The Journey from Propertied White Males – A Brief Overview of U.S. Suffrage History

The U.S. Constitution as drafted in 1787 offered only two comments on the subject of voting rights: one direct statement about voters in the first article and one indirect remark in the second. In Article I, Section 2, the Constitution proscribed that members of the House of Representatives would be “chosen every second year by the people of the several states, and the electors in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature.” This clause meant that states were entrusted with the exclusive power of defining the electorate not only for the purposes of state elections, but also, by extension of that same process, for elections of the people's representatives in the national lawmaking body. It was a truly federalist institutional design, both reserving power to the state governments and tying decisions about state politics to the fundamental workings of the national government. Election of Senators was the jurisdiction of state legislatures (until the ratification of Amendment XVII in 1913). Article II, Section 1 offered the process by which the President should be chosen, allowing each state “to appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors,” which would cast the state's votes for the national executive. Although there is no explicit mention of a public vote, the power of the state legislatures to control the appointment of presidential Electors allowed state legislatures to define the qualifications of voters for the offices of President and Vice President.

At the time when the colonies became states, most states decided to tie voting rights to property rights, in much the same way the colonies had under British rule. Ten of the original thirteen states required voters to be freeholders of some set amount of property and/or of a set level of personal wealth. Pennsylvania and Georgia required voters to be taxpayers; Georgia also required certain personal worth or that the voter be a mechanic by trade. New Hampshire required only the payment of a poll tax. Voting was restricted to men in all the states save New Jersey, where widows of sufficient property were for a short time qualified to vote. Property qualifications waned in the early nineteenth century as new states entered the Union without such requirements for their electorates and existing states wrote them out. Tax-paying requirements, however, remained commonplace.¹

Questions of race and the non-citizen vote were the next contentions in the history of American voting rights. Whereas only three of the thirteen states had constitutional bans on voting for persons of color in 1790, by 1840, twenty of twenty-six state constitutions included such clauses. In the 1840s and 1850s, state constitutions began to address the question of the vote for resident aliens. Three states – Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana – adopted provisions for suffrage rights for immigrants who declared an intention to become citizens in this time. More Midwestern, Southern, and Western states would follow suit in the 1860s and 1870s. Northeastern states, however, typically adopted citizen-only clauses. The political welcoming of alien voters where it existed was short-lived; by the 1920s, the “alien declarant” provisions were largely repealed. Exclusion of non-whites from electorates in the North, South, and West, persisted until the ratification of Amendment XV to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.² Redemption of the South in the last decades of the nineteenth century pushed black men back out of the electorate through various means, both constitutional and extra-legal. To pull out black voters without direct appeals to race, Southern state constitutions gained literacy and competency tests for the franchise, alongside grandfather clauses exempting those whose immediate ancestors were previously qualified to vote.

Between the end of the Civil War and 1920, there were several other major adjustments made to electoral composition across the states. Voter registration and complex residency requirements began to emerge immediately following the war. Literacy and competency tests – those common elements of Redemption constitutions in the Southern states – made their way into Northern and Western states by the early twentieth century. These non-Southern versions focused on required competence in the English language, holding new immigrant influxes out of the electorate. Women's voting rights first appeared in limited form in the mid-nineteenth century as states east and west of the Mississippi, and north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line, adopted provisions for women's participation in school or municipal elections. Full voting rights for women first took hold in the 1890s in the states of Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah. By the time of ratification of Amendment XIX in 1920, which prohibited the denial of voting rights on the basis of sex, thirty states had granted women significant access to the polls. In this time period, disfranchisement of convicted criminals of various sorts also began to appear in state constitutions.³

The mid-twentieth century witnessed two major adjustments to voting rights. Although the practice of “military suffrage” had given a number of eighteen- to twenty-year-old males the right to vote in at least some elections since colonial times, extension of full voting rights to this age cohort did not occur until after World War II. Georgia became the first state to amend its constitution to include suffrage rights for this group in 1943. Before passage and ratification of Amendment XXVI to the U.S. Constitution in 1971, which provided for the right of eighteen- to twenty-year-olds to vote in all elections, seven other states acted to lower the legal voting age. In the same period, black Americans were re-enfranchised in states that had employed various legal and quasi-legal provisions to subvert their voting rights since the turn of the twentieth century through the ratification of Amendment XXIV in 1963, which outlawed poll taxes, and passage by Congress of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.⁴

