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Conquered or Granted? A History of Suffrage Extensions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

Abstract

Why was franchise extended to the lower classses and to women? Was it conquered by the excluded groups, threatening that unless they were admitted as citizens they would reach for power by other, revolutionary, means? Or was it voluntarily granted by the incumbent elites? This question is examined statistically, using a new dataset covering the entire world from the inception of representative institutions until now. The general picture that emerges is that the poorer classes fought their way into the representative institutions and, once admitted, they were organized by different political parties. In pursuit of their economic and social goals, these parties sought to enhance their electoral positions, treating the issue of female suffrage as an instrument of electoral competition.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Bernard Manin, A Theory of Representative Government (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); John Dunn, Democracy: A History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005).

2 Reinhard Bendix and Stein Rokkan, ‘The Extension of National Citizenship to the Lower Classes: A Comparative Perspective’ (paper presented at the Fifth World Congress of Sociology, Washington, D.C., 1962), p. 30.

3 Adam Przeworski and Fernando Cortés, ‘Sistemas partidistas, movilización electoral y la estabilidad de sociedades capitalistas’, Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencia Politica, 2 (1971), 220–41.

4 John R. Freeman and Duncan Snidal, ‘Diffusion, Development, and Democratisation: Enranchisement in Western Europe’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 55 (1982), 299–329.

5 John P. Conley and Akram Temini, ‘Endogenous Enfranchisement when Group Preferences Conflict’, Journal of Political Economy, 109 (2001), 79–102.

6 Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, ‘Why Did the West Extend the Franchise? Democracy, Inequality, and Growth in Historical Perspective’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115 (2000), 1167–99. A more general treatment is by William Jack and Roger Lagunoff, ‘Dynamic Enfranchisement’ (unpublished, Department of Economics, Georgetown University, 2003).

7 Alessandro Lizzeri and Nicola Persico, ‘Why Did the Elites Extend the Suffrage? Democracy and the Scope of the Government, with an Application to Britain’s “Age of Reform” ’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118 (2004), 707–65.

8 Davide Ticchi and Andrea Vindigni, ‘On Wars and Political Development: The Role of International Conflicts in the Democratization of the West’ (unpublished, Department of Politics, Princeton University, 2006).

9 Nicolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, edited by Bernard Crick (London: Penguin Books, 1970), Book 1, Discourse 32.

10 Ruth Berins Collier, Paths Toward Democracy: The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

11 Humberto Llavador and Robert Oxoby, ‘Partisan Competition, Growth and the Franchise’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119 (2005), 1155–89.

12 Acemoglu and Robinson, ‘Why Did the West Extend the Franchise?’, p. 1168, explicitly note that their model is not intended to apply to enfranchisement of women: ‘Since extending voting rights to women does not have major consequences for redistribution from the rich to the poor, social values rather than redistributive motives should be more important.’

13 Moreover, this type of evidence seems to be based on the assumption that whatever happened later was a consequence of whatever occurred earlier. Since the lags between suffrage extensions and fiscal transformations vary according to the availability of data on the distribution of income, tax rates and expenditures on public goods, the causal effect of extensions cannot be identified.

14 Liberia was a private settlement of American slaves, a Commonwealth, in 1839.

15 Countries in which suffrage requirements were regulated at a sub-national level are not included in the statistical analyses as long as these requirements were de facto heterogeneous. This is why no mention is made of the United States.

16 The 1821 electoral law of Buenos Aires introduced universal suffrage but only for free males. About 12 per cent of the population was not free. See Marcela Ternavaso, ‘Nuevo régimen representativo y expansión de la frontera politica. Las elecciones en el estado de Buenos Aires: 1820–1840’, in Antonio Annino, ed., Historia de las elecciones en Iberoamérica, siglo XIX (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), pp. 65–106, at pp. 66–7.

17 The law of 1792 required direct tax payment equivalent to three days of local wages. Universal male suffrage was introduced in the Constitution of 1793 (article 4) but this Constitution never went into effect and no elections were held under it. The Constitution of 1795, which replaced it, required in turn payment of a direct tax contribution (article 8) or having participated in at least one military campaign (article 9). Moreover, it excluded domestic servants and persons convicted of bankruptcy (article 13). See the documents in Serge Aberdam et al., Voter, élire pendant la Révolution française 1789–1799 (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 2006), and a discussion in Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

18 The equivalent term in early North American history was ‘inhabitant’, defined in New Jersey in 1766 as a ‘Freeholder’, ‘Tenant for years’, or ‘Householder in Township or Precinct’. See Judith Apter Klinghofer and Lois Elkis, ‘ “The Petticoat Electors”: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807’, Journal of the Early Republic, 12 (1992), 159–93, p. 190n.

