Suffrage, Capital, and Welfare

This book explores disenfranchisement and other voting barriers before and after the introduction of so-called universal suffrage. Focusing on economic voting restrictions, implemented through constitutional provisions, laws, state policies, and ad-hoc practices, we explore the many disqualifications barring people from voting in self-governing and aspiring liberal democracies, including poor relief dependency, lack of property or wealth, bankruptcy, tax debt, and low income. The notions of economic independence underpinning these exclusions built and reinforced unequal social structures, especially in terms of class, gender, race, age, civil status, and education. Examining suffrage from an economic perspective prompts new questions about democracy and political citizenship as contested concepts. This approach illuminates the histories of democratic practices, state formation, welfare states, the economic entanglements of political citizenship, gender and racial hierarchies, and the unique circumstances of colonial and settler-colonial democracies. After exploring the influence of Enlightenment ideas on liberal democratic notions of political citizenship, this introduction highlights themes that unite the chapters. These are centred around four concerns: poor relief; different experiences of suffrage at the national, provincial, and local levels; voter exclusion through policy and vernacular political practices; and colonialism.

The Norwegian Constitution of 1814, written after Napoleon’s defeat, was inspired by American and French suffrage laws; it reserved the right to vote for men who paid land taxes and high-level civil servants. The reasoning was that these men could act independently and for the common good, thus receiving trust and esteem from other eligible citizens. Consequently, to paraphrase the British sociologist T. H. Marshall, political rights in Norway were not secondary to civil rights. Economic and moral measures were also used to define honour among men on whom the vote depended. Nevertheless, Norway was the first among Nordic countries to remove an article from the constitution that suspended the vote for citizens who enjoy “or within the last year have enjoyed support for the poor.”

When constitutional reform commenced in the early 1860s in the Habsburg Monarchy, economic independence and higher education were the fundamental pillars upon which enfranchisement was built. The vote was not considered to be an individual right. Rather, elections should ensure that certain interests, based especially on property and wealth as well as learning, found adequate representation. Social change and political crises led to various electoral reforms early on. These included the introduction in Habsburg Austria of so-called universal suffrage for men over twenty-four, however, at the same time leaving economic qualifications in effect within a system of unequal representation. At the level of the Habsburg Austrian parliament electoral reform finally consented to equal representation of voters in 1907. Despite the principle of “universal” suffrage, however, it continued to exclude recipients of public poor relief, among others. This chapter will outline the complex developments of voting qualifications both on the parliamentary level and for crownland diets and local government bodies, highlighting integrations and disintegrations of economic and educational qualifications. It will also focus specifically on women voters in Habsburg Austria and discuss in which way their inclusion was specifically based on economic factors, rather than educational qualifications.

Following the institution of responsible government in 1852, New Zealand rushed towards “full” democracy. Within seventeen years manhood suffrage was won and, by 1893, all adults could vote. The feat stood foremost among the “firsts” that allowed the colony to style itself as a “social laboratory.” Unlike most competitors in the “race” to universal suffrage, New Zealand’s franchise was not accompanied by citizenship disqualification for welfare recipients. Instead, Pākehā (white settlers) had long determined that welfare would not be a public provision. Rather than distribute aid, the state regulated migration to maintain wages and alienated Māori land to settlers. 1893 constituted a turning point; thereafter the colony gradually replaced its ad-hoc charitable aid system with an expansive notion of citizenship. The vote bridged the settlers’ “world without welfare” and the social experiments of the fin-de-siècle. Nevertheless, not all enjoyed the fruits of democracy. Attending to the subsequent contraction of the polity, women’s struggle for substantive equality, and the racialized limits of citizenship—extended unequally to Māori and denied to “Asiatic peoples”—this chapter troubles Pākehā claims to have built a truly democratic society and challenges linear narratives of franchise expansion with a contingent history of Aotearoa New Zealand’s path towards universal suffrage.

On June 5, 1849, King Frederik VII signed Denmark's first Constitution, marking the shift from autocracy to constitutional monarchy. The Constitution granted suffrage to a substantial portion of the male population but excluded women, servants, criminals, bankrupt individuals and recipients of poor relief. Although amendments in 1915 extended the vote to women and servants, exclusions based on economic independence persisted until 1959, when restrictions on bankrupt individuals and criminals were lifted. The final exclusion, which affected recipients of poor relief, was abolished in 1961. However, the 1849 Constitution also established poor relief as a constitutional right, creating a conflict between the political right to vote and the social right to receive relief. This chapter examines this conflict by focusing on the public poor relief recipients and their gradual political inclusion. Through the lens of citizenship, the chapter explores the interplay between gender, marital status and the practice of citizenship at the local level, illustrating the complex relationship between political and social rights in Danish history.