There remains, of course, additional room for expansion of voting rights in the United States. Voting rights for non-citizens, now a reality in only a handful of local jurisdictions, have emerged on the political agenda in recent years in a number of states, including New York, California, and Massachusetts. Felon disenfranchisement provisions continue to be adjusted by the states. Debates also endure about the voting rights of U.S. citizens residing in its territories; only residents of the District of Columbia cast votes for the offices of President and Vice President, and no territory claims a voting representative in the U.S. Congress. Recent decades have also borne renewed interest in regulation of voter registration and other procedural technicalities of the voting process that might be seen as effectively shaping the size and scope of the electorate. The U.S. Supreme Court's June 2013 ruling in Shelby v. Holder undid the federal government's legal formula under the Voting Rights Act for subjecting states and local jurisdictions to preclearance of any changes of their electoral laws and procedures. This decision reopens questions of the protection of racial and ethnic minorities’ voting rights, and has already prompted new legislative proposals in a number of the previously covered states. And so the process of defining the American electorate is ongoing.

Suffrage Supply and Demand – Existing Accounts of Suffrage Changes

Even a cursory glance at the history of the franchise in the United States suggests that those with institutionalized political power – political elites – routinely make decisions that enable a broader electorate. It also illustrates, however, important patterns of diversity: that many states never relented on specific forms of electoral expansion, that no state or region can claim a consistent pattern of suffrage qualification liberalization, and that each change has come at different moments for different states. Such diversity would seem to challenge narratives of a steady march toward universal suffrage, including that offered by perhaps the most famous observer of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville. Writing in the 1830s, the French thinker believed he saw confirmation of the inevitability of consistent suffrage extension:

Despite evidence of retrenchment and resistance in the history of voting rights in the United States, as well as other nations, de Tocqueville is not alone in his belief in the surety of universal suffrage. A number of scholars confronting the question of suffrage extension since de Tocqueville, however, have underscored the idea that political elites should not be willing to extend suffrage rights. Those with power should have an interest in maintaining it for the benefits that accrue to them; control of government institutions, of course, yields control over social and economic policy, as well as government coffers. Expanding access to the elective franchise to new groups would seem to threaten the benefits political elites reap by increasing the constituent demands that they must meet to maintain their control of the government. Indeed, elite interest in maintaining suffrage exclusion is emphasized by work in political economy that demonstrates a – perhaps unsurprising – pattern of increased public expenditures following suffrage extensions, generally attributed to greater demand for redistributive policies among the new electorate. As economists Humberto Llavador and Robert Oxoby have stated the question, “If greater democracy (extension of the franchise) implies a poorer median voter, and hence higher levels of redistribution, why would elites choose to extend voting rights?”⁶

Social scientists thus have searched for explanations of what might provoke elites to act against their seemingly simple self interest in maintaining the status quo in electoral qualifications. The answers they have provided can be grouped into two main veins: suffrage extension is seen either as a consequence of the politics of competing or divided elites, or as the acquiescence to pressure from the disenfranchised.

Accounts that center on elite division, quite simply, paint suffrage extension as a strategy by one set of elites to increase their leverage over another. A number of versions of this story have been offered. Economists have tended to focus on elite division over economic policies, and the idea that the franchise might be extended to create increased demand for some elites’ preferences. Llavador and Oxoby, for example, point to asymmetrical economic sector benefits for government policies ranging from reduction in tariffs to increased spending on education and health care infrastructure, and see extension of the franchise as an attempt by particular elites to increase electoral support for the policies that produce increased returns in their own economic domains. Other economists have seen the ways in which certain elites might benefit from greater provision of public goods or a stronger national government as incentives for some to look to the disenfranchised for new electoral support. Political scientists have used the same divided elite logic, but indicted partisan politics more broadly, arguing that competition between political parties can push political elites to look for new bases of support among the disenfranchised. In the words of V. O. Key, the logic is that “if competition for power prevails, invariably some of those within the privileged circle will hope for allies by the admission of their friends from without.”⁷

Building partisan politics into theories of suffrage extension is certainly an important move toward placing elite decisions within the institutional arrangements that shape their incentives and capacity for effecting the policy changes they might desire. Although political parties are not political institutions established through either constitutional or statutory law in the United States, they are fundamental organizations in the American political process. Parties structure the electoral choices of citizens, mobilize citizens for participation, and generally facilitate the process of distilling public policy from the preferences of the electorate.⁸ What parties do, and how they do it, follows from the political party's main objective: an organized endeavor to control the government through running candidates for elective office.⁹ Thus, the most basic interest of the political party is to establish and maintain a winning coalition, one that puts their candidates in the offices of government. The composition of the electorate, and the needs and preferences found therein, must therefore figure centrally into the strategy of the political party – meaning that an account of suffrage extension needs to contend with partisan interests.