19 Hilda Sabato, ed., Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones: Perspectivas históricas de América Latina (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 2000).

20 In the original: ‘Tener una propiedad, o ejercer cualquiera profesión, o arte con título público, u ocuparse en alguna industria útil, sin sujeción a otro en clase de sirviente o jornalero’ (Peru). ‘Son ciudadanos todos los habitantes de la Republica naturales de pais o naturalizados en el que fueren casados, o mayores de diez y ocho anos, siempre que exerzan alguna profesion util o tengan medios conocidos de subsistencia.’ (Costa Rica)

21 Leticia Bicalho Canedo, ‘Les listes électorales el le processus de nationalisation de la cityoennetè au Brésil (1822–1945)’, in Raffaele Romanelli, ed., How Did They Become Voters? The History of Franchise in Modern European Representation (The Hague: Kluwer, 1998), pp. 183–206, at pp. 188–9.

22 Antonio Annino, ‘Introducción’, in Annino, ed., Historia de las elecciones en Iberoamérica, siglo XIX(México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995); Antonio Annino, ‘Vote et décalage de la citoyenneté dans les pays andins et meso-americains’, in Romanelli, ed., How Did They Become Voters? pp. 155–82.

23 Ángel Bahamonde and Jesús A. Martinez, Historia de España Siglo XIX (Madrid: Catedra, 1998).

24 These are not the only criteria that were ever used. In addition to these categories, which were used in 14,605 years, additional criteria served to exclude some ethnic groups (in 364 years), inhabitants of some territories (351), adherents of some religions (170), political sympathizers of some parties or ideologies (239), slaves (623), military personnel (1003), and priests or nuns (583). Sometimes several disqualifying criteria were used simultaneously.

25 For example, the annual income requirement in Imperial Brazil was 100 milreis in 1824, raised to 200 in 1846, and Graham reports that because of inflation everyone except for beggars and vagabonds, even servants, earned enough to satisfy this criterion. See Richard Graham, ‘Ciudadanía y jerarquía en el Brasil esclavista’, in Hilda Sabato, ed., Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones: Perspectivas históricas de América Latina (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 2003), pp. 345–70, at p. 360. As Seymour pointed out, the crucial consequences of the British reform of 1832 was not that it enfranchised many new voters but that it opened a possibility of gaining political rights by acquiring wealth (Charles Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1915)). Or, as Guizot retorted to objections against the census criterion, ‘Get rich!’ (cited in Crook, Elections in the French Revolution, p. 32).

26 Not counting the Isle of Man, which in spite of its name, allowed propertied women to vote in 1866. Among places where suffrage was regulated at a sub-national level, the territory of Wyoming was the first to institute universal suffrage in 1869. In some countries women could vote earlier in municipal elections: in Sweden unmarried women could participate as of 1863 and in the rural communes of Finland as of 1868 (see Klaus Törnudd, The Electoral System of Finland (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1968), p. 30).

27 In graphs of this type (graph box command in Stata), the horizontal line represents the median, the thick box the observations between the 25th and 75th percentile, the whiskers indicate the upper and lower adjacent values, and the isolated points are outliers.

28 This is true in Nohlen's data use here (see below). According to Justman and Gradstein, the proportion increased from 4.8 per cent in 1865 to 8.8 in 1868 (see Moshe Justman and Mark Gradstein, ‘The Industrial Revolution, Political Transition, and the Subsequent Decline in Inequality in 19th Century Britain’, Explorations in Economic History, 36 (1999), 109–27, p. 119).

29 Contractions are clearly interesting events, but they entail different theoretical considerations and a different set up of data. We already know that some contractions were perhaps inadvertent, arising from the legal standardization of the vecino suffrage. I ignore them here for the lack of space.

30 While interpreting the variable that makes the threat of revolution credible in the Acemoglu–Robinson model is slippery, they observe: ‘The fact that μ fluctuates captures the notion that some periods may be more conducive to social unrest than others’ (Acemoglu and Robinson, ‘Why Did the West Extend the Franchise?’, p. 1170).

31 Arthur S. Banks, ‘Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive’, 1996 version. See 〈http://www.databanks.sitehosting.net〉.

