Racial Restrictions on Voting: Evidence from a New Pan-Anglophone Dataset, 1730-2000

A substantial literature studies franchise extension, focusing primarily on class-based – rather than race-based – voting restrictions. This paper constructs and analyzes a novel dataset that codes the presence of race-based restrictions on voting in 130 jurisdictions (primarily English-speaking subnational jurisdictions with substantial power to determine their electoral law) over 1730-2000. It documents extensive variation in these restrictions over time and across jurisdictions, exhibiting a cyclical pattern in sharp contrast to the continuous decline in class-based voting restrictions. To explain this variation, the paper uses a framework that emphasizes the distinction between centralized imperial control and the empowerment of local European settlers. A stacked event study analysis of the independence of colonies of settlement shows an absence of pre-trends, and implies that independence had a substantial positive effect on the probability of a racially restrictive franchise. The findings are similar but weaker for other forms of settler empowerment, such as dominion status. These results are robust to controlling for the existence and abolition of property (and other economic) qualifications for voting. They are consistent with a framework in which an imperial or federal government is less subject to capture by local settler elites, and thus more likely to promote franchise extension.