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]
With such expensive elections, it was no big surprise that elected officials were corrupt. In the late nineteenth century, legislative corruption in the USA, especially in state assemblies, got so bad that the future US president Theodore Roosevelt lamented that the New York assemblymen, who engaged in the open selling of votes to lobbying groups, ‘had the same idea about Public Life and Civil Service that a vulture has of a dead sheep’.[23]
In this light, the road to democracy in the NDCs was a rocky one. It was only through several decades of political campaigning (e.g., for female or black suffrage) and electoral reforms that these countries acquired even the basic trappings of democracy – universal suffrage and secret ballots – and even then its practice was swamped with electoral fraud, vote-buying and violence.
It is interesting to note that, compared to NDCs in their early stages of development, today’s developing countries actually seem to have had a better record in this regard. As we can see from table 3.2, no NDC granted universal suffrage below the level of $2,000 per capita income (in 1990 international dollars), but most of the wide selection of currently developing countries featured in table 3.2 did so well below that level of development.
Of course, many of these countries have experienced reversals in their democratic progresses in just the same way that the NDCs did, especially through military coups. However, it is important to note that, even as they were suspending elections altogether, none of the non-democratic governments in currently developing countries reintroduced selective disenfranchisement based on factors like property ownership, gender and race – factors that had been widely accepted as legitimate criteria for enfranchisement in NDCs in the early days. This shows that the idea, if not necessarily the practice, of universal suffrage is much more widely accepted in today’s developing countries than it was in the NDCs when they were at similar stages of development.
| Table 3.2 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Income per capita at attainment of universal suffrage | ||
| GDP p.c. (in 1990 international dollars) | NDCs (Year universal suffrage was attained; GDP p.c.) | Developing Countries (Year universal suffrage was attained; GDP p.c.) |
| <$1.000 | Bangladesh (1947; $585)[1] | |
| Burma (1948; $393)[2] | ||
| Egypt (1952; $542) | ||
| Ethiopia (1955; $295) | ||
| India (1947; $641) | ||
| Indonesia (1.945; $514) | ||
| Kenya (1963; $713) | ||
| Pakistan (1947; $631)[1] | ||
| South Korea (1948; $777) | ||
| Tanzania (1962; $506) | ||
| Zaire (1967; $707) | ||
| $1.000-$1.999 | Bulgaria (1945; $1.073) | |
| Ghana (1957; $1.159) | ||
| Hungary (1945; $1.721) | ||
| Mexico (1947; $1.882) | ||
| Nigeria (1979; $1.189) | ||
| Turkey (1946; $1.129) | ||
| $2.000-$2.999 | Austria (1918; $2.572) | Colombia (1957; $2.382) |
| Germany (1946; $2.503) | Peru (1956; $2.732) | |
| Italy (1946; $2.448) | Philippines (1981; ~2.526) | |
| Japan (1952; $2.277)[3] | ||
| Norway (1913; $2.275) | ||
| Sweden (1918; $2.533) | ||
| $3.000-$3.999 | Denmark (1915; $3.635) | Taiwan (1972; $3.313) |
| Finland (1944; $3.578) | Chile (1949; $3.715) | |
| France (1946; $3.819) | ||
| $4.000-$4.999 | Belgium (1948; $4.917) | Brazil (1977; $4.613) |
| Netherlands (1919; $4.022) | ||
| $5.000-$9.999 | Australia (1962; $8.691) | Argentina (1947; $5.089) |
| New Zealand (1907; $5.367)[4] | Venezuela (1947; $6.894) | |
| Portugal (1970; $5.885) | ||
| UK (1928; $5.115) | ||
| >$10.000 | Canada (1970; $11.758)[5] | |
| Switzerland (1971; $17.142) | ||
| USA (1965; $13.316) | ||
18
For example, in 1814, about 45 per cent of men were already able to vote in Norway (Nerb0rvik 1986, p. 119). Compare this with the figure (cited above) for the UK (18 per cent in 1832). See id., p. 125; Kreutzer 1996.
22
It also involved the manufacture of aliens into citizens with bribery, which was done ‘with no more solemnity than, and quite as much celerity as, is displayed in converting swine into pork in a Cincinnati packing house’, according to the New York Tribune newspaper in 1868 (Cochran and Miller 1942, pp. 159). See also Cochran and Miller 1942, pp. 158-9; Benson 1978.
23
Garraty and Carnes 2000, p. 472. Open sales of votes by them were especially widespread in the 1860s and 1870s. The group of corrupt assemblymen from both parties, called ‘Black Horse Cavalry’ demanded $1,000 per vote on railroad bills and vigorous bidding drove prices up to $5,000 per vote. The group also introduced ‘strike bills’, which if passed would greatly hinder some wealthy interests or corporation, and would then demand payment to drop the bill. As a result, some companies created lobbying organisations that bought legislation, sparing themselves from blackmail. See Benson 1978, pp. 59-60 for details.