Suffrage

Suffrage is the right to vote in an election. An important type of suffrage is universal suffrage, when all adults in a country have the right to vote without distinction by race, sex, belief, or wealth. Although it has not always been viewed as important to democracy, in the early twenty-first century many regard universal suffrage as an essential component of democracy. In fact, suffrage may be viewed as a minimum standard for democracy since the right of individuals to vote is presupposed in a requirement of competitive elections. Some of the largest social movements in history have centered on extending suffrage to disenfranchised groups (e.g., the international women's suffrage movement and the civil rights movement in the United States). Even countries that do not have other features of democracy tend to hold elections in which all or most citizens can vote. Universal suffrage has become the global ideal if not completely the norm.

suffrage over time and across countries

Many individuals may take the right to vote for granted. But the right to vote was denied to many people in the past, and continues to be denied to groups of people in some countries. Sometimes, the exclusion of groups of individuals is written explicitly into electoral laws. For example, in Belgium from 1893 to 1948, the vote was restricted to men (universal manhood suffrage). In Italy between 1861 and 1912, the vote was restricted to those who were male, property owners, and literate. Andrew Carstairs in A Short History of Electoral Systems in Western Europe explains that these restrictions kept the extent of suffrage to under 2 percent of the population. Indeed, early in their history, many Western democracies had property requirements for the vote (e.g., Britain, Denmark, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands). This meant that only the wealthy who could afford property were allowed to vote, and such a requirement often reduced the extent of the franchise to less than 10 percent of the population.

At other times the exclusion of groups of individuals from voting occurs only in practice, through the use of mechanisms such as poll taxes or literacy requirements. A poll tax can refer to either a tax levied on all adults in a community, or a fixed amount to be paid before a citizen is allowed to vote. When poll taxes are used as a prerequisite for voting, it can disenfranchise the poor. Poll taxes were most famously used to disenfranchise blacks in the American South before the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since most former slaves were very poor, they were unable to pay the poll tax and therefore could not vote. The poll tax was circumvented for poor white men by using grandfather clauses, which held that if an individual's ancestors (grandfathers) had voted, he was exempt from poll taxes or literacy requirements.

Further restrictions on suffrage occur if equal suffrage is not guaranteed. Equal suffrage occurs when every vote is counted equally, rather than being graded by income, wealth, occupation, or education. In the past, the wealthy were sometimes allowed to cast multiple votes, in proportion to their income or wealth. For example, in Sweden from the 1860s until its final abolishment in 1921, the rich were permitted to cast thousands of votes (limited to 5,000 votes in 1900). At the end of the nineteenth century in Belgium, Carstairs explains, an extra vote was given to married or widowed taxpayers and two extra votes to those with a higher education or membership in certain professions. Equal suffrage, like universal suffrage, was the norm across the world in the early

twenty-first century. Unequal, graded voting is most visible during general meetings of shareholders, where individuals vote in proportion to their amount of stock holdings.

The U.S. system of electing presidents through the electoral college is a graded or unequal voting system because individuals in less populous states have "more votes" than individuals in more populous states. How does this happen? Every state has a number of electoral college votes equal to their number of representatives in Congress (based on population) plus their two senators (not based on population). Thus, a very lightly populated state will always have a minimum of three electoral college votes, even if it would get only one electoral college vote based on population. Consider that Wyoming, with a votingage population (in 2000) of 358,000 and three electoral college votes, has 8.3 votes per million people. In contrast, Florida, with 11.8 million people and twenty-five electoral college votes, has 2.1 votes per million people. This means that a citizen in Wyoming has almost four votes for every citizen's vote in Florida. Furthermore, because minority voters are disproportionately found in more populous states, they are disproportionately disenfranchised. This system does not meet the requirements of equal suffrage: "one person, one vote."

Over time, it has become less and less acceptable to argue that certain groups do not have the right to vote. In 1906 Finland was the first country to introduce universal suffrage and many countries have since followed suit. Thus, during the twentieth century there was a general movement toward universal suffrage in many countries. This process is illustrated in Figure 1, which shows how suffrage has changed over time across almost 200 countries from 1950 to 2000. Time trends in suffrage follow a general U shape over the fifty-year

period. The average level of suffrage (measured as the percent of the population that can vote) was 69.8 in 1950 and drops to a low of 62.8 in 1976, when many democracies reverted to authoritarian regimes. From that point, the trend continues generally upward, reaching a high of 88.9 in 2000.

