Explaining Female Suffrage Reform in Latin America:  Motivation Alignment, Cleavages, and Timing of Reform

Castillo, Isabel

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-rga1-5z50

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Explaining Female Suffrage Reform in Latin America: Motivation Alignment, Cleavages, and Timing of Reform

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What explains the difference in the timing of female enfranchisement in Latin America? Despite constituting an essential process of inclusion for democratization, no comparative analysis of the region has sought to explain the differences observed in the timing of reform. Common explanations – developed for other regions – concerning the strength of women’s movement, the type of political regime, the degree of electoral competition, and women’s inclusion in modernizing economies do not account for the observed variation. This dissertation proposes a framework to explain the timing of reform that focuses on decision makers’ motivations. Strategic political calculations and normative beliefs constitute two central motivations of decision makers when facing the prospects of reform. Unlike the dominant strategic approach in political science, I show that both these motivations are necessary and need to align for reform to occur. The presence of only one motivation produces stalemate or the rejection of female suffrage reform. Before World War II, misalignment of motivations was the most common scenario. In this historical context, to explain the (mis)alignment of strategic calculations and normative beliefs in Latin America, I consider the region’s historical oligarchic/anti-oligarchic cleavage structure, which was rooted in an overlapping class and religious division. For most cases, a relative balance of power between oligarchic and anti-oligarchic actors blocked female suffrage reform in the region. In a few exceptional cases, reform was guided by normative motivations when strategic considerations were unclear or unimportant. After the war, the democratic window that opened impacted normative motivations, making them favorable in most cases. In this new context, a realignment in the axes of political competition or an incumbent in electoral need provided the necessary strategic motivations. To test the argument, I provide detailed analyses of failed and successful reform attempts for the early and late periods in the cases of Chile, Ecuador, Peru, and Uruguay.

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