Political parties, however, are not the only political institutions that wield significant influence over elite action in the process of enfranchisement. Changes in suffrage qualifications are changes in law – meaning, quite obviously, that they must pass through legislative institutions. Yet, the legislative process is absent from existing accounts of suffrage extension offered across the social sciences. This omission has masked important pieces of the politics of voting rights, notably the significant constraints legislative institutions place on elites’ ability to enact their desired suffrage policy. It has also limited our understanding of how demand from the disenfranchised influences elites’ preferences and decisions, a point to which I return momentarily.

A number of scholars have argued that suffrage extension is, at least at times, less an elite-initiated political strategy, and more an elite response to demand “from below.” Much of this work focuses quite specifically on enfranchisement as acquiescence to the use or threat of violent coercion on the part of the disenfranchised. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, for instance, have argued that expansion of the franchise across many Western nations in the nineteenth century should be understood as attempts by elites to avoid escalation of civil unrest into outright revolution. Ruth Berins Collier, who treats expansion of the franchise within an investigation of patterns of democratization, argues that elites are often motivated to expand the democratic circle when faced with “the emergence of dissident allies within the army, coup rumors or attempts, and successful coups and citizen rebellions.” Effective demand in these accounts, then, comes in the form of insurgency, a common function of social movements. And insurgency is deemed effective because it imposes certain costs on political elites for continuing to exclude particular disenfranchised groups: resources must be marshaled to deal with insurgents, and the attention of politics diverted from other policy matters. Voting rights are extended to invest insurgents in the existing government, to thereby quell costly rebellious behavior and perhaps avoid a greater loss of power through revolution.¹⁰

Scholars of social movements, however, might caution that successful movements for voting rights are not necessarily violent, nor particularly rebellious. Certainly the American experience of franchise expansion has not been regularly marked by violent insurgence, nor the threat thereof. Social movement-centered treatments of the extension of voting rights, therefore, point to such insurgency as only one of a number of versions of demand that might leverage success. These accounts of voting rights movement success borrow from frameworks originally developed to explain the rise of social movement activity, notably the ideas of resource mobilization and political opportunities. Resource mobilization accounts focus on the organizational capacity and tactical effectiveness of the group demanding new voting rights as explanations for successfully leveraging acquiescence from the state. Political opportunity explanations for successful demands for suffrage extension, in contrast, point to changes in the political environment (such as the constellation of elite alignments and the openness of political institutions) that facilitate the effectiveness of demand. Indeed, several scholars have used these concepts of resource mobilization and political opportunity structures – at times in tandem – to think about conditions that might generally make the adoption of woman suffrage more likely. Lee Anne Banaszak argues, for example, that in both the United States and Switzerland, woman suffragists’ chances for success were shaped by the resources they could mobilize, their abilities to perfect political lobbying tactics, and the coalitions of political actors drawn into the cause. Holly McCammon and her coauthors, in contrast, argue that success for American suffragists was facilitated by instability or conflict in partisan politics, which made the political system more vulnerable to their demands, as well as the changing economic and political standing of women, which made the idea of women voters less controversial.¹¹

Whereas social movement-centered accounts of voting rights extension have thus raised the idea of interplay between activists demanding inclusion and the political actors that must act to supply changes in suffrage laws, just as in the elite-centered accounts of suffrage extension, the incentives for those supply-side actors are not fully developed. The result is that these existing accounts still do not explain how activism influences voting rights policy outcomes. Importantly, there are no clear theoretical expectations about which activist tactics or resources should be most influential on those in the institutional positions to change voter qualifications, nor which changes in the political context should offer real political opportunities. This problem is not unfamiliar in the social movement literature, where, in the words of William Gamson and David Meyer, the term political opportunity “threatens to become an all-encompassing fudge factor for all conditions and circumstances that form the context for collective action.”¹² By beginning with partisan politicians’ motivations to expand the electorate and adding in the institutional constraints on their actions, I specify what should constitute a political opportunity for voting rights movements, and also what demand resources and tactics can be used effectively to take advantage of those opportunities. Starting with supply-side incentives, in other words, actually offers new leverage on the question of how both the supply and demand sides of the enfranchisement equation shape the development of voting rights.