32 B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: The Americas, 1750–2000, 5th edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750–2000, 5th edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Africa, Asia and Oceania, 1750–2000, 4th edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

33 One of the pieces of evidence Lizzeri and Persico cite in favour of their model is that suffrage reforms increased spending on public health (see Lizzeri and Persico, ‘Why Did the Elites Extend the Suffrage?’ Section V.F).

34 Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, ‘Modernization: Theories and Facts’, World Politics, 39 (1997), 155–83.

35 Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD Development Centre, 2003).

36 B. Peter Rosendorf, ‘Choosing Democracy’, Economics and Politics, 13 (2001), 1–31.

37 Göran Therborn, ‘The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy’, New Left Review 103 (1977), 3–41.

38 Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, ‘Factor Endowments, Institutions, and Differential Paths of Growth Among New World Economies: A View from Economic Historians of the United States’, in Stephen Haber, ed., How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800–1914 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 260–306; Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, ‘Inequality, Institutions, and Differential Paths of Growth Among New World Economies’ (paper presented at the meeting of the MacArthur Research Network on Inequality and Economic Performance, Boston, 2001).

39 Tatu Vanhanen, The Polyarchy Dataset (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, see 〈http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/data/vanhanen〉, 1996).

40 Multinomial logit estimates, conditioned on lagged franchise being less than universal, generate very similar results.

41 Since according to Ticchi and Vindigni, ‘On Wars and Political Development’, extensions should precede military mobilizations, I also replicated all the analyses using the rate of growth of military personnel during the next year. This variable behaves in the same way as the current size of the military, that is, it never matters.

42 I replicated all the analyses using gross death rates rather than infant mortality. The results are always the same.

43 Ticchi and Vindigni, ‘On Wars and Political Development’, p. 3; italics added.

44 Aberdam et al., Voter, élire pendant la Révolution française 1789–1799, p. 265.

45 Gabriela Soriano, ‘Introducción’, to Simón Bolívar, Escritos politicos (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1996), pp. 11–41.

46 Cited by Therborn, ‘The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy’, p. 14.

47 War periods are never distinct from periods that are neither before nor after wars.

48 Extensions that consist of lowering the age of eligibility are also less likely before wars, much more likely during post-war periods, and much more likely when more countries have universal suffrage. Of the other variables, only per capita income matters, with a highly significant positive sign. There were 158 such extensions, thirty coinciding with extensions by other criteria, but most of them, ninety-eight, occurred when franchise was already universal.

49 Note that Lott and Kenny, as well Abrams and Settle, find that welfare expenditures increased, respectively in the United States and in Switzerland, when women gained the right to vote. But this is not evidence that the men who supported votes for women were motivated by a desire to expand these expenditures. Moreover, neither study considers selection bias (see John R. Lott and Lawrence W. Kenny, ‘Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and the Scope of Government?’, Journal of Political Economy, 107 (1999), 1163–98; Burton A. Abrams and Russell F. Settle, ‘Women’s Suffrage and the Growth of the Welfare State’, Public Choice, 100 (1999), 289–300).

50 Przeworski and Limongi, ‘Modernization’.

51 Peter H. Lindert, Growing Public, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 171–4.

52 Wilhelmine Germany is a complicated case. Acemoglu and Robinson, ‘Why Did the West Extend the Franchise?’ use it in support of their claim that suffrage came later in countries with strong working-class movements, but in fact a broad male suffrage was introduced in Germany at the time of unification and they have to revert to ad hoc arguments that it was ineffective. Moreover, Lindert (Growing Public, p. 173) points out that Bismarck's insurance programmes had a miniscule redistributive component.

53 Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

54 Cited by Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour, 2nd edn (London: Merlin Press, 1975), p. 69.

55 Douglas Verney, Parliamentary Reform in Sweden, 1866–1921 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 208.

56 William Alexander Jencks, The Austrian Electoral Reform of 1907 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), pp. 41–5.

57 Adrien de Meeus, History of the Belgians (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), p. 332.

58 Therborn, ‘The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy’, p. 8.

59 Törnudd, The Electoral System of Finland, p. 28.

60 Cited in Susan Dunn, Jefferson's Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin), p. 23.

61 Cited in Crook, Elections in the French Revolution, p. 46.

62 Francisco Gutiérrez Sanin, ‘La literatura plebeya y el debate alrededor de la propriedad (Nueva Granada, 1849–1854)’, in Hilda Sabato, ed., Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones: Perspectivas históricas de América Latina (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 2003), pp. 181–201, at p. 185.