Another way to think about suffrage over time is to consider the percentage of countries that do not allow anyone to vote. Figure 2 shows the percent of countries with no suffrage from 1950 to 2000. Over time, there has been a generally increasing and then decreasing percentage of countries with no suffrage at all.

female suffrage

Women typically received the vote much later than men. For example, women received the right to vote 11 years after men in Austria, 104 years after men in Switzerland, 27 years after men in Italy, and 51 years after men in Germany.

Why were women not allowed to vote? Throughout history, philosophers such as Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg Hegel, and Arthur Schopenhauer argued that women should be excluded from politics because they were nonrational, inferior in intellect and reasoning ability, and inferior in their sense of justice. Consider what the German philosopher Hegel had to say about women in his essay "The Philosophy of Right" in 1821: "If women were to control the government, the state would be in danger, for they do not act according to the dictates of universality, but are influenced by accidental inclinations and opinions." (p. 167). Opponents of women's suffrage argued that men were perfectly able to represent their wives and, in fact, could do a better job than their wives themselves.

In 1869 the Wyoming Territory (before it became a state) was the first government to extend equal suffrage to women and to allow women to run for political office. The earliest countries to extend the right to women were New Zealand in 1893 (although they could not run for office) and Australia in 1902 (except for Aboriginal women). Switzerland was one of the last countries to grant women the right to vote. Although considered to have a long history of democracy, until 1971 women could not vote in Swiss national elections. In a 1959 referendum in Switzerland, suffrage for women was rejected by the male electorate 95 percent to 5 percent. Even when women did receive the vote, there was debate and opposition: The vote granting women suffrage in 1971 was approximately 65 percent to 35 percent. In fact, the last hold-out Swiss state was forced to grant women the right to vote in local elections in 1990.

In 1999 a bill granting women full political rights in Kuwait was narrowly defeated, but passed in 2005. There are still a few restrictions on women in local elections around the world; for example, women were not allowed to vote in the municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, first held in 2005. Table 1 includes a sampling of dates when women were granted the right to vote.

What does it mean for one's understanding of the history of suffrage if women's suffrage is explicitly considered? First, countries that are typically considered to have long traditions of democracy may not actually have achieved democracy by modern definitions until the middle of the twentieth century. Switzerland, discussed above, is an excellent example. Second, the dominant place of Western countries in early democratization weakens, since some Western industrialized nations did not become female-inclusive democracies until long after other less developed nations.

suffrage for racial or ethnic groups

Blacks and other ethnic groups also received suffrage later than whites in the United States and some other Western democracies. In the case of the United States, the vote was originally restricted to white males. The Fifteenth Amendment, adopted in 1879, made it illegal to deny any citizen the right to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. In practice, however, the United States did not have universal suffrage on the basis of race until 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed. Before that year, due to harassment, poll taxes, literacy requirements, and violence, few blacks in the South were registered to vote. For example, in Mississippi before the Voting Rights Act was passed, only 5 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, over 60 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote.

South Africa was an infamous Western holdout on the right to vote for nonwhites. The system of apartheid , in place until 1990, denied non-whites the right to vote in national elections. As universal suffrage became more closely equated with democracy throughout the twentieth century, South Africa became more and more of a pariah state because of its refusal to extend the franchise (among other restrictions). For example, the United Nations passed resolutions condemning South Africa, South Africa was barred from participation in some international sports events, and investors began to disinvest in South African companies. Voting restrictions ended on February 2, 1990, under President F. W. de Klerk (b. 1936).

current exclusions on suffrage

Even though universal suffrage is a global norm, in practice many countries have restrictions on the right to vote. In a 2002 article on democracy, Gerardo Munck and Jay Verkuilen explain: "Although de jure restrictions on the right to vote are not found in current democracies, a whole battery of other restrictions, usually informal ones, curb the effective use of the formal right to vote and significantly distort the value of votes" (Munck and Verkuilen 2002, p. 11).