The Supply-Side Politics of Extending the Franchise – Incentives and Constraints

Again, to develop a coherent model of suffrage extension, I allow supply and demand actors to interact, but begin by specifying the incentives and constraints of the supply side. Simply put, I consider the cost and benefit calculations of the political elites involved in supplying new voting rights provisions, including the limits placed on those elites’ actions on the issue of suffrage by the arrangement of political institutions. Unlike previous elite-centered accounts, I specify two sets of interrelated actors as the relevant elites in the enfranchisement equation – both political parties and legislators. I offer here first an outline of the incentives and constraints of these elites. In the next section, I detail the two models of suffrage extension these considerations imply, and then turn in the following section to more detail about how those interests play out in suffrage politics, where they interact with demand-side actors.

By invoking political parties as supply-side elites, I am referencing what are termed in the American context major parties. Rosenstone, Behr, and Lazarus offer a clear definition of a major party as a political organization which “runs candidates for local, state, and federal offices in a majority of the states” and which “prior to the contest…holds one of the two largest blocs of seats in the House of Representatives.”¹³ The major-party status, therefore, is conferred only on those political parties that can maintain electoral success for more than one election and who do so at all levels of American government. All other organizations offering candidates in American elections are bearers of the title third or minor party.¹⁴ I ultimately offer an argument about the important and unique role that third parties can play in leveraging the major parties to deliver new voting rights provisions. The major parties, however, must be central actors in the political story of suffrage rights extensions because of both their vested stake in the composition of the electorate and their unique degree of influence over the institutional hurdles that suffrage changes must cross – legislatures and, often, elections.

The parties’ central purpose of influencing the outcomes delivered by the electorate necessarily implies a partisan interest in the constellation of that electorate. Because the distribution of preferences in the electorate is, of course, key to the process of assembling a winning coalition, considering the possibility that parties may see groups of potential new voters as likely benefits or likely costs to their electoral endeavors is important. Yet parties are also beholden to existing voters’ preferences – although certainly, and importantly, under some conditions more than others – and thus it is also important to note that party organizations may also make calculations about extending the franchise that derive from the demands of their current electorates. This consideration of pressure from existing voters has been scarce in existing work on suffrage extension, despite being easily recognized as generally important to party position-taking, the policy process, and legislative outcomes. And it is my argument that suffrage extension in acquiescence to existing voters is a far more likely model of enfranchisement than the broadening of the electorate simply for the sake of the new voters’ future electoral support.

Pushing for new voters either for their own sake or in acquiescence to existing voters, I argue, is a strategy that parties pursue only under some duress. That is, I agree with Key's assertion that partisan competition should be the common driving force behind suffrage extension, although it is not a sufficient condition. Competitiveness signals vulnerability for the party in power; only in response to the threat of losing an election does a party need to change its strategy.¹⁵ Close margins of victory in the last election signal little certainty about winning in the next round. In such circumstances, a new bloc of support from a previously disfranchised group could resolve a party's electoral difficulties. At these moments, also, demands from current voters threaten to be particularly costly to ignore. But competition is particularly important as a necessary incentive for the provision of new voting rights because parties always face additional costs with the addition of new voters. A larger electorate means more work to congeal and mobilize winning coalitions – whether that cost is the additional payoffs to partisan supporters in the time of political machines or more dollars for media buys and advertising in modern campaigns. This inherent disincentive for extending the franchise helps explain why parties do not pursue suffrage extensions often. It also implies that the potential voter-preference-based payoffs need to be perceptible; the certain costs of suffrage extension must be outweighed by a real possibility of benefits.

