Voting Rights And Suffrage Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The term suffrage is derived from the Latin suffragium and the ancient Roman political practice of displaying direct support for a candidate or legislative proposal through one’s vote. Voting, however, was formalized first as a public decision-making device in ancient Greek juries and political assemblies in the sixth century bce. In these political bodies, only citizens were eligible to vote and participate in political deliberations, which then meant that all females, children, foreign-born, and enslaved persons were excluded (estimated to be approximately 85 percent of the population of Athens, the city-state conventionally recognized as the birthplace of democracy). The Roman right to vote was similarly limited and became even more so with the territorial expansion of Roman power as voting occurred only within the city of Rome. Despite these severe restrictions, individuals’ regular and direct voting on public matters was a legal and political innovation that distinguished ancient Greek democracies and the Roman Republic from the then-dominant methods of creating political authority based on individual charisma, social custom, and brute force.

These early exemplars of voting as a political practice were abandoned with the advent and eventual collapse of Roman imperial rule, making the revival of regular voting practices in Europe over a millennium later a remarkable political achievement. The idea and practice of voting were not wholly forgotten during this interim period, but they were associated almost exclusively with the selection of new popes, the decisions of church councils, and popular participation in the appointment of local diocesan bishops. By the twelfth century, Catholic religious orders such as the Cistercians and Dominicans regularly elected their leaders independent of secular and other religious authorities. During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church also developed and employed the ideas of contractualism, the common good, consent, and representation as well as various forms of majority rule voting, use of the secret ballot, and the requirement of procedural regularity in their elections—all direct precursors to modern, secular forms of electoral democracy. Ironically, although the early Catholic Church always aspired to achieve unanimity in its decisions, persistent encroachments by secular powers prompted restricted voting in 1179 for papal elections to its College of Cardinals.

The emergence of representative assemblies throughout Europe from the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries— for example, the various Cortes on the Iberian peninsula, the British parliament, provincial assemblies in France, the Polish Sejm, and the Swedish Riksdag—restored the regular practice of voting on public matters, especially where consent became necessary for monarchical requests for tax revenue. Voting rights within these national or provincial bodies typically were held by individuals of recognized noble classes or clerical offices, appointed or elected representatives of religious orders, or geographically defined communities. Voting rights in Italian city-republics, by contrast, were restricted to citizens and, for many, required membership in one of the many recognized guilds. Although all of these assemblies relied on the idea of representation to sustain their claims to act legitimately on behalf of their members and societies, only a small fraction of the population possessed the suffrage: at best, 6 percent in the city-republics and typically far less in elections for delegates to the national assemblies. In addition, throughout this time period, voting rights in Europe were rarely extended; in fact, they often became more restrictive and exclusionary. In 1297, for example, the city-republic Venice made the suffrage an exclusively hereditary right; by 1430 only freeholders, defined as those who owned property that yielded an annual profit of at least forty shillings, were permitted to vote in English parliamentary elections.

Whereas commitments to voting rights subsequently waned in most countries in Europe, the English tradition of deriving political consent through locally elected representatives strengthened throughout the seventeenth century, extending into the governmental structures of its new American colonies. Interestingly, in the first colonial election ever held, not only were legal efforts in 1619 to exclude non-English residents from voting in Virginia overturned, but one illegal resident was elected and, after an official inquiry, seated in the colony’s first House of Burgesses. In the American colonies, and later the U.S. states, the effects of the freehold requirement also grew less severe due to inflation, the availability of land, and the redefinition of property qualification in less restrictive terms. Moreover, in contrast to the suffrage in Europe, the number of Americans eligible to vote and those voting steadily increased throughout the colonial and early national eras. To be certain, the American electorate remained small by modern standards because individuals often were barred because of their gender, age, enslaved status, religion, race, ethnicity, citizenship, residency, tax payment, literacy, mental competence, criminal conviction, and military service. There were exceptions to these exclusionary standards, including these several noteworthy ones: women, for example, were permitted to vote in New Jersey from 1776 to 1807; several American states never adopted racial or religious restrictions on the suffrage; and in the first half of the nineteenth century, property and wealth requirements for voting were eventually abandoned.

Although often misnamed universal suffrage, popular participation in nineteenth-century U.S. elections set both historical and contemporary benchmarks. In the 1840s, for example, approximately 14 percent of the U.S. population voted in presidential and state elections, whereas less than 5 percent of the British population was eligible, even after the 1832 Reform Act. More important, as French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville speculated in his political study Democracy in America, the general tendency toward universal suffrage continues to gain momentum once started, for not only will excluded groups be energized, but the democratic ideals of equality and consent offer no clear qualifications for remaining exclusions. The United States unquestionably led the expansion of suffrage rights for most of the nineteenth century, although two dozen mostly European nations guaranteed women’s suffrage before the United States finally did in 1920. Moreover, the voting rights of African Americans were not fully recognized in the United States until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, nor were those of eighteen to twenty-year-olds until 1971. The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights specified that “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government” as “expressed in periodic and genuine elections” and “by universal and equal suffrage,” and these rights and freedoms are to be honored “without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status.” Today, close to 60 percent of the population in the world resides under some form of electoral democracy, a suggestive but not decisive empirical indicator of the global momentum of Tocqueville’s historical speculation.

Bibliography:

Finer, S. E. The History of Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Katz, Richard S. Democracy and Elections. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Keyssar, Alexander. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Kromkowski, Charles. Recreating the American Republic: Rules of Apportionment, Constitutional Change, and American Political Development, 1700–1870.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Monahan, Arthur P. Consent, Coercion and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987.
Myers, A. R. Parliaments and Estates in Europe to 1789. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975.

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