Explaining Contemporary Enfranchisement

• In Event: With or without You: Minority Enfranchisement in Europe

Abstract

Enfranchisement politics did not end with so-called universal male and female suffrage. New demographics—including immigrants, emigrants, and youth—have recently been granted the right to vote. So far, the academic literature has studied each of these expansions as separate phenomena. I bridge these parallel literatures with a common theory on how political parties, the key actors in contemporary enfranchisement, position themselves. The logic of enfranchisement does not primarily differ by to-be-enfranchised demographics, but based on whether the to-be-enfranchised are associated with a politicised issue dimension. This determines which audience political parties imagine in the enfranchisement process. In a quiet scenario, parties’ decision-making is based on the signals received by and sent to to-be-enfranchised voters. In a politicised scenario, parties cater to the current electorate, which makes successful enfranchisement less likely. I test this theory with two process-tracing case studies of franchise expansion in Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Author

• Klaudia Wegschaider, Yale University, University of Vienna