THE UNITED STATES

Despite the sentiments popularly attributed to the Founding Fathers of the United States, the formal or conceptual differences across New World societies in who had the right to participate in community decisions were not large as late as the end of the eighteenth century. The British colonies on the mainland, like those elsewhere in the hemisphere, reserved the privilege of voting to white adult men with significant holdings of real estate, although differences in the extent of inequality in landholding across colonies as well as in the specified thresholds meant that the same sort of limitation on the franchise implied very different proportions of the population eligible to vote.⁸

This practice was rooted in a philosophy tracing back to medieval Britain, in which the right to vote was reserved to “freeholders.” The logic was that their stake in land gave them more of a long-term interest in the welfare of the community, and thus the right to be a decision-maker and voter, compared to mere “freemen.”⁹ Communities were treated as akin to business corporations, with landowners analogous to shareholders who were entitled to vote.¹⁰ Indeed, even nonresidents who owned property were frequently permitted to vote. Over time, as the colonies became more diverse socially and economically, the restrictions on the suffrage evolved to take account of the more complex society.

Two general considerations might be said to have framed the political debates that guided the changes in the qualifications for suffrage across the British mainland colonies. One focused on the individual and was concerned with what characteristics gave a person the “right to vote,” for example, ownership of property, the payment of taxes, residency, or simply being an adult white male. The other general issue was what would be good for the community or the society. Would it be in the best interests of the society for nonresidents, non-property holders, women, illiterates, criminals, or non-church members to be allowed to vote? Overall, the dominant trend over the colonial period was the movement away from the idea that the right to vote should be based solely on the ownership of land. There was a growing appreciation, especially in urban settings, of how suffrage qualifications specified along this single dimension might exclude otherwise appropriate individuals. Over time, colonies began to introduce means of substituting other assets to meet property requirements, and this development ultimately led to the acceptance of economic qualifications based on the amount of tax payments. In no colony, however, was there a serious challenge to the notion that suffrage should be restricted to property owners.¹¹

All 13 colonies maintained some sort of property qualification for the franchise on the eve of the American Revolution. Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, and Rhode Island had minimum real estate requirements, specified in terms of either acreage or value. The remaining six colonies allowed for more flexibility, with the property requirement allowing either landholding, ownership of some other property exceeding a specified minimum, or (in the case of South Carolina) payment of a certain amount of taxes. Given the issues at stake in the conflict between the 13 colonies and Britain, it should not be surprising that the question of suffrage reform was central to many of the vigorous debates after the Revolution about the organization of state governments, which were sparked by the need for the now independent colonies to establish frameworks for governance. Although some states, such as Rhode Island, merely carried over the voting qualifications in place during the colonial era, eight of the 13 made substantial changes through the constitutions they adopted during the Revolutionary era. Most moved in the direction of expanding the franchise somewhat, such as by providing for alternative ways of meeting standards for property holders or adopting differential requirements for elections to different posts (such as New York's having higher property requirements for the election of state senators and the governor than for the election of members of its assembly), but only Pennsylvania eliminated wealth qualifications (replacing them with a taxpaying requirement).¹²

The paucity of detailed information on the distribution of wealth poses severe challenges for anyone hoping to construct precise estimates of how these changes in the laws governing suffrage impacted the numbers of eligible voters, but many scholars seem to believe the de facto effects were modest.¹³

Although the stringency with which the economic requirements were enforced is unclear, opponents of wealth-based suffrage qualifications often argued that such restrictions were difficult to administer because the amount of wealth held by an individual could change quickly (especially in areas with rapid population growth), and that decisions about valuation involved some degree of arbitrariness. That there were protracted political struggles, waged both inside and outside of state constitutional conventions, over the fixing of the requirements for the suffrage and the procedures for registration suggests that the laws made a difference in who was able to vote. Nevertheless, in cases where the desire to vote was intense and the distinctions to be drawn between individuals were fine, if not minute, something less than rigorous application of the requirements might have seemed prudent to the authorities.

