Winning wars based on principles, whenthose principles have political costs and consequences, is tough work

Whatis required of those demanding voting rights in this model is a willingness toexpend their resources for causes other than their own enfranchisement.

conveying political cohesion of the disfranchised groupthrough activism is key for those seeking new voting rights.

Strong sentiments of shared identity and linked fortunes, how-ever, can be particularly effective tools for mobilization and can encourage andfacilitate coalitional partnerships

Only groups perceived as politically cohesive, through the lenses ofthose holding political power, should be targets for strategic enfranchisement

We commonly refer to race, class, andgender as markers of such identities.

Even just a few third party legislators could exert significant pressureon state lawmaking bodies to pass voting rights measures when those bodiesare otherwise evenly split between the major parties.

Instead, the issue of capacity is simply of there being a sufficientnumber of lawmakers electorally vulnerable to the demands of the pro-suffragecoalition

third parties can be tremendous allies for would-be voters

The relative size of the constituent group, its previous partisancommitments, and the competitiveness of electoral politics all help shape thisunderstanding

That is, political competition is also integral toencouraging the expansion of the electorate in the programmatic model, butthat competition needs to be linked to the group of existing voters making thesuffrage demand.

specific threat of electoral consequence for failure torespond to existing voters’ demands for new voting rights policies.

nterest groups to use the issue of enfranchisementas one that might help advance their primary cause by building or maintainingtheir organizational capacity

It isthis leverage that gives interest groups power to influence policymaking

does not require the group to beenfranchised to seem likely to coalesce politically with those demanding theirinclusion.

because incentive derives from accommodation of constituentpreferences that may cross party lines

face of unclear or diffuse expectations of the voting behavior of the would-benew voters.

perhaps, at the state level, acrosstwo successive sessions of the legislature – or be able to call and control aconstitutional convention

clearly lack incentive to pay the costs associated withbroadening the electorate; the potential gain in support is not worth the risk toa winning status quo.

I discuss how both identity politics and specific demand-sideactions can help provide relevant signals in the next section)

hat the institutional path to change is particularly difficult, that the costsof implementing the new policy are necessarily broadly shared, and that themost direct tool of the policy beneficiaries’ influence on the outcome is missing.

the informationabout potential payoffs – is established.

is an excellent opportunity for partisanpoliticians to have their voting rights cake and eat it, too

mobilization

Thus,the referendum process is, in fact, a constraint on the elite politics of suffrageextension.

There are other implications of the legislative process for voting rights policychanges.

Legislators’ positions, then, are a balancing of theopinions or preferences of salient members of their constituencies and theirown preferences; the election process induces a fair level of agreement betweenthe two, calculations about the ability to explain the vote to those who careaccounts for the choice when preferences diverge.

legislation needs advocates to move forward andis vulnerable to the exercise of partisan control

What happens inside the committee, however, is not simply a function ofthe positions each member holds on the issue

but they can provide ample opportunity for defeat even by an opponent whois in the minority.

including legislativesuper-majorities,

In contrast, the party apparatus, designedto influence elections, could be a most effective ally or formidable obstacle inachieving the necessary public vote.

It also implies that the potential voter-preference-based payoffs need to be perceptible; the certain costs of suffrageextension must be outweighed by a real possibility of benefits.

acquiescence to existing voters is afar more likely model of enfranchisement than the broadening of the electoratesimply for the sake of the new voters’ future electoral support.

influence over the institutional hurdles that suffrage changes must cross –legislatures and, often, elections.

nor the threat thereof.

notably the significant constraints legislative institutions place on elites’ability to enact their desired suffrage policy

an organized endeavor to control the governmentthrough running candidates for elective office.

If greater democracy(extension of the franchise) implies a poorer median voter, and hence higherlevels of redistribution, why would elites choose to extend voting rights?

control over social and economic policy, as well as government coffers

for after each concession thestrength of the democracy increases, and its demands increase with its strength

residing

disfranchisement ofconvicted criminals of various sorts also began to appear in state constitutions

holding new immi-grant influxes out of the electorate.

1860s and 1870s.

by 1840, twenty oftwenty-six state constitutions included such clauses.

