The Logic of Franchisement

Abstract

Voting rights are a fundamental concern of democratic theorists as well as students of democratization. Yet, there has been little systematic investigation of franchisement—the process in which voting rights are extended or retracted. Historians, for the most part, are unwilling or unable to generalize from one case of franchisement to another; social scientists have either concentrated their efforts on specifying the effects of suffrage extensions or they have refined historical studies of franchise decision-making. What is needed is in-depth study of (a) the motivations and behavior of (dis)enfranchising elites (b) the politics of suffrage legislation—the bargaining which transforms individual preferences of national decision makers into voting rights statutes, and (c) the “macro-macro” relationship between franchisement—the outcome of b—and legitimization and stabilization. The first of these tasks is addressed here. Following the work of Rae (1969) and Buchanan and Tullock (1962), the suffrage decision is formalized as a constituency design problem and then shown to vary with the information the decision maker possesses regarding the likelihood of being reelected under different reforms and the probability that alternative electorates will adopt new institutional arrangements. A single, generic approach allows us to explain not only the manner in which individual entrepreneurs seek to create new electoral markets but, also, how and why “nonentrepreneurial elites” like the French Ultras behave as they do. In addition, a nonobvious aspect of elite reasoning is uncovered—the (rational) preference for an electorate which has a high probability of abstaining from indifference—and a well-known proposition concerning constituency size and political corruption is studied.