The political tools wielded by parties give them ample opportunity to influence the outcome of any consideration of new voting rights in the direction they desire. Partisan leadership and organizational structures in legislatures can impede or facilitate the flow of suffrage-extending legislation. Previous research suggests that on issues that carry partisan implications – as I have argued suffrage extension inherently does – parties play a unique role in structuring legislative outcomes. In particular, several studies have shown an increased influence of party discipline on voting – an induced similarity in voting behavior by members of the same party, above and beyond the preference similarities shared by members of the same party – the more the party as an organization has at stake.¹⁶ Of course, parties also have the means to influence the electoral process. Their specific tools of influence have certainly changed over time – in the time of woman suffrage politics, for example, the major political parties directly controlled decisions such as ballot wording and distribution and the location of polling places. Although some of their previous specific powers have been transferred to the state, to this day no other political organizations stand ready to mobilize electorates in favor or against a cause as readily as parties. This electoral influence is of particular importance because voting rights changes at the state level so often require a constitutional amendment that must be ratified by the existing electorate. The costs of educating and mobilizing the public to actually vote in support of the proposed change are formidable, and difficult for the disfranchised to bear. In contrast, the party apparatus, designed to influence elections, could be a most effective ally or formidable obstacle in achieving the necessary public vote.

No matter the influence of parties, however, it is still through legislatures that suffrage provisions must generally pass. What is most important to note about the legislative process, itself, is how difficult it makes the provision of new voting rights. In other words, placing suffrage politics inside legislative institutions imposes some important constraints. In the United States, at both the state and federal levels, legislative institutions in general make status quo protection easier than change, but particularly so in the case of voting rights. Because voter qualifications are generally defined by states’ constitutions, changes most often require the clearing of extra policy-making hurdles, including legislative super-majorities, passage in multiple consecutive legislative sessions, and final approval through public referenda. Thus, the process involves many opportunities to stall a new voting rights proposal, institutional rules that empower opponents to be effective veto players, even if they are in the minority, and significantly higher costs for lawmakers in terms of the time and effort that must be spent to push the issue to fruition than the average piece of legislation.

In order to even reach a vote in the legislature, of course, a change in voting rights must have had initial endorsement from a legislator who found it worth introducing and must be delivered to the floor by its assigned committee. Bill introduction is rather simple. Any member of the legislature may introduce a bill, and doing so can be an entirely symbolic gesture. Overcoming the introduction hurdle, therefore, may not be a particularly difficult task for advocates of new voting rights. Committee work, however, is more complicated, and it offers the first significant legislative hurdle. Lawmakers facing heavy legislative workloads turn to the committee system to deal with the formidable task of evaluating every proposal brought to the body. The committee may choose not to report a legislative proposal to the rest of the legislature for consideration, to report a version it knows will be difficult to pass, or to report a version designed to have a good chance at success on the floor of the legislature. Not only can committees thus block or diminish the chances of the passage of legislation, but they can provide ample opportunity for defeat even by an opponent who is in the minority.

The challenge of the committee stage of the legislative process begins with initial bill referral. Whether the assignment of committee membership is purely at the will of the partisan legislative leadership or tempered by norms such as seniority, committee assignments are not random; and, thus, committees can be quite different from the body in important ways. This means, of course, that there is the possibility that legislation for voting rights changes could be stymied by an unfriendly committee, even if it might pass on the chamber's floor. Moreover, when partisan legislative leadership is charged with bill referral, it can exercise that choice in a way intended to shape the legislation's fate.

What happens inside the committee, however, is not simply a function of the positions each member holds on the issue. As Richard Hall has detailed, those with particularly keen interests in the outcome for a proposed piece of legislation, whether they desire any form of the proposed new policy or not, have at this stage in the legislative process ample opportunity to exert influence on both whether a measure will be reported and in what form. The key is the deliberative work in committee that shapes what appears to the body of legislature for approval, the work that can facilitate or forestall the deliverance of an agreeable proposal. Hall and others have argued that how strongly legislators feel about the issue – the intensity of their preferences for or against the proposed policy – shapes their willingness to expend their time and effort on drafting and promoting proposed legislation. Thus, even if nominally agreeable to most members of the legislature, proposals without interested advocates in committee are likely to slip off the agenda. Or proposals that draw little attention from most members can be shaped for failure or success by just the interested few. In sum, even if some version of a voting rights extension indeed exists that would pass the floor, if those with intense preferences are against it and on the appropriate committee, or if no member of the committee has an intense interest in the policy one way or the other, the agreeable version of the enabling bill may never materialize.¹⁷

Once past the committee stage, legislation faces the further hurdle of actually gaining consideration on the floor. Legislative processes require multiple readings of bills before a vote on the floor of the chamber can occur, and the scheduling of all of this floor activity is typically controlled by the chamber's partisan leadership. These details leave ample room for defeat either by simple neglect – when no member advocates for the legislation to appear on the calendar – or through purposive delay by the party leadership in scheduling. From committee to calendar, then, legislation needs advocates to move forward and is vulnerable to the exercise of partisan control. With political parties inherently interested in the definition of the electorate, the most promising trip through the legislative process before the vote would seem to be when the party in control of the legislature sees partisan benefit in the proposed change in electoral qualifications.

