ABSTRACT
The claim that political rights should not be conditional on class, gender or race is not just a symbolic recognition of equality but is also supportive of an equal distribution of a basic political instrument for change. A century ago, this claim was at the heart of the struggle for democratization and the call for a more inclusive suffrage. A century later, we know that the call was largely successful, in at least the formal sense, as today no one would accept as democratic a political system where the vote excludes people on such grounds. In fact, it has been observed that suffrage expansions represent manifest evidence for democracy's progress in the twentieth century (Arat 1991: 52). Universal suffrage is the norm and is recognized as such by international law and in most national constitutions (Fox 1992; Wilson 2009). As concluded by Andreas Schedler (2002: 44) ‘legal apartheid’ in the realm of electoral politics is ‘not a viable model anymore’.