In general, the major institutional innovation of doing away with all suffrage qualifications related to property, or economic standing more generally, was led by new states entering the Union (see Table 1). Not a single state that entered the union after the 13 colonies had a property requirement for the franchise, and although a few adopted tax-based qualifications, it was only in Louisiana that the restriction was a serious constraint and endured very long. Most of the original 13 states (all but Rhode Island, Virginia, and North Carolina) eliminated property qualifications by the middle of the 1820s, but tax-based requirements for suffrage (and for the holding of public office) lingered on in many of them into the middle of the nineteenth century and beyond. Of the states formed of the originally settled areas, the leaders in doing away with economic-based qualifications for the franchise were those that were sparsely settled and on the fringe (Vermont, New Hampshire, and Georgia).

The spirit of the Revolution undoubtedly contributed to the movement for the extension of the franchise, but the rather systematic pattern of where the changes were made seems significant and deserves attention.¹⁴

Why were frontier states more liberal in extending the franchise than the original states that had long been settled? One possible explanation is that the U.S. Constitution and Congress had laid out a process for new states to join the union and that process may have favored the adoption of state constitutions with universal white male suffrage.¹⁵ Although this hypothesis certainly has some relevance, the initial policy laid out in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (reaffirmed in 1789 by the first Congress) specified a freehold requirement for suffrage that held for elections of territorial governments as well as of delegates to constitutional conventions. Such a law would not seem to bias new states toward universal white male suffrage. The freehold requirement held until 1811, when Congress—spurred by concerns of territories that relatively few of their residents could meet the freehold requirement—replaced it with a taxpaying requirement for all territorial residents (aliens as well as U.S. citizens). Thus, the pattern of frontier areas or new states choosing to extend the franchise more broadly than their neighboring states to the East does not appear to have been driven by the preferences of the U.S. Congress, but rather by conditions in those states.

Scarcity of labor is a condition characteristic of frontier areas, as well perhaps of newly settled regions with small native populations, that might have encouraged new states to place fewer restrictions on who had the right to vote. Nearly all of the residents of such territories or states, and certainly property holders and the elite more generally, would have had a strong interest in attracting more people to settle there. If the right to participate in the political process was desirable to potential migrants, the new states thus had an economic incentive to adopt liberal suffrage provisions as a lure.¹⁶

That voter participation was higher in western states than in eastern, and that migrants wrote back to friends and relatives in Europe to proudly tell them about how they had cast votes, is perhaps a testament that this right was indeed highly valued.¹⁷ Not all potential migrants would have attached such significance to being able to vote, but frontier states typically offered many other enticements as well (some inscribed in state or territorial laws and some grounded in federal policies, as in the case of the Northwest Ordinance) including cheap land, generous provision of public services, and laws conducive to broad access to economic opportunities.¹⁸ In other words, the liberal constitutional provisions regarding suffrage were only one part of a major organized effort, involving many institutions, to attract migrants—a campaign that appears to have been systematically encouraged by the conditions prevalent in the frontier states.¹⁹ Moreover, once some of these states moved to offer these attractions to potential migrants, other states likely felt pressure to alter their laws to remain competitive. It need hardly be recounted that these early frontier states were indeed extremely successful at attracting migrants.

Elites in labor-scarce frontier areas should have been more strongly motivated to attract migrants and stimulate population growth than their counterparts in long-settled areas, but there may have been other mechanisms at work linking labor scarcity to broader suffrage institutions as well. For example, as one would expect in places with a relative abundance of land and scarcity of labor, frontier areas were characterized by greater equality or homogeneity among the population.²⁰

Either because of the political ideologies fostered by such homogeneity, the hazards of trying to define a meaningful and consequential threshold within a relatively continuous distribution, or because the amount of property owned at a particular point in time was not very informative of an individual's life course or commitment to his community in such settings, the greater equality in the new states may have made it more difficult to sustain a case for discriminating among otherwise rather similar individuals on the basis of wealth or economic standing. Thus, while the relationship may have been the result of a variety of different processes, the observation that the new states were the leaders in doing away with wealth and other economic-based qualifications for the franchise is certainly consistent with our hypothesis about the importance of equality in accounting for the way institutions evolved.

