Abstract
‘With the acquisition of universal suffrage in Great Britain and the passing of the Old Prussian system’, Charles Seymour and Donald Paige Frary wrote in 1918, ‘a definite milestone on the road of political evolution has been reached’. Indeed Seymour and Frary’s optimism about the developments of a popular electoral franchise apparently knew few boundaries: ‘...if a League of Nations is to become a reality, removing trade barriers between countries, diminishing the likelihood of war, and promoting a common intercourse of things material and intellectual, there can be no reason for delimiting elections upon lines of dead frontiers’. Thus they concluded: ‘an international franchise, limited, no doubt, to elections of general interests, is a possiblity of the future’.1
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Notes
Charles Seymour and Donald Paige Frary, How the World Votes. The Story of Democratic Developments in Elections (Springfield, Mass., 1918), vol. 1, p. v, and vol. 2, pp. 310–11.
See Eric J. Evans, The Great Reform Act of 1832 (London and New York, 1994), p. 2; Javier Tusell (ed)., El sufragio universal (Madrid, 1991), pp. 17 and 118; C. Dardé, ‘El sufragio universal en España: causas y efectos’, Historia Contemporánea. Anales de la Universidad de Alicante, No. 7 (1989–90), pp. 85–101; J. Stengers, ‘Histoire de la législation électorale en Belgique’, in S. Noiret (ed.), Political Strategies and Electoral Reforms: Origins of Voting Systems in Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Baden Baden, 1990), p. 77.
Raymond Huard, Le suffrage universel en France, 1848–1946 (Aubier, 1991), pp. 9 and 101.
Tusell, El sufragio universal, p. 17, and Janet L. Polasky, ‘A Revolution for Socialist Reforms: the Belgian General Strike for Universal Suffrage’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 27 (1992), pp. 449–66.
R. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy. American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York and Oxford, 1986), p. 277. In fact, ‘many new laws redefined the eligible electorate by excluding certain people from voting and including others’, idem. See ibid., note 25 for further reading suggestions. See also R. F. Wesser, A Response to Pro-gressivism: The Democratic Party and New York Politics, 1902–1918 (New York and London, 1986). For a contemporary description of US electoral politics, see James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London and New York, 1895), vol. II.
See R. Donoso, Las ideas politicas en Chile (México, 1946), pp. 381–439; N. R. Botana, E/ orden conservador. La polÍtica argentina entre 1880 y 1916 (Buenos Aires, 1977), pp. 217–346; D. Cullen, ‘Electoral Practices in Argentina, 1898–1904’, unpublished D. Phil, thesis, University of Oxford, 1994; F. Barón, La reforma electoral (Bogotá, 1915).
P. Steinbach, ‘Reichstag Elections in the Kaiserreich: The Prospects for Electoral Research in the Interdisciplinary Context’, in L. E. Jones et al. (eds.), Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1992), p. 120.
Evans, The Great Reform Act, p. 10. Nevertheless, Evans acknowledges recent advances in the literature, providing a rather different picture of elections before 1832, of which more later in this introduction; see idem, pp. 11–4.
C. E. Chapman, ‘The Age of the Caudillos: A Chapter in Hispanic American History’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. XII (1932), p. 292; see also Seymour and Frary, How the World Votes, vol. 1, p. v, and vol. 2, p. 267.
F. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: the Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832(Oxford, 1989), pp. 2–4.
Ibid., p. 4.
Ibid., pp. 384–93.
J. H. Elliot, National and Comparative History. An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1991), p. 24.
Charles Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales. The Development and Operation of the Parliamentary Franchise, 1832–1885 (1915) (Hamden, 1970), pp. vii–viii.
These points also receive systematic attention in F.-X. Guerra, Modernidad e independencias. Ensayo sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Madrid, 1992); see in particular pp. 140, 144, 177–226, and 275–318. See also V. Peralta, ‘Elecciones, constitucionalismo y revolucin: el Cusco entre 1809–1815’, unpublished paper presented at the Instituto Ortega y Gasset, February 1994.
‘El buen cura y sus feligreses. Diálogo patriótico, acomodado a la inteligencia del pueblo para fijar su opinion estraviada sobre constitutión, y dirigir su conducta en el delicado e importantisimo asunto de elecciones’ (1820), in B. E. Buldaín Jaca (ed.), Las elecciones de 1820. La época y su publicistica (Madrid, 1993), pp. 119–48.
David Bushnell, ‘El sufragio en la Argentina y en Colombia hasta 1853’, Revista del Instituto de Historia del Derecho, no. 19 (Buenos Aires, 1968), pp. 11–29, and ‘La evolutión del derecho del sufragio en Venezuela’, Boletín Histórico, vol. 29, Caracas (May 1972), pp. 189–206.
Bushnell, ‘La evolución del derecho de sufragio en Venezuela’, p. 202. Two recent books shed light on the elections of Venezuela during the first half of the nineteenth century: A. Navas Blanco, Las elecciones presidenciales en Venezuela del siglo XIX, 1830–1854 (Caracas, 1993), and E. Gabaldón, Las elecciones presidenciales de 1835 (Caracas, 1986).