In the late 1800s, Sweden had a higher proportion of disenfranchised adults compared to many European counterparts due to significant economic inequalities and a censitary suffrage system that tied voting rights to income and property ownership. Although early twentieth-century suffrage reforms weakened the link between money and voting rights, they did not eradicate it. Even with the introduction of so-called universal suffrage in 1921, financial conditions such as tax arrears and bankruptcy could still disenfranchise voters. Delving into the formal barriers to voting rights associated with financial status, this chapter traces their evolution, the lawmakers’ rationale behind them, and their impact on various societal groups. By incorporating empirical results and theoretical insights from recent studies, the chapter challenges the linear progress narrative of Sweden’s suffrage history and re-evaluates the notion that universal suffrage was won in 1921, a perspective still echoed in contemporary Swedish parliamentary commemorations.

At the turn of the twentieth century, while many nations were expanding their democratic franchises, Brazil enacted restrictive electoral reforms that severely limited voter participation. This chapter explores these antidemocratic strategies, focusing on reforms in 1881, 1904, and 1916. Ostensibly aimed at reducing electoral fraud, these reforms instead created bureaucratic barriers that excluded the poor, illiterate, and Afro-descendant populations from voting. Rooted in a so-called conservative liberalism resistant to democratisation, these measures reflected a deliberate effort by the political elite to maintain control. Through an analysis of parliamentary debates and electoral data, the chapter reveals the intentional tactics used to restrict suffrage. These exclusionary practices entrenched structural inequalities and weakened Brazil’s democratic institutions, contributing to the political instability that culminated in the First Republic’s overthrow in 1930. The study underscores how the calculated restriction of voting rights perpetuated social disparities and hindered the expansion of political participation in Brazil, shaping the nation’s political landscape for decades to come.

This chapter focuses on the politics of poor women and men in Iceland who were denied voting rights due to their dependency on poor relief. By analysing contemporary political discourses and drawing on the testimonies of excluded individuals, voting registers, and poor relief records, I demonstrate how the citizenship of the poor was contested not only at the national level but also at the local and individual levels, even at the polling station. In effect, this was a quest to uproot prejudice against those living in economic insecurity and to establish a new notion of citizenship that protected the poor from the shame associated with disenfranchisement and acceptance of social relief. First, I outline the rationale behind suffrage exclusions in Iceland. Next, I explore how the labour movement fought to include the “deserving poor” in the electorate. Then, I describe the development of the legal framework that culminated in a 1934 constitutional amendment, which enfranchised (most) of the people dependent on poor relief. Finally, I provide examples illustrating how these legal changes impacted the political citizenship of individual voters.

This chapter explores long-lasting economic and class-based restrictions on suffrage rights in Canada over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on property and taxpayer voting qualifications, and secondly, exclusions of those receiving state or charitable assistance, including the aged, sick, and poor. These prohibitions denoting class and wealth were intertwined with changing gender-based, racial, and colonial voting restrictions and structures of inequality, always in complicated ways. By focusing on legislated economic exclusions at all three levels of government, we can see how struggles over suffrage remained embedded in social and economic relations of power long after it was claimed “universal” suffrage prevailed. The paper also notes the longest barrier to voting, namely incarceration, which might be interpreted as a race and class-based exclusion. Understanding the rationales for, and longevity of exclusions based on class/property and poverty, as well as gender and race, offers a correction to whig narratives of inevitable suffrage progress, highlighting the resilient power relations, both material and ideological, which characterised a profoundly unequal society.

Although universal suffrage was implemented in Finland in national elections (1906) and in local elections (1917), poor relief recipients were, among eight other groups, excluded from voting rights. By focusing on poor relief, the chapter analyses how exclusion criteria were connected to the economic ideals of a citizen. Regular poor relief was an obstacle for voting until the 1940s and those poor relief recipients who were under the guardianship of the local board of public welfare were excluded until 1970. Moreover, voting practices were exclusive, as poor relief institutions were not accepted as polling stations until the late 1960s. By using deservingness as an analytic concept, Harjula indicates how the strict reciprocity, which defined a vote as a reward for fulfilled responsibilities—indicating independence and contribution—, was replaced by the idea of equality-based individual rights. As two societal layers of experience, these competing views resulted in complex and hierarchical lived citizenship of the poor. The combination of electoral legislation, social welfare legislation, and civil legislation intertwined civil, social, and political rights and created differing notions of belonging at the local and national levels.

Universal franchise is integral to citizenship’s promise of equality. Since they introduced the principle of collective bargaining, historically, political rights were handed down ‘cautiously,’ denying political personhood to large sections of people. The struggle for universal suffrage in India can be traced to the claims of the colonised to equality and self-determination. The adoption of universal franchise by the Constituent Assembly of India in November 1949, established political equality in a single moment of rupture. Yet, the insertion of voters in the electoral roll as individuals was difficult in a context where both access and intelligibility presented bureaucratic and political challenges. The persistence of deference in a caste-based society bound the vote to traditional systems of authority. With popular mobilisations in the late 1980s the ‘voter’ finally emerged as a significant political category. The potential of universal suffrage to attenuate the inequalities of social class has shown two tendencies—of reinforcement, where the ‘excluded’ have ushered in a different politics through the power of ‘irruption’ in the electoral domain, and of enervation—where the power to change is enfeebled by turning the working class into ‘beneficiaries’ binding them in a relationship of indebtedness to the state.