The People and the Party: Disfranchisement and Party Building

Standard accounts of voter disenfranchisement emphasize the electoral advantages that might accrue to a political party by extruding part of their partisan opponents' political base. While partisan considerations are rarely absent from this form of electoral manipulation, their role is often theoretically under-specified and difficult to establish empirically. I present evidence in support of an alternative explanation, rooted in the coalitional nature of political parties and an analysis of what the participants themselves believed to be at stake. Through a comparison of the disfranchisement of antebellum free blacks in the United States, the Catholic Irish in pre-Reform Act United Kingdom, and the failed effort to disfranchise working class voters in 1870s France, I argue that efforts at disfranchisement were motivated less by calculation of electoral interests by ambitious office-seekers than they were responses by party leaders to the efforts of intense policy demanders and ideologically motivated activists within each party’s respective coalition.