I explain the utility of using woman suffrage as a case to test thetheoretical expectations implied by that framework

engendered by electoral considerations and politicalinstitutions

either on the role of political elites oron the role of social movements in bringing about changes in electoral qual-ifications. One might label these two lines of investigation “supply-side” and“demand-side” accounts of the politics of voting rights

I turn to state politics to explain how and whyAmerican women won the right to vote.

Given the logic of enfranchisement articulated in the second chapter,this interaction suggests that heightened mobilization can lead one partyor another (or possibly multiple parties) to believe they would have anadvantage in mobilizing women in future elections.

it would be a very wise act of public policy” to consider the issue inthe House.

There is no consistent pattern between suffrage reformand prohibitionist policy in the States.

In my view, progressive reforms,and the acceptance of women in states where progressivism was stronger,may themselves stem from the factors that drove franchise reform,namely, increased political competition vis-à-vis the other regions

Table 4.2 shows that there are no statistically significant regionaldifferences in the adoption of the Australian ballot or initiative rightsbefore suffrage was extended to women.

56.25

0 100 11.11 88.89 11.11 88.89

On the other hand, as the runner-up to winner grows, weshould expect this to positively interact with suffrage as competition isincreasing

Mobilization

Runner

Majority

Parties had thelongest lives in the Northeast and the South, and the Southern parties hadmuch larger winning margins than parties in the rest of the country

North

had the largest margins in the South

Idiosyncratic

Allof the studies cited describe a distinctive politics in the western US thatmay have driven women’s early enfranchisement.

by courting new andunattached constituencies

voters in the West weremore likely to do so (10.7 percent switched parties in the same period)

This meant that state-specific political environ-ments would be crucial to determining which parties would supportwomen’s suffrage

many progressive Democrats claimedthat they came around to the issue of suffrage because of the supposedlymoral force women were to exercise on politics

Republican

It is preciselybecause politicians were concerned that women and men had differentinterests, and that women were not a sure bet for their party, that theyresisted reform

we must turnto how politicians responded to women’s entreaties for the vote.

Consider

Suffrage

might vote if pressedinto the necessity by the voting of all sorts of other women.

expediency

Democrats could win a bigger share of the votewith just black men voting than if all men and women could cast ballots

Not onlywould women’s suffrage reinforce white hegemony in the South, but alsowould end the question of regional fanaticism and push the North outof southern politics.

that the challenge of forming a broad feministconsciousness rises in the presence of extreme levels of inter-groupinequality.

which they hadno intention of jeopardizing by stirring up an unnecessary tempest overwoman suffrage.

After Reconstruction, whitebourgeois suffragists, even those who had been staunch abolitionists,focused their energy on mobilizing women that were educated andrelatively well-off into their ranks. Hoping to prove to the public thatthe majority of women did want the vote, suffragists generally formednon-partisan organizations.

mobilization of the working class became an explicitpart of suffrage strategy through which important victories in Californiaand eventually New York were achieved through assiduous mobilizationof the working classes in the major cities.

as well as the national parties’ concerns that they would losewomen’s votes in the states with suffrage if they failed to support anamendment, paved the way to the national reform.

Hence there is good evidence that politicalcompetition and women’s mobilization were important in the momentsthat led to women’s suffrage in the states.

working classes and adopted new strategies ofraising awareness and new forms of organization that proved critical tostate legislative change

lack of voting rights in many forms in the South

geography of national suffrage rights for women.The darkest shaded states gave women suffrage in the full gamut ofelections, on equal terms a

Timeline

used their enormous organized power to block every move on behalf ofwoman suffrage.

and therefore reward women with morefreedom under the new regime than they had enjoyed under the old

why the western United States wereearly adopters of women’s suffrage when, by conventional accounts, themovement was stronger in the East;

they were able to block women’s suffrage for two decades

married French women had easier accessto divorce by consent than women in the US and the UK, and unlikewomen in the US, married or pregnant French women were not easy toforce out of their jobs.

boldest

the Swiss parties did notneed women’s votes to maintain political power, and thus had littleincentive to pursue reform

didnot need the extra votes in order to win.

and whenthere was some degree of ambiguity about women’s preferences, partiessubject to high levels of political competition become open to the challengeof fighting over the women in the middle.

