Search Results

Small, homogeneous communities in medieval and early modern times were able to make consensual social choices by voting with relatively broad voting rights. In complex societies in modern times, the enlargement of the electorate until introducing universal suffrage rights was developed with different enfranchisement paces, electoral rules, and party systems, producing different degrees of political instability.

Civil rights litigation in the USA successfully interpreted the 1965 Voting Rights Act as implying the right of minority voters to elect the candidates of their choice. This gave the impetus to ‘race‐conscious districting’, which created voting districts in which minority citizens (primarily Black and Latino) formed a voting majority. This chapter explores the success of this in raising the proportion of black representatives but also the problems this mechanism has generated. It uses this case study to argue the importance of combining a politics of ideas with a politics of presence.

This chapter discusses the paradoxical ways that the Civil War served to strengthen states’ rights. Abolition was countered in many states by the enactment of “the Black Codes”, undermining the voting rights and equal protection that had ostensibly been granted to newly freed slaves. The author argues that these developments affect American life to this day, in the forms of felon disenfranchisement and discrimination, and in instances of denial of equal justice under law, such as the 1973 Rodriguez case.

This chapter begins by reviewing arguments that supporters of felon disenfranchisement have used to frame the public debate. But the contemporary arguments in support of felon disenfranchisement do not help us understand how these laws came into existence in the first place. We must instead look to the legal, political, and historical record to understand how we got to this point. The denial of political rights to criminal offenders can be found under very different types of democratic (and protodemocratic) regimes, and the practice has been a hot topic of philosophical debates since at least Aristotle. Understanding this history requires exploration of premodern political regimes and legal systems, classical philosophical writings, and their enduring traces in contemporary legal and political discourses. That is the goal of this chapter. But before exploring how and why societies disenfranchise, we must first ask why the right to vote became—and has remained—a bedrock of democratic governance.

Chapters 1 and 2 endeavored to describe and analyze the origins of modern felon disenfranchisement laws, as well as highlight the peculiarities of the American case. This chapter now asks who these disenfranchised citizens are. How many are there? How and when are their rights restricted? When are they restored? And do the laws have a disproportionate racial impact today?

This chapter considers a range of policy and political proposals for reenfranchisement. It suggests that the key long-term reforms require reconsideration of all voting restrictions on disenfranchised felons. The issue can be broken down into three separate questions: restoring voting rights for people who have completed their entire sentence (ex-felons); restoring voting rights for people who remain under supervision of the criminal justice system on probation or parole, but live in their communities (nonincarcerated felons); and restoring voting rights for currently incarcerated felons.

This chapter examines how the federal government and black protest organizations intervened in southern authoritarian enclaves, with a particular focus on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as the reform of the National Democratic Party during the period 1964–1972. It first considers state authorities' consensus preference for effecting a “harnessed revolution” before discussing the challenges posed by the Civil and Voting rights acts to southern enclaves. It then describes the degree to which outsiders interfered in enclaves' responses to these landmark statutes, including federal oversight of voting rights in the Deep South and deployments by black protest organizations. It concludes by analyzing the McGovern–Fraser national Democratic party reforms of 1968–1972.

This chapter studies and rebuts a variety of objections to the argument that hold that abstention involves a loss of autonomy for the individual. Some might see abstention as a violation of autonomy. To abstain means to cede political judgment to others and to give up one's own independent judgment. The chapter argues against this. First, deferring to others does not always involve a troubling loss of autonomy. Second, the idea that voting gives the voter significant autonomy or control is implausible anyway. So long as one has an equal right to vote, choosing not to vote can be an autonomous act, a way of expressing one's will that the best outcome be achieved.

This chapter presents a case study of women's enfranchisement in the United States. It argues that the formation of a broad coalition of women, symbolized by growing membership in a large non-partisan suffrage organization, in combination with competitive conditions in state legislatures, was crucial to securing politicians' support for women's suffrage in the states. The chapter first gives a broad overview of the phases of the US suffrage movement, arguing that the salience of political cleavages related to race, ethnicity, nativity, and class influenced the type of movement suffragists sought to build. It then describes the political geography of the Gilded Age, showing how the diversity of political competition and party organization that characterized the several regions mirrors the pattern of women's enfranchisement across the states.

