Contemporary Enfranchisement: A Theory on Party Positioning

Long after universal suffrage and the enfranchisement of women, the demos has continued to expand. In the last decades, new demographics—immigrants, emigrants, and youth—have been granted the right to vote. So far, the academic literature has studied each of these expansions as separate phenomena, to the detriment of common knowledge advancement. I argue that the granting of voting rights to each of these demographics should be jointly studied under the umbrella of contemporary enfranchisement. With this starting point, I propose a common theory on how parties position themselves on enfranchisement proposals.