The uncertainty surrounding women’s future loyalties drove abias toward the status quo electoral rules that could only be overcomewhen competition was high or during a moment of political realignment.

why in many countries the longest standingresistance to women’s inclusion came from centrists

but not limited to,freedom of the press, secret voting, direct-election of all legislative houses,and voting rights for all citizens.

but where the United States, asan occupying power after the Second World War, pushed for the reformin its postwar constitution.

USA

universal franchise bill (14 percent of today’scountries), as a result of external imposition (30 percent), gradually, aftersome men had already gained political voice (42 percent)

That is to say, why did male politicians agree to extend the voteto women?

they communicated throughunauthorized channels, exploited vulnerabilities in shared infrastructure, gained internetaccess, and accessed third-party systems.

cures for diseases, long life spans, unlimited wealth, the end of work, etc. “The analogy that Iwould give is to retirement,” he told me. “If we successfully build superintelligence and it goes well, then it’llbe kind of like humanity itself is now the elderly retired part of the family.”

We need a global monitoring bodysimilar to what we have for uranium enrichment.

switch

“This A.I. model wasn’t even trying to be malicious,” Mr. Lieu said. “The model was just trying to complete atask. And that is one of the problems with A.I. models: They are relentless at what they’re trying to do.”

“Insofar as something scary or problematic was happening, anyone could sortof point it out and start a conversation about it online.”

Mr. Kokotajloestimates the odds of a globally catastrophic A.I. outcome are around 70 percent and told me he wasn’tbothering to save for his retirement

We need A.I. cops.

Chloé Bakalar, OpenAI’s head of ethics, left the company less than a year after joining,and Dylan Scandinaro is no longer in his role as OpenAI’s head of preparedness

We found that GPT-5.6 Sol would often uncritically adopt the perspective of the agent in thetranscript it was reviewing, and we are concerned that the anecdotes it selected and the summaries it wrotemay present an overly charitable picture,”

. “We need a formal incident-reporting obligation, right?” he said. “Youhave to, like, actually share the information with the government.”

said

Take an air crash investigator approach.

It would be ugly.

I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.

begging

for the U.S. government to please come and regulate them as soon as possible. We havenever seen anything like it.

Even

the ability of these A.I.s will continue to increase,which has Ms. Cotra worried about human disempowerment and perhaps even a total loss of control

ood suffrage, perhapsmost telling observation is that the western or frontier states, togethehighly rural northern ones, were the fi

evolved, as it became ever more difficult flators or delegates to constitutional conventions to resist the prebroaden acc

Vigorous political struggles were necessary to do away with por tax-based qualifications in the majority of the

pecuniary

opulation. But they remained comfosupporting the exclusion of groups that were, in their view, obvdistinctive and unsuitable for participating in community decblacks, women, children, Native Americans, the mentally incompthose with criminal records, and those (immigrants as well asborn) who had not long been resident in the co

s, the greater equality in the new states may have made itficult to sustain a case for discriminating among otherwise ratlar individuals on the basis of wealth or ec

ally, was led by new states

tionary era. Most movethe direction of expanding the franchise somewhat, such as by ping for alternative ways of meeting standards for property holdadopting differential requirements for elections

ny of the vigorous debates afteRevolution about the organization of state

person th

e effective elites in any society wer

t the exceptional differences in thedegree of inequality across the societies of the Americas, rooted in theirrespective factor endowments and evident during the colonial era, cameto be reflected in the institutions that evolved. In o

reme inequality in wealthand human capital came to characterize much of Spanish America aswell.

ts for growth. Another, moreoutlook, however, is that a broad distribution of political influters higher investments in schooling, infrastructure, and othgoods and services conducive to long-run

revenues, frontier societies were inadopt institutions congenial to

ed that the franchise was extended whewere threats to the basic social orde

y many have fought and died over both the design of the ruthe outcomes of elec

. Polities with labor scarcity and greater equality gener-ally led in broadening the franchise and attaining high rates of participation inelections

The stubborn AmgiUcan 'Environme nt is'tliere AyfOTits imperiottUsuinmons to accept jits coiTditions; the inherited Avavs of doing thines are also thei'e

The East has always feared the result of an unregulatedadvance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it.

