Suffrage as a Party System Issue: Party Strategies in the Politics of Voting Rights Extension

How do political parties position themselves when confronted with proposals to extend voting rights? Prominent competition-based theories argue that parties promote suffrage expansion when both facing pressure from competitors and expecting electoral gains from future electorates. Yet these accounts overlook situations in which external events place the issue on the agenda, forcing parties to take a stance rather than choose the timing. When suffrage reform becomes such a party system issue, parties face a strategic dilemma between satisfying their existing constituencies and anticipating future electorates. This paper examines how parties navigate this dilemma focusing on the case of Switzerland’s Catholic Conservative Party (CVP) during the debates over women’s suffrage. Using discourse network analysis of newspaper articles around the 1959 and 1971 popular referendums, we trace shifts in party coalitions and argumentation. The analysis shows that while the CVP, in line with its existing constituencies, was initially aligned with the anti-suffrage coalition, it strategically avoided a formal “no” stance, delegating public opposition to women’s anti-suffrage groups, which as a result became the dominant voice in the opposition camp. However, as international and domestic pressures made reform seem inevitable, the CVP repositioned itself and officially endorsed women’s suffrage before the 1971 vote – despite continued resistance to women’s suffrage among its traditional voter bases. Archival evidence supports the interpretation that the party’s evolving stance reflected strategic adaptation to changing political realities. Our paper extends competition-based theories of suffrage extension by revealing party strategies in contexts of external agenda-setting and by highlighting the important role of women’s anti-suffrage organizations.