Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Extension of Suffrage as Policy Innovation: A Comparative Study of the American States

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This Doctoral Dissertation provides an explanation of the extension of suffrage rights in a federal system. The ultimate question is: what does it take for a previously excluded group to successfully lobby for the right of electoral inclusion? While other scholars have treated the behavioral explanation of mass activism for suffrage rights and the institutional explanation of policy enactment as separate endeavors, the Principal Investigator argues that the two are too highly interconnected to be understood independently. Understanding when and how movements for political incorporation succeed requires understanding how the processes of activism and institutional constraints interact. The project will explicitly endeavor to combine theoretical frameworks from the literature on social movements that seek to explain the development and maintenance of activism, with the literatures in political science that seek to explain processes of policy enactment (e.g., political parties, legislative institutions, and policy innovation) to offer a new and more complete explanation of the process of enfranchisement. To answer this fundamental question about the American political system, the Principal Investigator studies the struggle for adoption of woman suffrage. Woman suffrage measures were considered and adopted by states through legislative enactment, constitutional convention, and popular referendum. Some of these measures provided for only presidential suffrage, some only primary suffrage, some full suffrage. Thirty years passed between the earliest and latest state-level adopters of woman suffrage. It is through investigation of this variance that we can discover the institutional and socio-political factors that make expansion of the right of electoral participation more or less possible for previously excluded groups. The research design combines an event history approach to analysis of in all forty-eight states with in-depth archival research on the consideration of woman suffrage (in a sample of six states). The national data analysis models the time to adoption of woman suffrage in the states as a function of social and institutional conditions, including: partisan competition, electoral strength of third parties, racial and sex composition of the population, economic conditions, organization of woman suffrage interests, and the difficulty of the state initiative and constitutional amendment processes. The archival work is conducted in states chosen explicitly for their variance on these conditions. This allows the Principal Investigator the ability to trace the processes through which each of these factors comes to matter in the struggle by disenfranchised groups for their political inclusion.