The movement toward universal white adult male suffrage, or the elimination of all economic-based qualifications for the vote, began when Vermont and Kentucky joined the United States in 1791 and 1792. Perhaps inspired by her neighbor, in 1792 New Hampshire— which resembled a frontier area in many respects—swept away the taxpaying qualification that it had previously adopted (in 1784) to replace a rather high property requirement. Although making suffrage reform a live issue of political debate, these states did not immediately attract a flood of imitators, especially because both Pennsylvania and South Carolina had in 1790 adopted new state constitutions which maintained, in slightly weakened forms, qualifications that were primarily tax-based.²¹

The suffrage issue was of course only one of a number of important issues that divided the population, and the coalitions that formed to fight political battles were somewhat different in each state. In general, however, the struggles over economic-based restrictions on the franchise were more intense, and extended over much longer periods, in the older states, such as Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia. The new entrants to the union, in contrast, rarely adopted meaningful economic requirements for the suffrage during this era.²²

Louisiana, the only significant deviation from the pattern among new states, joined the union in 1812 with a landholding alternative to a relatively stringent tax qualification; anyone who had actually purchased land from the United States government had the right to vote, however, as long as he was a white male who had resided in the county in question for a year.²³

Louisiana notwithstanding, the innovations in suffrage laws over the first two decades of the United States signify a critical juncture. The use of wealth as a basis for distinguishing who should vote was clearly becoming less viable, and the ultimate fate of such qualifications was becoming clear.²⁴

This did not mean, however, that there was opposition to all restrictions on who could vote. White men might come to believe that differentiation on the basis of wealth was unfair, unreasonable, or inconsistent with basic rights, especially where wealth was relatively equally distributed and there was substantial social mobility amongst that relatively homogeneous population. But they remained comfortable supporting the exclusion of groups that were, in their view, obviously distinctive and unsuitable for participating in community decisions: blacks, women, children, Native Americans, the mentally incompetent, those with criminal records, and those (immigrants as well as native born) who had not long been resident in the county or state.²⁵ When there were wealth-based restrictions, there had been no real need for provisions that dealt specifically with these classes, but as states eliminated or weakened the economic-based qualifications, there was increasing emphasis on introducing or tightening qualifications that would keep undesirable groups out of the electorate.²⁶ At the same time that Delaware, Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania eased their economic qualifications, each altered its constitution to exclude blacks. On the eve of the Civil War, only New York (where a property requirement of $250 was applied to them alone) and five New England states (where those of African descent were exceptionally rare) had extended the franchise to blacks.²⁷

Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri were brought into the nation between 1815 and 1820. None had any suffrage qualification related to wealth or to tax payments. There was little support within the relatively homogenous populations of the western states for drawing a line to distinguish the franchised from the disfranchised among white adult males; indeed, a modest proposal to require a tax payment was voted down resoundingly in the Missouri constitutional convention of 1820. After Ohio in 1803, no northern state admitted to the union came in with a property or taxpaying qualification (and no southern state, after Mississippi in 1817). Residency requirements, strictures on race, gender, and age, as well as disqualifications for infamous crimes were the only constraints on suffrage imposed in the more newly settled areas. Lines continued to be drawn, but the population was increasingly skeptical of basing them on purely pecuniary factors.²⁸

Property- or tax-based qualifications were most strongly entrenched in the original 13 states, and dramatic political battles took place at a series of prominent state constitutional conventions held during the late 1810s and 1820s. For example, although the Committee on Elective Franchise to the New York State convention of 1821 had recommended the abolition of all property distinctions (requiring of voters only virtue and morality), opponents of universal suffrage put up a spirited defense. After lengthy discussion, and a strong vote against an explicit property qualification, a compromise plan that offered a wide set of alternatives was enacted: a voter must have paid a state or county tax, or have performed military service, or have worked on a public highway, or have lived three years in the state (instead of the ordinary one-year requirement); in 1826, these qualifications were dispensed with in favor of universal white adult male suffrage for residents.²⁹

