Introduction

This chapter examines the removal of the property qualification for voting in the United States. All of the original thirteen U.S. states entered the revolutionary era with some sort of ownership restriction on the franchise, most often using a real estate criterion. Removal of the property qualification was neither automatic nor inexorable. The process began with Pennsylvania in 1776 and ended three-quarters of a century later. Removal was a critical democratic step, helping to transform the suffrage from a corporate privilege into a human right. The volume is focused on social scientific explanation more than narrative history. The question is why a group of incumbent politicians in whose hands decision-making rests, successfully elected and re-elected under prevailing rules, would consent to alter those rules and expand the electorate to which they are accountable. After discussing the conceptual and practical meaning of property qualification removal, the chapter reviews the main causal variables found in the literature and proceeds to develop its own preferred hypothesis, that the strategic calculations of partisan electoral advantage mattered enormously. There were four different partisan routes by which incumbents in the U.S. states found political motivation to repeal the property qualification for voting. Each was distinctive; together they resulted in significant American democratization. The different routes were determined by the prevailing pattern of party consolidation and competition, rather than by region or linear time.