Cleavages, Coalitions, and the Struggle for the Vote

Theories of democratization tend to examine the extension of the vote to working class men under the assumption that women's enfranchisement followed a separate, and less-political logic, than inclusion of the lower class males. This paper argues that in fact, the politics of enfranchisement of men and of women were fundamentally intertwined. The institutional legacies that followed the transition to representative governments in Europe and Latin America set early voting rules for men. These rules both reflected and solidified the cleavages along which electoral competition was waged. In countries that adopted manhood suffrage, only a universal measure for women would have been politically feasible. Parties of the right, which tended to think of women as more conservative on average, and parties of the left, which tended to think they could win working class women’s support, both had incentives to support women’s enfranchisement when they were out of power. The center parties, on the other hand, would resist suffrage for fear of being outflanked on both sides. In conditions with limited manhood franchise, parties of the left would support women’s suffrage as a wedge to argue for universal suffrage, but parties of the right would resist the reform if there was already pressure for expansive male reform. Hence the coalitions for women’s suffrage depended, in a critical way, on the citizenship status of non-propertied men. I support this argument using comparative historical evidence from Europe.