Another heated debate took place at the Massachusetts convention of 1820, where John Adams and other notables warned of the consequences of extending the franchise. Although their eloquence was not sufficient to save a property qualification, the new constitution did include a requirement that either a county or state tax had been paid. At an equally turbulent convention in 1829, with James Madison, James Monroe, and John Marshall participating, the delegates revised the Virginia constitution but maintained a rather stringent property requirement. This lasted until 1850. In general, the changes in the laws governing suffrage were introduced without violence. Rhode Island is the one exception. There, protracted political conflict led in 1842 to civil strife quelled by federal troops, and the reform adopted in that year included a stiff property requirement for those born outside of the United States.³⁰

Vigorous political struggles were necessary to do away with property or tax-based qualifications in the majority of the original 13 states, but the restrictions were incrementally but continuously eroded—often to the point of a token tax payment of a dollar or two. Because of our limited knowledge about patterns of wealth holding and of tax payments, and because of shifts in the regional distribution of the population, it is difficult to construct precise estimates of how the eligible pool of voters changed over time. As shown in Table 2, however, comparisons of the number of votes cast with the adult white male population indicate that a very high rate of voter participation was realized rather early in the nineteenth century. These figures suggest that by 1820 more than half of adult white males were casting votes, except in those states that still retained property requirements or substantial tax requirements for the franchise—Virginia, Rhode Island (the two states that maintained property restrictions through 1840), and New York as well as Louisiana.³¹

The clear implication is that the adoption of laws that extended suffrage contributed to the attainment of such broad participation in elections. Some may consider the estimates puzzling in that the voting rates are higher in early nonpresidential elections than in the presidential elections, but that is probably a testament to citizens caring most about local issues during this era and presidential races not generally being con-tested seriously at the state level.³² Overall, the remarkably high rates of voter participation, especially by modern standards, suggest that the bulk of the population was keen to exercise political influence. This evident enthusiasm for voting seems likely to have contributed to how suffrage institutions evolved, as it became ever more difficult for legislators or delegates to constitutional conventions to resist the pressure to broaden access.³³

By 1840 only three states retained a property qualification, North Carolina (for some state-wide offices only), Rhode Island, and Virginia. In 1856 North Carolina was the last state to end the practice. Tax-paying qualifications were also gone in all but a few states by the Civil War, but they survived into the twentieth century in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.³⁴

Poll taxes were revived during the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, along with the introduction of literacy tests, as a number of southern states revised their constitutions or enacted new laws to sharply restrict voting by blacks.³⁵ This effort was successful, and the experience of blacks in the South—where they were flagrantly denied equal access to public services—dramatizes how important the right to vote can be.³⁶ Despite this episode, what stands out from the U.S. record is how rare such measures were as compared to virtually all of the other societies in the hemisphere (at least by the proportion of the population affected). But it must be remembered that qualifications based on race, gender, residency, as well as on criminal record and mental health, were too commonplace to support the notion that the relative absence of restrictions on the franchise was due to an ideology that everyone had an innate right to vote. On the contrary, the pattern by which such qualifications were introduced and stiffened as property and tax-based standards were relaxed or abandoned suggests that the requirements for the franchise were being set through a process that accepted the drawing of lines but would change or vary them depending on circumstances.³⁷ As regards the question of what circumstances favored universal white manhood suffrage, perhaps the most telling observation is that the western or frontier states, together with highly rural northern ones, were the first-movers.