This gives him hone and muscle, sir, and preserves hisrepublican principles juire and uncontaminared.

preponderance

It was westernXew York that forced an e.xtension of suffrage in the constitu-tional convention of that State in 1821; and it was westernVirginia that compelled the tide-water region to put a moreliberal suffrage provision in the constitution framed in 1830

tvhere individual liberty was sometimes confusedwith absence of all effective government.

Middle region mediated betweenEast and "West as well as between Vorth and South. Thus itbecame the typically American region.

which later came to si)readits industrial type thioughout the South

The pioneer needed the goods ofthe coast, and so the grand series of internal improvement andrailroad legislation began, Avith poteut nationalizing effects.Over internal improvements occurred great debates, in which ;gruA’e constitutional questions were discussed.

rivalry

In the South there was et^en adei)endence on the Northern colonies for articles of food.

Aniericanizeir. IdTcu-atecTTlin^^ into a mixed race,JAiiglish in neither nationality or chai'acteris tics.

composite nationality

we may next inquire what were the influenceson the East and on the Old World.

The Westand the East began to g’et out of touch of each other.

Government mili-tary and exploring expeditions in determining the lines of set-tlement.

Indian

AVhen the trappers scaled the Bockies, the farmer was stillnear the month of the Missouri.

the evolution of each into a higherstage lias worked political transformations.

experimentations

And the settlement of these andsimilar (piestions for one frontier served as a guide for the ue.xt.

Hardly is a new State or Territory formedbefore the same principle manifests itself again- and gives j*iseto a further emigration; and so is it destined to go on until aphysical barrier must finally obstruct its pi'Ogress.”

Florida also furnished frontier conditions.The Mississippi River region was the scene of typical frontiersettlements.

And to study this advance, the men whogfStV Up iTuder” these conditions, and the i)oliticaI, economic,and social results of it,is to study the really American partof our history.

fprnish the forces dominat- 'ing Ame rican char acter.

it has met other growinj^ peoples whom it has conquered. Butin the case of the United States we have a different phenom-enon.

frontier"line

for further separnot free while any woman is unfree, even when her shacklesdifferent from

any

of self, woma

all too often, guiltis just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive ofcommunication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and thecontinuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection forchangelessne

ll our efforts. Guiltis not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lackof actio

that it is not our anger which makes me caution youto lock your doors at night, and not to wander the streets of Hartfordalon

calls me on it, to answer her anown only blankets the substance of our

id. That unexpressed anger lies within them likean undetonated device, usually to be hurled at the first woman ofColor who talks about racism.

gain: Is this to be merely another situation of the acad-emy discussing life within the closed circuits of th

n poem, and then dashes off to an"important pa

Because I do not exist to feel her anger for he

n says, "I think I've gotten a lot. I feel Blacreally understand me a lot better now; they have a betwhere I'm comi

defensiveness are brick

tendency to conflatethe three and assume an underlying common-ality of meaning.

t imputes mutual autonomy to respectiveracialization processes that are in fact mutuallyconstitutive of one another

Does group consciousness activateAsian-American and Latino identity andpolitical participation in ways similar to thatidentified among African-Americans?

hen such a collec-tively defined linked fate heuristic should sig-nificantly determine our political worldview.

“Do youthink what happens generally to Black peo-ple in this country will have something to dowith what happens in your life?” If there isan affirmative response, the respondent is thenasked to evaluate the degree of connectedness:“Will it affect you a lot, some, or not verymuch?

group consciousness.

ace becomes theobject of loyalty and idealization

Group consciousness is in-group identificationpoliticized by a set of ideological beliefs aboutone’s group’s social standing, as well as a viewthat collective action is the best means by whichthe group can improve its status and realizeits interests

broader national identities

core values of equality andindividualism

Scholars have found that individu-als adopt identities to associate themselves withpolitical parties or to characterize their own is-sue positions

awareness

. Thus, group membershipis based on a subjective assignment of people,particularly in the case of racial group mem-bership, that is arbitrary and, at times, flexible

Measures that political sci-entists developed in the African-American pol-itics literature when the black-white paradigmwas dominant are routinely applied to the studyof other racial minority groups.

Are racialidentity and group consciousness the same con-cepts

descriptive category to stand in place of identity.