The Electoral Impact of Newly Enfranchised Groups: The Case of Women’s Suffrage in the United States

How do newly enfranchised groups achieve representation of shared interests? I theorize that while suffrage expansion has the potential to sway electoral tides in favor of the newly enfranchised, such effects are conditional on the strength of a social movement that seeks to represent the group. A social movement defines the group’s shared interests and creates a mobilized pool of voters who can take electoral action to foster common goals. In testing this argument, I use evidence from the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in the United States. I employ a difference-in-differences approach that exploits the heterogeneity in the proportion of women across counties to estimate preferences of women voters and show that these preferences vary with the strength of the suffrage movement. These findings highlight that de jure inclusion of a previously disenfranchised group may not be sufficient to secure de facto representation of the group’s shared interests.