Bushnell, ’El sufragio en la Argentina y en Colombia’, p. 20.
J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London, 1967), p. 41.
Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability, pp. 41, 45, 46.
Maurice Zeitlin, The Civil Wars in Chile (Princeton, 1984); and Lia E. M. Sanucci, La renovación presidencial de 1880 (La Plata, 1955).
See my ‘Elections and civil wars in nineteenth-century Colombia: The 1875 presidential campaign’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 26, pt. 3 (Oct. 1994), pp. 621–50.
For electoral violence, see, for example, O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, pp. 255–9; I. Gilmour, Riot, Rising and Revolution. Governance and Violence in 18th century England (London, 1992), pp. 207–23; K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 388–408; R. M. Brown, No Duty to Retreat. Violence and Values in American History and Society (Oxford, 1991), p. 10; R. Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-century Brazil (Stanford, 1990), p. 141; S. Wilson, Feuding, Conflict and Banditry in Nineteenth-century Corsica (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 324–34.
See also P. Pinzón de Lewin, El ejército y las elecciones (Bogotá, 1994).
P. Rosanvallon, ‘The republic of universal suffrage’, in B. Fontana (ed.), The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, 1994).
For examples of how ‘men of certain social position... do not attend the polls’ in Argentina, see H. Sábato, ‘Citizenship, Political Participation and the Formation of the Public Sphere in Buenos Aires, 1850–1880’, Past and Present, vol. 136 (1992), pp. 142–8. A more systematic analysis of who voted in Buenos Aires is in P. Alonso, ‘Politics and Elections in Buenos Aires, 1890–1898’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 25 (1993), pp. 465–87. For the case of Chile, see J. Samuel Valenzuela, Democratización vía reforma. La expansión del sufragio en Chile (Buenos Aires, 1985). David Sowell demonstrates how artisans were heavily involved in the electoral politics of Bogotá, Colombia, since the early years of the republic; see his The Early Colombian Labor Movement (Philadephia, 1992).
See his ‘The Spanish-American Tradition of Representation and its European Roots’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 26, pt.1 (Feb. 1994), pp. 1–36.
For a study of how Santa Anna, the archetype Mexican caudillo, was unable to control the electoral process, and how contested Mexican elections were during the first half of the nineteenth century, see M. P. Costeloe, ‘Generals versus Politicians: Santa Anna and the 1842 Congressional Elections in Mexico’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 8, no. 2 (1989), pp. 257–74. An exceptional defence of the significance of elections in Mexico between 1857 and 1876 is in Daniel Cosío Villegas, La constitución de 1857 y sus critícos (Mexico and Buenos Aires, 1957), pp. 122–50.
Graham, Patronage and politics in nineteenth-century Brazil, pp. 34 and 86.
See his Coffee, Contention and Change. The Making of Modern Brazil (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford, 1990).
O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, pp. 384–5.
See, for example, M. L. Anderson, ‘Voter, Junker, Landrat, Priest: The Old Authorities and the New Franchise in Imperial Germany’, American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 5 (December 1993), pp. 1448–74.
See chapter 6 in this book.
J. H. Whyte, ‘The Influence of the Catholic Clergy on Elections in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, English Historical Review, no. 75 (1960), p. 245.
See Hoppen’s chapter in this book (chap. 5). See also his Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, p. 232.
Donoso, Las ideaspo Ifticas en Chile, p. 389.
See also Valenzuela, Democratizacion via reforma, pp. 55, 70, 72.
See also Donoso, Las ideas politicas en Chile, pp. 403–4; A. Edwards, El gobierno de don Manuel Montt, 1851–1861 (Santiago, 1932), p. 16; and I. Errázuriz, Historia de la administración Errázuriz (Santiago, 1935), pp. 312–3.
D. E. Ginter (ed.), Whig Organization in the General Election of 1790 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), p. xlvii. For a suggestive approach to electoral organisation see also: H. J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management (Sussex, 1978), and J. H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, 1991).
See P. P. Figueroa, Historia de la revolucin constituyente (1858–1859) escrita sobre documentos completamente inéditos (Santiago, 1889), pp. 479–85; and J. Heise Gonzalez, El período parlamentario, 1861–1925 (Santiago, 1982), vol. II, pp. 36–7.
E. Santos (Calibán), ‘Las causas de las derrotas’, La Linterna, 12 Feb. 1915, in his La Danza de las Horas y otros escritos (Bogotá, 1969), p. 59
Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales, p. 401.
Elliot, National and Comparative History, p. 22.
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Posada-Carbó, E. (1996). Introduction: Elections Before Democracy: Some Considerations on Electoral History from a Comparative Approach. In: Posada-Carbó, E. (eds) Elections before Democracy: The History of Elections in Europe and Latin America. Institute of Latin American Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24505-5_1
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