The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

by Joseph E. Stiglitz

The reluctance of the elites to extend the voting franchise, however objectionable from current perspectives, is understandable. In the UK, until the Reform Act of 1832, only large property owners or people of considerable wealth could vote. The elites didn’t trust what might happen if voting rights were extended. In the Jim Crow South at the end of the nineteenth century, white politicians devised poll taxes that were designed to disenfranchise the former slaves and their descendants, who wouldn’t have the wherewithal to pay.28 Those taxes, combined with literacy tests and sometimes violence and terror, succeeded both in substantially lowering electoral turnouts and in increasing the Democratic vote share.29 In Ecuador, before 1979, only the literate could vote, and the ruling elite made sure that the indigenous people didn’t have sufficient education to qualify. In each case elites feared they would lose their position of power and privilege, and even their wealth, if they extended the voting franchise. Many of the efforts at disenfranchisement, now and in the past, have been directed at disenfranchising the poor; in the 1930s, pauper exclusion laws disenfranchised jobless men and women who were receiving relief.