If finally brought to a vote in the legislature, a change in voter qualifications obviously must satisfy the constitutionally required number of legislators. In many instances of voting rights changes, that number is a two-thirds supermajority of each chamber; many alterations to suffrage qualifications can only be made through amendment to the state constitution, and many amendment processes place the threshold of support higher than for statutory changes. One set of models of the legislative decision making (and perhaps common understanding) would propose that the outcome should at this point be a rather straightforward aggregation of legislators’ individual preferences on the issue, with the voting rights change being adopted as long as it satisfies the preferences of the requisite majority. Some nuance, however, is necessary in understanding the origins of legislators’ preferred positions and the role such preferences may play in the determining legislative votes on the voting rights issue.

As elected partisan politicians, legislators’ voting behavior needs to satisfy their constituencies – either because they desire reelection or at least because their party seeks to retain that seat in the government. The resultant connection between the policy positions of legislators and their constituencies’ has been explained by John Kingdon with the concept of the “explainable vote.” In Kingdon's telling, legislators take account of salient issue preferences in their districts, weighing the likelihood that they can justify their votes to those who care enough to notice (or have group-elites to notice for them) their behavior on each specific issue. Legislators’ positions, then, are a balancing of the opinions or preferences of salient members of their constituencies and their own preferences; the election process induces a fair level of agreement between the two, calculations about the ability to explain the vote to those who care accounts for the choice when preferences diverge. And studies of interest group influence would suggest that it is interest groups that effectively communicate the salience of constituents’ preferences to lawmakers; “lobbying friends,” or appealing to legislators who can be convinced that the interest group's goal is consistent with representation of their constituencies’ preferences, is common practice.¹⁸ The implication for voting rights politics of this model is simple – as long as legislators sense little interest in the issue among their voting constituents in extension of the franchise, they should be free to rely on their own preferences on the issue – either personal or partisan. The inherent interest of parties in voting rights legislation and their likely influence on members has already been stated. Personal preferences on voting rights could be driven by any number of attitudinal factors, although likely culprits would seem to be their attitudes about the group seeking voting rights or their general disposition on the idea of republican government.

There are other implications of the legislative process for voting rights policy changes. Not only is change difficult, the appearance of supporting change can be rather easy. The legislative process can enable legislators to undertake actions that seem to signal support for a change in suffrage policy, such as sponsoring a bill, voting it out of committee, and even voting in favor of the bill on the chamber's floor, yet remain confident that the new suffrage provisions will not actually become law. Moreover, because the inherent electoral costs of implementing a new suffrage policy are necessarily broadly shared, suffrage changes need true widespread support – new voting rights are not an issue that a small but committed minority can pass without arousing the interest of others. And, of course, at the end of the day, the path of electoral accountability from the policy beneficiary – would-be voters – to deciding legislators is indirect at best. Would-be voters need a way to create electoral consequence for their inclusion or exclusion. In sum, changing voter qualifications is particularly costly legislative work, the support needed is broad, and the most direct tool of influence on the outcome is missing.

Finally, there is often the additional layer of constraint on voting rights policy of the need to pass the policy change at the polls through a referendum that endorses a suffrage extension approved by legislators. Although it is not uncommon to conceive of a public vote on a policy as an expression of the public's preferences, elite influences on electoral outcomes are difficult to understate – particularly when those elites are partisan actors who control the timing of the election, the wording of the policy choices that appear on the ballot, and the partisan apparatus regularly used to persuade and mobilize voters. Certainly, this does not mean that partisan elites can push policies through at the polls despite widespread and deep-seated opposition among voters. Thus, the referendum process is, in fact, a constraint on the elite politics of suffrage extension. Yet, when the parties have a vested interest in the outcome of a ballot measure, as they inherently do in voting rights measures, they have unmatched means of influencing the outcome. Therefore, what may be far more important to understand about the referendum requirement for voting rights changes is the constraint it enables partisan elites to exert on the supply of new suffrage provisions.

