The politics of suffrage extension in the American states: Party, race, and the pursuit of women's voting rights.

Abstract

Although American voting rights research largely focuses on rare instances of change to the U.S. Constitution, power to redefine the electorate is largely reserved to the states. Thus, I offer a theoretical framework for understanding the development of American voting rights as a state-level process driven by party politics. I distinguish between two partisan paths to enfranchisement: <italic> strategic enfranchisenient</italic>---the extension of voting rights by a single party with the intention of reaping the new votes for that party---and <italic> programmatic enfranchisement</italic>---when voting rights are extended to a new group in order to appeal to preferences of extant voters necessary to the party coalition. Programmatic enfranchisement, then, may be pursued either by a single party or by a coalition of politicians responding to an issue-constituency that stretches across party lines. Using woman suffrage in the states as a case study, I draw on evidence from archival research in four states and event history analysis of data on all forty-eight (relevant) states to trace the process of enfranchisement, from defining the group's potential as a voting bloc, to building---or failing to build---credible suffrage coalitions, and then follow these coalitions into major party politics and legislative decision-making. Because party politicians perceived women as a politically heterogeneous group, and thus unpromising as a new voting bloc, successful bids for woman suffrage were programmatic. Alliance with electorally viable third parties or large, well-organized interest groups, and the presence of major-party competition, I find, played particularly crucial roles in determining women's ability to gain new voting rights. In addition, I find that the incentives of party elites and legislators were especially constrained in states where racial politics had already imposed strict coalitional boundaries, and where the issue of white supremacy had encouraged the adoption of policies that constrained party competition and electoral participation. These results place party politics at the center of the story of voting rights extension and highlight the crucial task for activists of maneuvering to create and maintain credible and durable coalitions.