Conditional Democracy: Partisan Electoral Concern in Support for Enfranchisement

• In Event: Public Attitudes toward Democratic Principles, Reforms, and Backsliding

Abstract

How do perceived partisan and social ramifications of voting rights extensions affect public support for expanding the franchise? Through 2 original survey experiments, I find that partisan electoral concerns significantly influence Americans' support for expanding the right to vote to citizens with previous felony convictions, non-citizens, and younger Americans. When respondents expect enfranchisement to benefit the opposite party, they are much less likely to support voting rights extensions. However, support is virtually unchanged when enfranchisement is projected to benefit their own party vs when it would be electorally neutral. Respondents from both parties hold almost identical priors that the Democratic Party would very slightly benefit more from voting rights extensions. These empirical patterns show that the public is mainly motivated by electoral threat when deciding whether to expand the franchise. My results provide valuable insights into the prospects for further voting rights expansions in the US, and imply that a perceived electoral non-neutrality is a major obstacle to increasing democratic inclusion in the US.

The right to vote is critical to a functioning democracy. Since the scope of voting rights has changed in many dimensions, where do these transitions come from? Acemoglu and Robinson (2001) connected the origin of democratization in many western countries to elites' rational decision-making. Historical accounts of major milestones in expanding the franchise to more Americans also corroborate this narrative (e.g. McConnaughy (2013) on women's suffrage, Kousser (2000) on Voting Rights Act). However, little is understood regarding how individual voters decide what to do with other people's voting rights. This is an important question because firstly, the canonical explanation of elites' decision-making process lacks generalizability since the right has not been restricted to elites for some time; secondly, future enfranchisement policies are closely connected to how the public thinks about this issue.

This paper finds that partisan electoral concerns significantly influence Americans' support for franchise extensions. When respondents are told that enfranchisement would benefit the opposite party, they become much less in favor of extending the right to vote (6 to 10 percentage points reduction across two studies). However, support doesn’t change when enfranchisement is projected to benefit the respondents' own party vs when it is projected to be electorally neutral. I also show that Democrats and Republicans hold common priors that the Democratic Party would gain a very slight electoral advantage post-enfranchisement. I conclude that individuals are motivated by threat rather than opportunity.

Additionally, Democrats and Republicans have similar preferences over franchise limits. They both have the highest baseline support for extending voting rights to citizens with previous felony convictions, and are more likely to support enfranchising non-citizens than lowering the legal voting age to 16. Respondents are much less likely to support a policy that gives those who are currently serving time in prison or undocumented individuals voting rights, and they prefer policies that require affirmation that the new voters have some political knowledge. However, projected partisan consequences dominate other factors, suggesting that individuals place more weight on partisan implications than principle or personal rules over franchise boundaries.

This paper makes several novel contributions to research on enfranchisement and democratic inclusiveness. Firstly, I use original survey experiments to study public support for enfranchisement and can causally identify the contributing factors. Previous works usually focus more on the decision-making process of the elites rather than the mass public, or skip the decision-making process and directly discuss the implications to electoral outcomes. Secondly, I discover a novel empirical result of asymmetric responses to partisan gains, which suggests that individuals' support for enfranchisement is mainly motivated by a perceived electoral threat. Lastly, this paper connects partisanship to democratic backsliding.

This paper puts the prospects for future franchise extensions in political contexts, where the current dominating narratives associate enfranchisement with the Democratic Party. My results imply that it is highly unlikely for the more Republican-leaning states or municipalities to pass further voting rights extensions. Support for enfranchisement policies in more Democratic-leaning states or municipalities can decline if the potential new voters turn out to be more Republican-leaning. However, if the public can be convinced that enfranchisement would be partisan neutral in outcomes, the average support for enfranchising these 3 groups would increase by 9 to 10 percentage points – these are 26% to 31% increases from status quo.

Author

• Saikun Shi, Stanford University