For most of history, democracy was rare and often considered dangerous. Even early modern republics limited voting to a small group, usually men who owned property. The story of the last two centuries is, in large part, the story of who gained the vote and how many countries became democratic.

Expanding the vote

The idea that voters should have a material stake in society, usually shown by owning property or paying taxes, was widely accepted in the eighteenth century. Over the following century, those requirements fell away in many places.

• In the United States, most states dropped property requirements for white men by the middle of the nineteenth century.
• In Britain, the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884 gradually widened the vote among men.
• After the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) barred denying the vote on account of race. In practice, many Southern states used poll taxes, literacy tests and violence to keep Black citizens from voting for nearly a century. The civil rights movement won the Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964), which banned poll taxes in federal elections, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which suspended literacy tests and brought federal oversight of voter registration.

Women's suffrage

Suffrage means the right to vote. In 1893, New Zealand became the first self-governing country to give women the vote in national elections. Others followed, often after long campaigns: Britain gave the vote to some women over thirty in 1918 and on equal terms with men in 1928; the United States ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Some democracies came much later. Swiss women gained the vote in federal elections only in 1971.

Each expansion was resisted with arguments that the new voters were not ready, not informed or not independent. Each time, the inclusion of new groups changed what people meant by “the people.”

Waves of democratization

The political scientist Samuel Huntington, in a 1991 book, described the spread of democracy as coming in waves, each followed by a partial reverse wave.

1. The first wave, beginning in the early nineteenth century, slowly brought wider male suffrage and elected government to the United States, Britain, France and other countries. It was followed by a reverse wave in the 1920s and 1930s, when democracies in Italy, Germany, Spain and elsewhere fell to dictatorships.
2. The second wave followed the Second World War, as defeated powers such as West Germany and Japan adopted democratic constitutions and many former colonies gained independence. Several new democracies soon fell to military coups.
3. The third wave began in 1974 in Portugal, where a largely bloodless military coup, the Carnation Revolution, opened the way to democracy. It then spread to Spain and Greece, much of Latin America in the 1980s, parts of Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe after 1989.

Why do countries democratize?

Scholars disagree, and several causes probably work together:

• Economic development: wealthier, more educated, more urban societies tend to demand a voice, though there are many exceptions.
• Elite bargains: rulers sometimes accept democracy when repression becomes too costly, or when they believe they can survive in open competition.
• Popular movements: strikes, protests and civil resistance can make continued authoritarian rule impossible.
• International influence: neighbors, trade partners and alliances can reward or pressure change.

Not a one-way street

Every wave so far has been followed by some reversal. Democracy has spread far beyond what eighteenth-century thinkers imagined, but its history shows that it is achieved and maintained by effort, not guaranteed by progress. In 1947, Winston Churchill remarked that democracy had been called the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried, a line that captures both its flaws and its enduring appeal.

Worked example: arguments against expanding the vote

Each time the vote was extended, opponents offered reasons. It is worth looking at them carefully, because similar arguments still appear in new forms.

• Against propertyless men: people without property have no stake in society and might vote to seize the property of others.
• Against women: women's interests are already represented by their husbands and fathers, and politics would disrupt family life.
• Against newly freed or minority groups: they are not yet educated enough, or will be controlled by others.

Notice a common structure. Each argument claims that the excluded group is either dangerous (it will vote the wrong way) or dependent (it cannot vote independently). And in each case, history did not confirm the warnings: property survived universal male suffrage, families survived women's suffrage, and new voters proved as capable of independent judgment as the old.

Supporters of each expansion also made a shared argument of their own: people who must obey the laws and pay the taxes deserve a say in making them, and leaving them out invites governments to ignore their interests.

This does not mean every proposed change to who votes is right. Debates about voting age, for instance, raise real questions about maturity. But it suggests a useful test: when someone argues that a group should not vote, ask whether the same argument, applied in the past, would have excluded people whose inclusion we now consider obviously just.