The constraints partisan elites could and, as I show in later chapters, have introduced to the referendum process on voting rights issues include a variety of important strategic choices about the appearance of the suffrage issue on the ballot. Those wanting the suffrage issue to fail, for example, could push for the placement of the issue in a low-turnout special election or in a fast-approaching election that would leave little time for mobilization work. They could choose to place it on the ballot next to another issue, such as a prohibition measure, they know to be especially likely to turnout voters with less sympathetic views on the suffrage measure. Partisan actors also control ballot language – whether directly in the days preceding the Australian ballot or through the legislative process in contemporary times – and thus could also ensure that the ballot wording was sufficiently confusing to cloud voters’ comprehension of their choices. Thus, although pro-suffrage activists and other political actors face the same task in a referendum – getting enough voters on their side on Election Day, party leaders in particular have far more tools at hand to accomplish that task. Not only do partisan influences over the referendum process grant them unique leverage on the outcome of a public vote, but politicians can use the referendum process in particular as a way to vote in favor of new voting rights and yet remain confident that the electorate will remain constrained. The referendum process, in other words, is an excellent opportunity for partisan politicians to have their voting rights cake and eat it, too.

Models of Suffrage Extension – Strategic and Programmatic Enfranchisement

Summing up the incentives and constraints of supply-side actors, I argue, leads to two possible models of enfranchisement. Both models are differentiated from other models of policy outcomes by the particular features of voting rights politics: that the institutional path to change is particularly difficult, that the costs of implementing the new policy are necessarily broadly shared, and that the most direct tool of the policy beneficiaries’ influence on the outcome is missing. Across both models, I delineate three necessary political conditions for suffrage extension: information, incentive, and capacity. What varies across the models are the specific ways in which the three conditions can be satisfied. The sharpest distinction across the models is in the information condition, in how the political meaning that incentivizes the supply-side actors to act – the information about potential payoffs – is established. Differences in the particular incentive structures of the two models, however, also lead to important differences in the activism strategies that are likely to increase suffrage proponents’ chances of success. I layout the general framework and basic implications of both models here and delve into more detailed implications of demand-side politics in the section that follows.

Seeing the Role of Demand Inside the Partisan Story – Identities and Activism

Although the central imperative for those demanding new voting rights is attaching a clear electoral consequence to politicians’ actions on their enfranchisement, each of the two partisan paths to enfranchisement I have detailed implies a different key role for demand-side actors. The politics of strategic enfranchisement turn on expectations of solid electoral support from the new voters, meaning that demand activities that convey the political cohesion of the group should be most effective. Programmatic enfranchisement, in contrast, requires a coalitional strategy from demand-side actors, rather than one that maximizes the internal cohesion of the group. Demand-side implications of both models are elaborated in the following sections. Yet, before discussing the development of effective demand strategies for the disfranchised within each of these enfranchisement models, a crucial variable that shapes the possible path to enfranchisement for previously excluded groups, one over which they may not have tremendous control, must be introduced: political identity.

Lingering Alternative Accounts

I have outlined two models of voting rights extension, drawing together theories of the incentives of political elites and of the effects of social movement activism. Still, I have not touched on some ideas about why voting rights are expanded. Notably, I have endeavored to offer a theoretical framework for understanding expanding definitions of the electorate absent the threat of violent rebellion, for elaboration of the democratic project within the confines of existing political institutions. As mentioned earlier, so much of the American experience calls for a model that does not invoke the threat of insurrection as the main incentive for a broadening electorate. Explanation of the role of insurgency that threatens existing political institutions, therefore, has intentionally been left to others.

Also largely absent from this discussion of both the strategic and programmatic paths to enfranchisement has been the demand tactic of direct appeal to legislators’ personal preferences for a policy. Certainly, we would expect that some legislators would have their own salient preferences about the inclusion of a new group into the electorate. In particular, strong egalitarian or liberal convictions, we might presume, would make the issue of salient personal interest, as might strong personal sentiments against the group in question, such as racist or sexist beliefs. Personal connections to the causes of the disfranchised may even include kinship ties to active members of the group, as was the case with a number of politicians and woman suffragists. Appealing to both these personal beliefs and associations surely could win the support of a legislator, even without the support of his voting constituency, if the legislator felt he could offer a workable “explanation.” This approach may indeed be part of getting the issue on the agenda, perhaps attracting bill sponsors, for instance. Yet, for establishing winning coalitions in favor of new voters, this approach is far less than expedient.

