| Introduction of Democracy in the NDCs | ||
|---|---|---|
| Country | Universal Male Suffrage | Universal Suffrage |
| Australia | 1903 [1] | 1962 |
| Austria | 1907 | 1918 |
| Belgium | 1919 | 1948 |
| Canada | 1920 [2] | 1970 |
| Denmark | 1849 | 1915 |
| Finland | 1919 [3] | 1944 |
| France | 1848 | 1946 |
| Germany | 1849 [2] | 1946 |
| Italy | 1919 [4] | 1946 |
| Japan | 1925 | 1952 |
| Netherlands | 1917 | 1919 |
| New Zealand | 1889 | 1907 |
| Norway | 1898 | 1913 |
| Portugal | n.a. | 1970 |
| Spain | n.a. | 1977 (1931)** |
| Sweden | 1918 | 1918 |
| Switzerland | 1879 | 1971 |
| UK | 1918 [5] | 1928 |
| USA | 1965 (1870)* | 1965 |
Sources: Therborn 1977 and Silbey 1995 for democracy indicators. Additional information from Foner 1998 on the USA and Carr 1980 on Spain. For more details on the introduction of universal suffrage, see table 3.2.
1. With racial qualifications.
2. With property qualifications.
3. Communists excluded.
4. With restrictions.
5. All men and women over 30.
* Universal male suffrage was introduced in 1870, but reversed between 1890 and 1908 through the disenfranchisement of the blacks in the Southern states. It was only restored in 1965. For further details, see the text.
** Universal suffrage was introduced in 1931 but reversed after General Franco’s military coup in 1936. It was only restored in 1977, following Franco’s death in 1975. See the text for details.
For example, during the late nineteenth century, when an electoral victory by the Social Democratic Party became a possibility, at least in local elections, Saxony abandoned the universal male suffrage that had earlier been adopted, moving over to the Prussian-style three-class voting system (which Prussia itself used from 1849 to 1918).[12] In this system, each of the three classes (classified according to income) elected the same number of delegates to the parliament, which meant that the top two classes (accounting respectively for 3-5 per cent and 10-15 per cent of the population) could always outvote the poorest class. In 1909, Saxony moved still further away from democracy by giving voters between one and four votes depending on their income and status. For example, those with a large farm gained three additional votes, while additional ballots were allotted to the well-educated and those over 50 years of age.
In the USA, black males were allowed to vote from 1870 following the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbade states to deny the vote to anyone ‘on account of race, colour, or previous condition of servitude’. However, the Southern states subsequently disenfranchised them again from between 1890 (Mississippi) and 1908 (Georgia). Not being able to introduce overtly racist measures, they instead adopted methods such as poll tax and property requirements (which also disenfranchised some poor whites), as well as literacy tests (which were applied to illiterate whites extremely leniently). After this, all but a handful of blacks in the Southern states could vote. For example, in Louisiana, 130,000 black votes were cast in the election of 1896, but in 1900 only 5,000 were cast.[13] Moreover, the threat of violence kept many of the few qualified black voters from registering and, of those who registered, from voting. This state of affairs lasted until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, introduced after the Civil Rights Movement.
In Spain, when the introduction of universal suffrage in 1931 resulted in a series of left or centre-left Republican governments, conservative forces reacted against it with a military coup in 1936, thus suspending democracy until the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1977.[14]
Although universal male suffrage among the majority (white) population was attained in most NDCs by the end of the First World War, these countries could hardly be called democracies even in the purely formal sense of the word, because women and ethnic minorities were disenfranchised. It was not until 1946 that the majority of the 19 NDCs featured in table 3.1 attained universal suffrage.
Australia and New Zealand were the first countries to give women votes (in 1903 and 1907 respectively), although Australia did not enfranchise non-whites until 1962. Norway allowed votes for tax-paying women or women married to tax-paying men in 1907, although universal suffrage was only introduced in 1913.[15] Women were only allowed to vote in the USA in 1920 and in the UK in 1928. In many other countries (for example, Germany, Italy, Finland, France and Belgium), women were not given votes until after the Second World War. In the case of Switzerland, female suffrage was granted almost a hundred years after the introduction of universal male suffrage (1971 as against 1879).
Some countries also had voting restrictions based on political creeds - Finland banned Communists from voting until 1944. In countries with significant non-white minority groups, for example Australia, there were racial restrictions. In the case of the USA, even in the Northern states, black suffrage was continuously limited right up to the Civil War. In 1821, for instance, the state of New York removed the property qualification on white voters but for black voters raised it to $250, ‘a sum beyond the reach of nearly all the state’s black residents’. By 1860, blacks (males only, of course) could vote on the same basis as whites in only five New England states.[16] Even after the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), various obstacles, both formal (e.g., literacy, ‘character’ and property requirements) and informal (e.g., threats of violence), kept blacks from the ballot boxes.[17]
Even when the NDCs achieved formal democracy, it was often of very poor quality, as in the case of many modern-day developing countries. We have already mentioned the ‘quality’ problem relating to selective enfranchisement according to race, gender and property ownership. But that was not all.
First of all, secret balloting was not common until the twentieth century. Norway, which was relatively advanced in terms of democratic institutions,[18] only introduced secret balloting in 1884. In Prussia, employers could exert pressure on their workers to vote in a particular way until the electoral reform of 1919 because balloting was not held in secret. France only introduced the voting envelope and voting booth in 1913 – several decades after the introduction of universal male suffrage.[19]
Second, vote buying and electoral fraud were also very common. For example, bribery, threats and promises of employment to voters were widespread in British elections until the late nineteenth century. The first serious attempt to control electoral corruption was the Corruption Practices Act of 1853-4. This act for the first time defined activities like bribery, ‘treating’, undue influence and intimidation, while establishing the procedures for election accounts and auditing. However, the measures were ineffective.[20] The Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act introduced in 1883 managed significantly to reduce electoral corruption, but the problem still persisted well into the twentieth century, especially in local elections.[21] In the decades following the introduction of universal male suffrage in the USA, there were numerous cases of public officials being used for party political campaigns (including forced donations to electoral campaign funds), as well as of electoral fraud and vote-buying.[22]