63 Natalia Sobrevilla, ‘The Influence of the European 1848 Revolutions in Peru’, in Guy Thomson, ed., The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Americas (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2002), pp. 191–216, at p. 196.

64 Roberto Gargarella, Los fundamentos legales de la desigualidad: El constitucionalismo en América (1776–1860) (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2005), p. 120.

65 Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963), p. 277.

66 Montesquieu, De l’ésprit des lois (Paris: Gallimard), p. 155.

67 Cited in Crook, Elections in the French Revolution, p. 13.

68 Restrictions of political rights based on religion were also couched in a universalistic language, but the appeal was not to reason but to common values. From Rousseau and Kant to J. S. Mill, everyone believed that a polity could function only if it is based on common interests, norms or values. Following on the Spanish Constitution of 1812, the cement holding societies together was to be Catholicism: of the 103 Latin American constitutions studied by Loveman, eighty-three proclaimed Catholicism as the official religion and fifty-five prohibited worship of other religions. While many arguments for restricting political rights to Catholics were openly directed against the principle of popular sovereignty – ‘it is not for people to change what God willed’ – quite a few were pragmatic. For example, the Mexican thinker Lucas Alamán maintained in 1853 that Catholic religion deserves support by the state, ‘even if we do not consider it as divine’, because it constitutes ‘the only common tie that connects all Mexicans, when all others are broken’ (cited after Gargarella, who provides other examples). See Brian Loveman, The Constitution of Tyranny: Regimes of Exception in Spanish America (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1993); Gargarella, Los fundamentos legales de la desigualidad, p. 93.

69 A speech by Senator Abdón Cifuentes, cited in Erika Maza Valenzuela, ‘Catolicismo, Anticlericalismo y la Extensión del Sufragio a la Mujer en Chile’, Estudios Politicos, 58 (1995), 137–97, at p. 153.

70 This is not to say that all restrictions of franchise were justified in a universalistic manner. For example, the Polish Constitution of 2 May 1791 asserted in Paragraph VI that ‘deputies to the local parliaments ... should be considered as representatives of the entire nation’ (italics in the original). Yet to become a deputy to the local parliaments (sejmiki, which, in turn elect deputies to the national legislature, the sejm) one had to be a member of a legally defined group, the gentry (szlachta). In turn, only members of the hereditary gentry could own land entitling to political rights. In fact, the Polish justification for privileging gentry was not reason but ‘Respect for the memory of our forefathers as founders of free government’ (Article II) (Jerzy Kowecki, Konstytucja 3 Maja 1791 (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1991). Simón Bolívar used the same principle in 1819 when he offered positions of hereditary senators to the ‘liberators of Venezuela, … to whom the Republic owns its existence’ (Bolívar, Escritos politicos, p. 109).

71 Cited in R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: Vol. II. The Struggle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 230. Hamilton formulated something like this syllogism in his Plan for the National Government, delivered at the Convention on 18 June: ‘In every community where industry is encouraged, there will be a division of it into the few and the many. Hence separate interests will arise. There will be debtors and creditors, etc. Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few.’ Yet he thought, like Madison, that this effect could be prevented. Hamilton’s speech is in Ralph Ketcham, ed., The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates (New York: Mentor Books, 1986), p. 75.

72 James Madison, The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, edited by Gary Wills (New York: Bantam Books, 1982).

73 A note written at some time between 1821 and 1829, in Ketcham, ed., The Anti-Federalist Papers, p. 152.

74 Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 98.

75 Collini, Winch and Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics, p. 107.

76 Thomas B. Macaulay, Complete Writings, Vol. 17 (Boston and New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1900), p. 263.

77 Cited by Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 23.

78 Immanuel Kant, ‘The Principles of Political Right’ [1793], in Kant's Principles of Politics, edited and translated by W. Hardie, B.D. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1891), p. 38.

79 An observation made by Sieyes, according to Pasquale Pasquino, Sieyes et L'Invention de la Constitution en France (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1998), p. 71. Note, however, that perhaps the most powerful of them all, Queen Victoria, adamantly opposed female suffrage.