The greatest complication of the direct, personal appeal for the enfranchisement of new voters derives from the fact that the policy in question by definition carries consequences for parties and legislators, and its corollary that voting rights changes cannot be forwarded by a small, intense minority without arousing the interests of others. The resultant complication is that a successful direct appeal strategy would have to indoctrinate, one by one, a majority (likely supermajority) of legislators with a personal preference for new voting rights, and would have to engage any salient personal preferences against voting rights to stave off opposition. Winning wars based on principles, when those principles have political costs and consequences, is tough work. Additionally, building a winning coalition based on personal preferences is extremely sensitive to legislative turnover; if convinced members leave office, there is no mechanism to increase the chance that their replacements will be friendly to the cause as well. In contrast, garnering support within key constituencies provides incentives for politicians to act independent of their personal preferences, meaning that activists’ work is not necessarily undone by a change in the legislature's membership. This distinction is particularly crucial for state-level voting rights struggles given that state legislatures are typically populated by members who serve only a term or two.²⁷ Hence, direct appeal to legislators’ personal preference may work as part of either the strategic or programmatic enfranchisement process, but partisan electoral incentives offer far more promise.

Finally, I have also laid aside accounts of voting rights extension that imply, in one way or another, that voting rights are extended simply because they are an idea whose time has come. This would include accounts that paint changing attitudes about the disfranchised as the primary impetus for changes in suffrage qualifications, as well as those that ascribe legal changes in voting qualifications to moments of heightened attention to democratic governance – the most cited of the latter being times of war. I have done so not because ideas play no role in voting rights politics, but because, given the incentives of political elites, attitude changes are insufficient as an explanation unto themselves. As I have outlined, and illustrate in later chapters, attitudinal shifts may help form new ideas about what groups could be promising targets of strategic enfranchisement, or to influence the coalitional possibilities available to the disfranchised, thus affecting their chances for inclusion under the programmatic enfranchisement model. Without partisan political incentives attached to them, however, ideas lack the leverage to change policy.

Assessing the Theory – The Case of Woman Suffrage

To evaluate the theoretical framework for understanding the development of voting rights offered earlier, I turn to the struggle for adoption of woman suffrage in the American states. Although Amendment XIX of the U.S. Constitution, barring discrimination in state voter qualifications based on sex, was not ratified until 1920, woman suffrage measures were considered and adopted by states as early as 1838. Some of these measures provided for purely local electoral rights, enabling women to vote on local tax issues, school matters, and/or for municipal officers. Other measures provided women with limited suffrage rights in statewide elections, such as allowing them only presidential suffrage. And some states endowed women with truly full voting rights – as early as 1890. There were thirty years between the earliest and latest adoptions of state-level woman suffrage, and nearly eighty years between the earliest and latest adoptions of local-level woman suffrage (see Figure 1.1). This variation, itself, begs explanation, which the literature on the woman suffrage movement has yet to fully provide. Moreover, it is through investigation of this variance that we can empirically demonstrate the institutional and sociopolitical factors that make attainment of the right of electoral participation more or less possible for previously excluded groups.

Figure 1.1. Timing of State-Level Woman Suffrage.

Some might argue that the politics of women's voting rights were unique and therefore not instructive as we seek to understand the expansion of the franchise generally. Yet there are a number of reasons why the case is particularly informative. To begin, because the American story of woman suffrage unfolded across a span of nearly eighty years, it overlapped with a number of other developments in voting rights. This fact enables direct and contemporaneous comparison of woman suffrage politics to consideration of the enfranchisement of other groups, notably black men, illuminating how differences in the groups being considered for enfranchisement engendered distinct reactions from partisan politicians. Moreover, although many treatments of voting rights politics in the United States have focused on the rights of African Americans, it would seem that politicians often lack the level of clarity about partisan expectations of new voters that characterized that case. Consider, for example, the layers of uncertainty involved in the question of enfranchising non-citizens. There are the questions of which immigrant groups are likely to support which party and which groups are likely to turnout to vote, and the issue is further complicated by ambiguity about what incoming immigrant streams will look like in both the short and long term. Turning to woman suffrage sheds light on this sort of politics of voting rights, where the promise of a new voting bloc does not seem likely to be the incentive for partisan politicians. In addition, following both failed and successful endeavors to enfranchise women across a variety of political contexts does unearth attempts at a strategic enfranchisement approach. The circumstances surrounding and results of these attempts further underscore the host of difficulties in satisfying the conditions of the strategic enfranchisement account, undermining its feasibility as the dominant model of voting rights politics.