion, or about our hypocrisy, but it says very little about the future prospects either of the ideal or of efforts to realize it. Certainly we have too much evidence of the fragility of the democratic impulse to continue to hold any Whiggish confidence in its promise as our appointed destiny. The problems of realizing democratic rule are put into useful perspective by recalling some of the arguments that were employed, not so very long ago, when we were not all democrats. One of the most influential of the arguments brought against suffrage expansion in the nineteenth century amounted essentially to a rather simple claim: the elimination of political privilege threatened, indeed it promised, the elimination of socioeconomic privilege as well. An equal distribution of the right to vote would lead directly and rapidly to a redistribution of property from the wealthy few to the impecunious many. Here, for example, is the warning issued by Robert Lowe to the House of Commons (and to the entire propertied elite of Britain) in 1866 on the consequences to be expected from extending the franchise to working men:

The Political Incorporation of the Newly Enfranchised Voter: Organizational Encapsulation and Socialist Labor Party Development

O NN E OF THE most problems in the evolution of liberal democracies is their transformation from limited franchise regimes to mass suffrage polities. The dynamics of the problem and its consequences can be summarized as follows: Suffrage expansion and political mobilization coincided with social mobilization resulting from urbanization and industrialization. As social and economic grievances became political, pressures for suffrage expansion increased.1 These demands set in motion an intriguing process of historical dialectics.2 The extension of suffrage increased greatly the potential for polarization in society, but enfranchisement also facilitated an organizational proliferation which reduced polarization by generating a myriad of cross-pressures. This long-term process narrowed alternatives in politics, fragmented interest organizations, and reduced the importance of electoral contests. The result was a lowering of political participation, the alienation of major segments of the citizenry, and the limitation of policy formulation to the bargaining process of major interest organizations, parties, and the bureaucracy. An analysis of the dynamics of the political incorporation of the newly enfranchised citizenry into national political life is important to our understanding the transition to mass politics and the stability of democratic institutions.

Expansion of Negro Suffrage in Arkansas

During the past ten Oears, the changing character of the Negro's relative and absolute suffrage status in Arkansas has been possibly greater than at any comparable period since Emancipation. The various factors involved in the problem of Negro suffrage expansion are an integral part of the overt political, social, and economic structures and the covert or psychological correlates of the dynamic racial power system.' In race relations, differential social power carries unequal access to the opportunities and rewards of society serving both as a determinant and as a consequence2 of unequal power distribution. While it is likely that some power inequalities characterize every group relationship, the political structure emerges from the unique set of socio-economic factors which underlie the historical development of the society. Thus, this treatment of the suffrage status of 'the Arkansas Negro describes the inequality of political power within the complex system of Negro-white group relationships. We shall delineate specifically in this paper Negro and white socio-cultural'and