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Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. By Bateman David A.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 348 p. $99.99 cloth, $29.99 paper.
For obvious reasons, the study of the limits of American democracy is cresting just now. Scholars of American politics are discovering that it is not as immune from democratic backsliding as we might once have imagined, and studies of the United States as a case study in democratization and democratic fragility are beginning to reframe the way we think about every aspect of American politics.
No recent work pushes this project further than David Bateman’s outstanding book. In Disenfranchising Democracy, Bateman offers a compelling and truly gripping account of the connection between democracy’s expansion and its limits. He shows that the extension of voting rights in the early nineteenth century was accompanied by the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans, and he demonstrates that these two moves were closely connected as part of a common, and deeply contested, political project to define the boundaries of the US political community. Universal white male suffrage, often invoked as the first step in the progressive realization of an American democratic ideal, was purchased at a terrible price.
Bateman’s deeply researched account highlights the political processes and strategic behavior that underlay this push and pull of democratization and de-democratization; often the same actors who supported extending the franchise by dropping property qualifications also supported disenfranchising African Americans, especially in the North. Bateman takes pains to demonstrate that this double move was far from preordained by any kind of overarching ideology of white supremacy. Rather, it resulted from evolving partisan and sectional dynamics as the early republic groped toward a common definition...