For obvious reasons, the study of the limits of American democracy is cresting just now. Scholars of American politics are discovering that it is not as immune from democratic backsliding as we might once have imagined, and studies of the United States as a case study in democratization and democratic fragility are beginning to reframe the way we think about every aspect of American politics.
No recent work pushes this project further than David Bateman’s outstanding book. In Disenfranchising Democracy, Bateman offers a compelling and truly gripping account of the connection between democracy’s expansion and its limits. He shows that the extension of voting rights in the early nineteenth century was accompanied by the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans, and he demonstrates that these two moves were closely connected as part of a common, and deeply contested, political project to define the boundaries of the US political community. Universal white male suffrage, often invoked as the first step in the progressive realization of an American democratic ideal, was purchased at a terrible price.
Bateman’s deeply researched account highlights the political processes and strategic behavior that underlay this push and pull of democratization and de-democratization; often the same actors who supported extending the franchise by dropping property qualifications also supported disenfranchising African Americans, especially in the North. Bateman takes pains to demonstrate that this double move was far from preordained by any kind of overarching ideology of white supremacy. Rather, it resulted from evolving partisan and sectional dynamics as the early republic groped toward a common definition of American “peoplehood”—in the presence of black chattel slavery, territorial expansion, federalism, and newly evolving mass political parties. The result—with tragic consequences—was the “white man’s republic,” which operated both as a description of reality (white men had political power; others did not) and as an increasingly rooted myth about “the origins, purpose, and boundaries of American political community” (p. 140).
Bateman sets this powerful American story alongside parallel nineteenth-century cases of democratization in the United Kingdom in the decades leading up to the Reform Act of 1832 and in France during the birth of the Third Republic out of the ruins of the Second Empire. In the United Kingdom, a similar dynamic prevailed; the expansion of the electorate to include the urban middle class, as well as Catholics and Dissenters, went along with the disenfranchisement of Irish peasants and many working-class voters. In France, “universal” male suffrage (that was not quite universal) prevailed as the guiding principle of the new republic, but only just. The comparison highlights the similar push–pull dynamics of party building, political strategy, and the definition of peoplehood as those that drove developments in the United States, not to advance a single compact theory but to show the common challenges of the birth pangs of democratic politics.
The book has numerous virtues. First, it punctures the common view of American political development as a story of progressive democratization. American democracy has always been uneven and precarious, as Bateman very effectively demonstrates. Second, it does not reduce the story of American disenfranchisement to an overly simple narrative of racism and white supremacist ideology. Racism and white supremacy were present, even prevalent, of course, although they were not universal, nor did they alone determine the course of American democratization. In fact, Bateman shows that a distinct conception of black disenfranchisement, rooted in ideas about the “white man’s republic,” emerged out of a series of political struggles over the franchise, especially in the context of partisan conflict and sectional tension, particularly within the Democratic Party.
Third, the book joins a growing list of works that examine American politics, and especially American political development, in comparative context. This is an intellectually compelling move for Americanists, never more so than in a moment when events have overwhelmed the American politics subfield’s unspoken presumption that a stable democratic regime underlies our efforts and that our job is merely to describe and explain the regime’s ordinary workings. In a world of democratic fragility, even in the United States, looking beyond our boundaries is essential, and Bateman offers an ingenious contribution to this expansion of our horizons. Finally, and for similar reasons, Disenfranchising Democracy is a work of powerful contemporary resonance at a moment when the boundaries of American peoplehood are once again a matter of deep contention and conflict and when American democracy is in peril as a consequence.
The narratives that drive the book’s core empirical sections are rich, well constructed, and exquisitely researched, and they highlight the powerful analytical use to which scholars of political development might put such effective narrative writing. But the cost of such narrative emphasis is that the book’s core theoretical claims and contributions occasionally seem somewhat elusive. Early on, Bateman sets his approach alongside classic macro-historical accounts of democratization by the likes of Barrington Moore, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Evelyne and John Stephens, and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. He powerfully shows how careful and close-range attention to the political dilemmas and coalition-building strategies of democratic elites can supplement these more structural accounts that focus on large and lumpy categories such as class. But the cost of this move is a somewhat fuzzier conceptual framework. The core argument is that ruling coalitions in democratic regimes must make choices in the presence of challengers to the regime, and maintaining or expanding these coalitions often involves negotiating new boundaries of the political community, which may result in enfranchising some groups and disenfranchising others. This account makes for striking and convincing accounts of the cases at hand, but it is not always conducive to crisp observable implications that might make the theory clearly portable to other places and times.
The book also provokes questions about the extent to which elites in these three countries observed and learned from each other. Britain, France, and the United States were deeply entangled with each other as colonizers and colonized, allies and antagonists, trading partners, and intellectual and political interlocutors. The American and French Revolutions and the waves of democratization that they set off were signal events in transatlantic history, celebrated by some as models to be emulated and reviled by others as horrors to be avoided. What, if anything, did these countries learn from each other as they fumbled their ways toward democracy? If there was transnational learning among these (and other) countries, we might have to rethink theories of democratization that treat individual nations as independent cases and to take questions of timing and sequence more seriously.
These cavils aside, David Bateman has produced an essential study that no student of American political development or comparative democratization—or indeed of American or comparative politics more broadly—can afford to ignore.
