Annual Review of Political Science
Women's Suffrage: Causes and Consequences
2025-06-17
From 2000 to 2020, more than 20 countries marked a century of women's suffrage. These anniversaries occurred alongside a period of rich theoretical innovation in the democratization literature, producing a decade of research on the causes and consequences of women's suffrage. This body of research pushes against the narrative that suffrage happened automatically with modernization and the claims that early women voters were apathetic and conservative and did not get what they wanted out of politics. New scholarship reveals how political competition and suffragists’ strategies were key components of suffrage reform and how women, who often cast the largest number of votes in any given context, could shift the balance toward left parties if they were highly mobilized in cities. Finally, a growing body of scholarship has shown how suffrage led to expansions of early welfare state policies. Future work should examine these dynamics in suffrage's second wave and outside of the global North.