Of course much of the concern with the factors influencing the evolution of suffrage institutions arises from the belief that as the composition of the electorate changed, so did the types of policies adopted by the elected representatives. In principle, the movement away from economic qualifications for the franchise should have led to laws that were more favorable to the less wealthy, and indeed there is much evidence in support of this view. Historians of education in the United States, for example, typically highlight the fact that the common school movement was one of a number of campaigns for democratization in various social and economic policies that coincided with, or followed shortly, after widespread extension of the suffrage. Although there had previously been scattered successes in achieving the goal of universal access to a primary education, the movement is usually dated as beginning about 1825 and ending about 1850, by which time virtually every northern state had passed and implemented laws to encourage townships or counties to establish tax-supported common schools that were “free” to all who wanted to attend. This 25-year period was marked by intense political struggle in state after state, with especially strong support coming from urban dwellers, members of labor organizations, and residents of western states—groups that are most likely to have benefited from the establishment of the schools, as well as from the extension of the franchise. Opposition is said to have come primarily from the wealthier classes who bore disproportionately more of the increases in the taxes needed to fund the schools.³⁸

By 1860, however, universal primary schools were the norm through most of the United States, and are generally credited with responsibility for the country having the highest literacy rates in the world.³⁹ The movement for the establishment of public schools supported by local property taxes closely and successfully followed the expansion of the suffrage, which strongly suggests that the latter did indeed make a difference for policy.

LATIN AMERICA

The weakening and ultimate removal of wealth-based restrictions on the franchise were clearly important in raising the fraction of the population voting in U.S. elections. The United States had the highest proportion of the population voting in the world by the middle of the nineteenth century, and together with its spread of more secrecy in balloting and other reforms in the conduct of elections, arguably the most equal distribution of political influence. None of the Latin American countries, which were characterized from the early colonial period by much greater inequality, would attain this rate of suffrage for another 75 years. Indeed, throughout the hemisphere, only Canada, where similar movements for the extension of the franchise with similar outcomes lagged those in the United States, was much of a rival in political participation. As is evident from Table 3, the United States had perhaps one-and-a-half times the rate of population voting as did Canada, and eight or more times the rate as elsewhere in the hemisphere (including other British colonies). Given that most of these societies were at least nominal democracies, it is important to ask where this profound gap in political participation came from.

The chief issue is whether the contrasts in the proportions of the population voting were due to differences in the numbers eligible to vote under law, or to some other disparity in conditions. If attributable to differences in qualifications for the suffrage, what accounted for the differences in the laws? Even a cursory examination is sufficient to demonstrate that the requirements for voting were much more restrictive elsewhere in the Americas than in the United States or Canada. Qualifications based on wealth or income were very common throughout Latin America during the early 1800s, but over time the requirement of literacy came to be virtually universal in Latin America as well. These latter strictures, which were generally set forth as qualifications for being a citizen, effectively barred the great majority of wage-earners, whether urban or rural, and of Native Americans from voting. In such a legal environment, and with extremely low literacy rates (perpetuated by very limited support for public schools) and with unequal distributions of land and wealth, it is not surprising that the proportions of the populations voting were no higher than 1 or 2 percent until late in the nineteenth century.

The independent Latin American nations maintained the same political institutions and policies in place during the colonial period when they excluded non-property owners from the legal standing to vote. Although the Spanish Crown had appointed the chief officials in its colonies, municipal councils (cabildos) were charged with responsibility for providing local public services and granted the authority to levy taxes to pay for them. These councils were primarily composed of appointments from the ranks of prominent citizens (vecinos) of the municipality or pueblo, but some members were selected by election. Participation in such elections (and frequently membership on the council as well as the holding of other offices) was generally restricted to substantial landowners (and sometimes even confined to the council members themselves).⁴⁰

In restricting the right to vote to an elite propertied class, the regulation of suffrage in the Spanish colonies resembled that in the English colonies but was much more restrictive with respect to the proportion of the population that had voting rights.