This chapter presents a case study of women's enfranchisement in France. It considers evidence for the role religious cleavage played in hampering French suffrage politics. It argues that Catholicism influenced both the incentives of leaders in the Radical Party and the motivations of women who were suffragists. The first section delves into the rules governing electoral politics and the groups that were empowered throughout the period. The second section gives a brief introduction to the campaign for women's suffrage in France after 1870. The third section analyzes the failure of suffrage reform in the French legislature. In 1919, when a bill for women's suffrage was debated in the Chamber of Deputies, an amalgamation of Socialists, conservative republicans, some Radicals, and parties of the right brought it to a majority vote. But many among the Radicals, and nearly every member of Georges Clemenceau's cabinet, voted against the measure.

In a public company, ownership is dispersed among small shareholders, causing a separation between ownership and control. This chapter discusses the role of takeovers and voting rights in limiting the ability of a management team to pursue its own goals rather than maximizing the company's public value. Using a general model of the effects of security‐voting structure on control transactions, it is shown that, under a reasonable set of assumptions, the optimal structure is a single class of shares with votes attached (‘one share‐one vote’). The author also discusses situations in which departures from ‘one share‐one vote’ may be optimal and relates the results to the empirical evidence.

All complex societies have states, and they are extraordinarily important, but it is vital not to conflate states and their powers with the institutions of the civil sphere. States are organizations that exercise social control in formal and explicit, if sometimes indirect ways, by requests if possible, by commands if necessary, and by force if nothing else will do. The goals of government and its ends, are established by forces outside state organization itself. At the head of state organization sits an authority that is instituted by some nonbureaucratic power, which aims to make the bureaucracy work in its own interests and name. This chapter discusses civil power; the instrumental science of politics; constructing and destructing civil power; the right to vote and disenfranchisement; parties, partisanship, and election campaigns; and civil power in the state.

This chapter discusses the growing number of citizens who have criminal records and the ways in which those records are increasingly being openly shared with the public. It also reviews the evidence on how a criminal record affects an offender's right to vote, qualify for public assistance, find work, or retain his parental rights. The restrictions on employment and housing create formidable obstacles to law-abidingness. One has to question whether we are jeopardizing public safety by making it so difficult for released prisoners to succeed.

This chapter discusses the different social scientific arguments about women's enfranchisement. It evaluates several alternative explanations of women's enfranchisement, such as economic modernization, growth in women's labor force participation, sex ratios, and warfare, that have been generated from scholarship on male democratization. It lays out an alternative argument that links political cleavages and electoral competition to politicians' and suffragists' strategies surrounding suffrage. Drawing on the massive literature on suffrage movements, which has historical and social scientific branches, the theory forms insights into the tensions among suffragists and between suffrage organizations, and outlines the political hurdles that suffragists must overcome to make suffrage bills become law.

The survey results described in Chapter 5 provide useful information about the political orientations of people who have had contact with the criminal justice system. Yet those results also suggest new questions: why offenders hold the political views they do, and how those views are driven by underlying values or dispositions, how they are not well captured by a survey instrument (however well designed). This chapter begins to address these issues using information from in-depth interviews. These interviews allow felons to articulate their views within their own frames rather than those provided by survey questions. Respondents were asked questions such as the following: What kinds of political experiences have you had? Do you expect to participate in politics in the future? Are any political issues especially salient to you, and if so, why? How did losing the right to vote affect your ideas about being a part of a community, and about your government?

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to analyze and interpret felon disenfranchisement laws in the United States. It examines whether and how large-scale disenfranchisement impacts democratic processes; how racial factors might help to explain the origins and impacts of these laws; and the importance of the right to vote in weaving former offenders back into the social fabric. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Although there are plenty of signs that the German model of corporate governance is indeed forced into a transition to a more capital market-oriented one, the remnants of the old modus operandi persist. In portraying the traditional legal foundations of German corporate governance, the present chapter first explores how such archetypal internal structures as the dual board system, mandatory labour codetermination and the specific legal regime for groups of companies are embedded in the fundamental structure of German corporate law.

It then outlines some of the issues that define the ongoing transition process. The basic general thrust of this part is that the traditional corporate governance system, which has long been dominated by a focus on the legal rules determining the inner structures of the corporation, is more and more integrating new elements of an emerging body of capital market laws leaving German stock corporations under the governance of a non-uniform set of rules. Recent developments such as the German takeover law and the German Corporate Governance Code will further strengthen capital market orientation, but the final outcome of this process of modernisation cannot be assessed clearly yet.