Even when countries have ostensibly had universal suffrage, there were any number of minor restrictions on the right to vote across countries in the early twenty-first century. For example, many nations do not allow sentenced prisoners or criminals convicted of serious crimes to vote. In almost all U.S. states, voting privileges are denied to individuals convicted of felonies, even after they are released from prison. In other countries, such as France, disenfranchisement may be imposed by a court decision during sentencing. The right to vote is also often denied to the mentally ill or mentally incompetent.

Almost all countries deny the vote to noncitizens, a practice that does not reduce claims to universal suffrage. In a few cases, however, this restriction can be excessive. In Kuwait, for example, ethnic non-Kuwaitis (55% of the total population in 1999) are not enfranchised. In Monaco prior to 1993, the requirement of true-born Monegasques nationality effectively disenfranchised 82.5 percent of the total population. Citizenship by birth may also be required, as in the case of Thailand. Or, voters may be required to be physically present in the country on voting day (as in Slovakia, Tuvalu, and Samoa).

Other restrictions on suffrage include age, with most countries requiring that voters be at least 18 years of age. The minimum age for voting was steadily lowered throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Minimum voting ages of 25 or higher were common when universal manhood suffrage was instituted in many countries. As of 2004, the most common minimum age for voting was 18.

Certain countries deny the vote to members of particular political parties or to individuals who participated in previous undemocratic governments. For example, Portugal denies the vote to anyone who supported the regime in power prior to April 1974. This disenfranchises those who were part of the former authoritarian regime. Another example is Indonesia, which prohibits voting by anyone who at one time supported the now-forbidden Communist Party.

Below are some further examples of restrictions on the vote:

1. In Thailand Buddhist priests, monks, or clergy are not allowed to vote.
2. In Slovakia those who are seen as a threat to public health are not allowed to vote.
3. In Niger undischarged bankruptcy results in disenfranchisement.
4. In Mexico a citizen must have an "honest means of livelihood" to vote.

It is also worth noting that voting is mandatory in some countries such as Australia and Belgium. Individuals who do not vote are subject to fines or other sanctions .

suffrage and democracy

Suffrage is closely related to democracy. Samuel Huntington defines a government as "democratic to the extent that its most powerful collective decision-makers are selected through fair, honest and periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes and in which virtually all the adult population is eligible to vote" (Huntington 1993, p. 7, emphasis added). Huntington continues, "To the extent, for instance, that a political system denies voting participation to part of its society—as the South African system did to the 70 percent of its population that was black, as Switzerland did to the 50 percent of its population that was female, or as the United States did to the 10 percent of its population that were southern blacks—it is undemocratic" (Huntington 1993, p. 7).

Suffrage and democracy are related, but not equivalent. It is difficult to argue that an election is fair, for example, if a third of the population does not have the right to vote. On the other hand, universal suffrage can exist but voters may be presented with only a single candidate for office. Suffrage is therefore a necessary but not sufficient condition of democracy. In general, the fairness of elections should be viewed as separate from the percent of the population allowed to participate. Among countries with universal suffrage it is possible to have fair or unfair procedures. Rigged voting, ballot stuffing, and vote buying can occur at varying degrees of suffrage.

See also: Civil Rights Movement in the United States; Democracy; Finland; New Zealand; Voting Rights.

bibliography

Carstairs, Andrew McLaren. A Short History of Electoral Systems in Western Europe. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980.

Hegel, Georg. 1977. "The Philosophy of Right." in Agonito, Rosemary. History of Ideas on Women: A Source Book. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Huntington, Samuel. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.

International Parliamentary Union. <http://www.ipu.org/parline-e/parlinesearch.asp>.

The Library of Congress. Timeline of Women's Suffrage.<http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/vfwhtml/vfwtl.html>.

Munck, Gerardo, and Jay Verkuilen. "Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: Evaluating Alternative Indices." Comparative Political Studies 35 (2002):5–34.

Parish, Gary. The Electoral College: Source of Inequality and Social Injustice in America.<http://www.geocities.com/gparish2000/root.html>.

Paxton, Pamela, Kenneth A. Bollen, Deborah M. Lee, and Hyo Juong Kim. "A Half-Century of Suffrage: New Data and a Comparative Analysis." Studies in Comparative International Development 38 (2004):93–122.

Sivard, Ruth Leger. Women: A World Survey. Washington, DC: World Priorities, 1985.

Pamela Paxton