Universal Suffrage and the Rise of Socialist Parties in Europe: Evidence from Eleven European Countries.

Most socialist parties were established at the end of 19th century. While their support grew rapidly over the next two decades, a substantial part of their natural electorate was still disenfranchised at the time of their establishment. Analysing data from eleven European countries for the period 1888-1975, we provide evidence that an increase in the size of electorate resulted in an increased support for socialist parties. We show that universal male suffrage contributed to the rise of socialist parties. A suffrage reform which enfranchises about half of the male population leads to estimated 7-8% increase in electoral and parliamentary support of socialist parties. This effect increases over time. The effect of female suffrage depends on the presence of Catholicism. Female suffrage increases socialist vote shares in countries which are Protestant by about 6% and decreases socialist support in countries which are Catholic by about 8%. The magnitude of the effect is slightly larger for socialist seat shares. Any type of suffrage extension which enfranchises about a quarter of the population leads on average to about 3% increase in electoral and parliamentary support. Applying synthetic control method, we provide further evidence from a comparative case study of male suffrage in Norway in 1898. We synthesize counterfactual Norway as a weighted average of five countries, which have not yet enfranchised the vast majority of working-class men. We find that universal male suffrage in Norway increases electoral but not parliamentary support for the Norwegian Labour party. The reform lead to a notably steeper rise in the electoral support fpr the Norwegian Labour party compared to the synthesized control group. We find that this effect increases over time, reaching 7.7% in the third election after the reform. We test the robustness of these findings by applying the treatment to various pre-treatment years and show that these findings are strongly robust to the placebo interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]