As in the United States, however, the nature of the suffrage qualifications changed over time. Restrictions that had typically been specified in terms of land ownership during the colonial period were made more flexible. Qualifications were revised in early constitutions to encompass those who owned different types of property, satisfied an income threshold, or had a certain social standing or professional occupation. Scholars of Latin America have often attributed these sorts of changes in postindependence political institutions to the interests of the criollo elite—who were much broader in composition, if not distinct from, the major landowning families, and accordingly favored different sorts of requirements.⁴¹

An alternative gauge of status that came to be extensively employed was the ability to read and write—a capacity that was quite rare in these societies, especially among Native Americans. In time the literacy test, which may have been an administratively easier and more effective screen than wealth to distinguish a socioeconomic elite, evolved to become the dominant standard.

Indeed, the introduction and growing emphasis on a literacy requirement was the major change that occurred after independence in the laws governing the franchise. This development is remarkable not only for spreading rapidly throughout Latin America, but also for it being rather novel, at that time, in the New World. Whereas literacy qualifications were not much used in the United States until after amendments to its constitution had forbade restrictions based on race, virtually all Latin American countries included a literacy requirement for citizenship (encompassing the right to vote) in their first constitution or soon afterward. For example: Bolivia advanced a literacy restriction in its 1826 constitution, which was maintained beyond the 1945 constitution; Costa Rica had one in its first constitution as an independent state (1844) but eliminated it in 1913; Chile adopted a literacy requirement in 1833 and maintained one through 1970; Ecuador abandoned its property requirements for voters in its 1861 constitution, but replaced them with a literacy requirement (which endured until 1978); El Salvador had a literacy restriction in its first constitution as an independent state (1864), but seems to have eliminated it in 1945; Guatemala had a literacy restriction in its first full constitution (1879), and maintained it through its 1945 constitution (when illiterates were given the right to a public vote—illiterates with a profession were given the right to vote in 1935); Mexico had a literacy qualification in its 1835 constitution, but did away with it in the 1857 constitution (which also nationalized church property and set off a civil war); Peru had a literacy qualification in its 1826 constitution that was largely maintained through 1979 (there have been more than 20 constitutions, and a few of them prior to 1979 relaxed the qualification albeit briefly); and Uruguay had a literacy requirement from the 1830 constitution until the 1918 constitution. Brazil, despite a different national heritage, also had property-based restrictions after independence, but replaced them with a literacy qualification in 1891. This requirement endured until 1988. The only major Latin American countries that did not have literacy requirements at the national level were Argentina and Colombia. In both of these cases, however, states or provinces were allowed considerable latitude in regulating elections and voting, and it seems that some did impose literacy qualifications.⁴²

To an even greater extent than in the United States, the requirements for suffrage appear to have made a difference in the rates of political participation across Latin America. This is apparent from Table 3. The countries with the most progressive suffrage laws and the highest proportions of the population voting (Argentina, Costa Rica, and Uruguay) are also the countries in the region with histories of relative equality, population homogeneity, and labor scarcity. That the literacy restrictions could have had such a great impact on participation in elections is evident from the exceptionally low literacy rates in Latin America (see Table 4).⁴³

Within countries, even the short-term responses to laws extending suffrage were significant in terms of increasing the proportions of the population voting. In Chile, for example, after the electoral law of 1874 relieved literate males of the requirement to show proof of wealth or income, the proportion of registered voters in the population more than tripled within a few years.⁴⁴ In Argentina, the 1912 reform that introduced the so-called “Australian ballot,” with secrecy and standardized public ballots, as well as universal and compulsory suffrage for men over 18, led to a rapid and dramatic increase in political participation, as “voting increased threefold or fourfold in the parliamentary elections of 1912, 1913, and 1914, and rose still further in the presidential elections of 1916.”⁴⁵ Indeed, the change in the law is generally credited with being responsible for an historic defeat of the long dominant National Autonomist Party (PAN) and the election of the presidential candidate of the principal opposition Radical Civic Union. Such evidence that the extent of the franchise mattered both quantitatively and qualitatively is consistent with the observation that intense political debates normally surrounded changes in the suffrage laws in all of these countries.