80 Why were women not independent in the same way as some men were? If women could not own property, they were legally barred from qualifying for suffrage just by this criterion. But where they could and did own property in their own name, why would property ownership not be a sufficient indicator of reason? Condorcet, who defended property qualifications, thought it should be: ‘The reason for which it is believed that they [women] should be excluded from public function, reasons that albeit are easy to destroy, cannot be a motive for depriving them of a right which would be so simple to exercise [voting], and which men have not because of their sex, but because of their quality of being reasonable and sensible, which they have in common with women.’ Condorcet [1785], ‘Essai sur l'application de l'analyse a la probabilité des décisions rendues a la pluralité des voix’, in Sur les élections et autres texts, textes choisis et revus par Olivier de Bernon (Paris: Fayard, 1986), pp. 9–176, at p. 293. And Chilean suffragettes claimed, ‘Wives and mothers, widows and daughters, we all have time and money to devote to the happiness of Chile.’ (An article in El Eco, 3 August 1865, cited in Maza Valenzuela, ‘Catolicismo’, p. 156.) Yet these were isolated voices.

81 Helen Kendrick Johnson, Woman and the Republic (1913), http://www.womenhistory.about.com. Klinghofer and Elkis, ‘The Petticoat Electors’, dispute that including women was simply an error, but I find their evidence unpersuasive.

82 Maza Valenzuela, ‘Catolicismo’.

83 Trevor Lloyd, Suffragettes International (London: American Heritage Press, 1971), p. 14.

84 Indeed, in the four countries for which this information is available, only 1.6 per cent of adult women were employed in non-manual occupations in Germany as late as of 1907, only 2.4 per cent in Denmark in 1901, 2.8 per cent in France in 1901, and 1.5 per cent in Sweden in 1900. Only after the First World War did this proportion surpass 5 per cent in all these countries.

85 Lloyd, Suffragettes International; Collier, Paths Toward Democracy, p. 78.

86 For the argument that women are more risk-averse than men, see Lott and Kenny, ‘Did Women’s Suffrage …?’

87 According to Lloyd, Suffragettes International, p. 101.

88 Therborn, ‘The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy’; Lloyd, Suffragettes International, p. 101.

89 Jean Stengers, ‘Histoire de la législation électorale en Belgique’, in Serge Noiret, ed., Political Strategies and Electoral Reforms: Origins of the Voting Systems in Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1990), pp. 76–107, at p. 87.

90 Herbert Tingsten, Political Behavior: Studies in Election Statistics (Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press, 1973).

91 Erik Allardt and Pertti Pesonen, ‘Cleavages in Finnish Politics’, in Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds, Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: The Free Press, 1967), pp. 325–66.

92 Juan J. Linz, ‘Cleavage and Consensus in West German Politics: The Early Fifties’, in Lipset and Rokkan, eds, Party Systems and Voter Alignments, pp. 283–322, at p. 191.

93 Mattei Dogan, ‘Political Cleavage and Social Stratification in France and Italy’, in Lipset and Rokkan, eds, Party Systems and Voter Alignments, pp.129–96, at p. 161.

94 The timing in Norway is perhaps explained by the defeat of the Liberal party by the Right in 1909.

95 Lindert, Growing Public, Table 5.5.

97 Verney, Parliamentary Reform in Sweden, p. 205.

98 Irma Sulkunen, ‘The Women's Movement’, in Max Engman and David Kirby, eds, Finland: People, Nation, State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 178–92.

99 Bhuttan, which had family-based representation is not included below. Saudi Arabia had no franchise rules before 2001.

100 Dieter Nohlen, Enciclopedia Electoral Latinoamericana y del Caribe (San Jose: Instituto Americano de Derechos Humanos, Costa Rica, 1993); Dieter Nohlen, ed., Elections in the Americas: A Data Handbook, Volume 1: North America, Central America, and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Dieter Nohlen, Michael Krennerich and Bernhard Thibaut, eds, Elections in Africa: A Data Handbook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Dieter Nohlen, Florian Grotz and Christof Hartmann, eds, Elections in Asia and the Pacific: A Data Handbook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Dieter Nohlen, ed., Elections in the Americas: A Data Handbook, Volume 1: North America, Central America, and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Danièle Caramani, Elections in Western Europe since 1815: Electoral Results by Constituencies (London: Macmillan, 2000).

101 More precisely, this row also includes cases in which in the previous history of a country qualification for suffrage was decided by sub-national units and was heterogeneous.

102 See Banks, ‘Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive’.

103 See Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, volumes cited in fn. 32.

104 See Maddison, The World Economy.

105 See Vanhanen, The Polyarchy Dataset.