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Democratic Exclusion: the Right to Vote in the United States, United Kingdom, and France University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2013 Democratic Exclusion: The Right to Vote in the United States, United Kingdom, and France David Alexander Bateman University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Labor Economics Commons, and the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Bateman, David Alexander, "Democratic Exclusion: The Right to Vote in the United States, United Kingdom, and France" (2013). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 832. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/832 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/832 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Democratic Exclusion: The Right to Vote in the United States, United Kingdom, and France Abstract This research focuses on the forms of exclusion that democratizing processes have historically facilitated. The dynamics of democratization often lead political coalitions to change electoral rules to simultaneously extend and constrict the right to vote across different categories of persons, as well as to reinforce existing exclusions. This pattern occurred in all the 'exemplary models' of early democratization, and yet the historical narratives relied on by the comparative democratization literature neglect its exclusionary dimension, and thereby misinform comparative theory building. The dissertation empirically documents the "dark side of democratization" in the three paradigmatic cases of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, and develops and tests a theory explaining cross-national and cross-time variation. At key moments in a country's development, political entrepreneurs advance ideas of community belonging for the purpose of securing a governing coalition. When successful the ideas of political community are embedded in new institutions and in public opinion, shaping the expectations of political agents across the political spectrum and resulting in higher costs of coalition-building and political mobilization across categories of people. The exclusions were thereby made resilient to subsequent democratizing processes. The dissertation advances research the role of ideas in social science by focusing on the micro-foundations of democratic exclusion. The model predicts various of political behavior that are integrally important to democratization, and is tested against debates, voting behavior, and correspondence in and outside of parliaments, legislatures, and constitutional conventions. The data draws on archival field work esearr ch, multiple datasets of legislator behavior, constituency demographics, and institutional change. These allow for the identification of stable patterns as well as change across time, and supplement a process tracing research design. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Political Science First Advisor Brendan O'Leary Keywords Comparative Politics, Democratization, Historical Institutionalism, Voting Rights Subject Categories Labor Economics | Political Science This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/832 DEMOCRATIC EXCLUSION. THE RIGHT TO VOTE IN THE UNITED STATES, UNITED KINGDOM, AND FRANCE David Alexander Bateman A DISSERTATION in Political Science Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 Supervisor of Dissertation: Brendan O’Leary, Professor of Political Science Graduate Group Chairperson: Matthew Levendusky, Associate Professor of Political Science Dissertation Committee: Brendan O’Leary, Professor of Political Science Rogers M. Smith, Professor of Political Science John Lapinski, Associate Professor of Political Science DEMOCRATIC EXCLUSION. THE RIGHT TO VOTE IN THE UNITED STATES, UNITED KINGDOM, AND FRANCE David Alexander Bateman A DISSERTATION in Political Science Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 Supervisor of Dissertation Graduate Group Chairperson Brendan O’Leary Matthew Levendusky Dissertation Committee Rogers M. SmithDissertation Committee John Lapinski DEMOCRATIC EXCLUSION. THE RIGHT TO VOTE IN THE UNITED STATES, UNITED KINGDOM, AND FRANCE COPYRIGHT 2013 David Alexander Bateman For Mary Flanagan Robert, Kate, Christopher, Justin, Mary Alma, and Martina iii Acknowledgements A refrain I have heard often since coming to the United States to begin graduate school is that a Ph.D. is a waste, a foolish investment of time and effort in pursuit of a disappear- ing career. At conferences and on campus, I would frequently hear graduate students bemoan the fact that they had chosen this path, rather than going off to make some “real money.” I naively believed this meant a yearly salary of forty-thousand dollars, and luridly imagined the elite networks that would enable them to obtain such a lucrative opportunity. I have since learned that ‘real’ has a rather surreal quality at privileged American institutions. So perhaps it is with that baseline in mind that one should eval- uate my claim that the years I spent in graduate school have been the richest in my life. I have been fortunate to a degree unmerited by talent, effort, or personal virtue. And, as tends to be the case with fortune, my own rests entirely on the efforts and support of others. I have incurred many debts to institutions and persons, and it is a great pleasure to have the opportunity to acknowledge them here. As tends to be the case with the for- tunate, I am certain that I will overlook many people and organizations whose support has been essential to the completion of this project. I apologize for the oversights. I owe a great debt to the Department of Political Science, which accepted me into its program and provided a very generous fellowship and supplementary research grants over the years. From my first days at Penn, I found the Department to be a welcoming space for a variety of research approaches and theoretical perspectives, supporting an intellectually stimulating and challenging culture that refuted narrowing and parochial tendencies within the discipline. I hope it continues to be so. I am especially grateful to the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism, which awarded me with a David Boies Family Graduate fellowship and with it the opportunity to engage on a regular basis with fascinating graduate students and (almost-as fascinating) faculty, as well as funding for research in the national archives of the United Kingdom and France. But even after the fellowship’s expiration, the DCC provided me with employment, with research support, and with the stimulation of a rich intellectual atmosphere for which I will be forever grateful. The Penn Program in Ethnic Conflict provided an early op- portunity to develop my research interests and to meet and engage with scholars from around the world, through an Andrew Mellon Sawyer Seminar fellowship for early re- search. It provided an institutional home and an intellectually stimulating and collegial environment for my first few years at Penn. The School of Arts and Sciences provided a iv generous dissertation completion fellowship, which enabled me to complete the research and writing of the dissertation. And the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at the Woodrow Wilson School has given me with the opportunity to advance this project further. My personal debts are greater than my institutional ones. Brendan O’Leary did yeo- man service as my advisor and committee chair, critiquing the argument and challenging me to take alternative perspectives. He has had a profound influence on my understand- ings of the relationship between the state and human diversity, and has consistently reminded me to pay attention to the material bases of colonialism and the human costs of exclusion and oppression. His admonitions have served as an inspiring counter to tendencies in the academy and public debate that often treat the right of a people to democratically govern themselves with a wilful and cavalier abandon. I have benefited considerably from his advice and mentorship, and working with him—on both the dis- sertation and other projects—has been a privilege and a great pleasure. Rogers Smith has consistently provided thoughtful feedback and criticism, and strongly encouraged me to pursue the question of exclusion in democratizing contexts. His own commitment to a comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter was an inspiration for the research approach attempted here. Throughout the dissertation process he has engaged with the core theoretical arguments, and his advice has been invaluable. When the dissertation threatened to become unwieldy, he both encouraged me to retain its comparative design and suggested ways in which the core theoretical and empirical points could be made more succinctly. I have been only marginally successful in this effort, but what success I have had I owe in large part to his advice. John Lapinski sparked my interest in leg- islative institutions, highlighting their centrality to democratic politics and encouraging me to empirically study their internal dynamics. Research conducted with John on how members of Congress behaved differently and had distinct preferences across relatively discrete issue areas provided an early inspiration
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