New suffrage scholarship: how far does it travel?

The ‘new suffrage scholarship’ has deepened our understanding of women voters at the turn of the 20th century in the West. Even though newly enfranchised women faced structural and cultural barriers to voting, they nonetheless voted frequently, sometimes as often as men, in competitive single-member districts. While both women’s and men’s turnout were spurred by fierce competition, women’s turnout responded to competition to a greater extent than men’s, closing the gap between the two in the most competitive districts, provided that most men were already mobilized there.

The natural question is to what extent these insights travel beyond the very narrow geographical and time-bound case of women at the turn of the 20th century in a few Western countries. Obviously, the daily experiences of Western women some 100 years ago are vastly different from the daily experiences of women in today’s Pakistan. In addition, women in Pakistan have not just won the right to vote but, rather, had de jure access to the polls for over half a century.

Yet, these differences may not matter. What matters is not the specificity of the national context or the period but the facts that (1) women are less likely to vote than men and (2) rational parties are less likely to mobilize voters who are less likely to vote. In this context, women can get caught up in a vicious cycle of under-mobilization, where being less likely to vote means being less likely to be mobilized by parties, which in turn leaves women disengaged and less likely to vote. When district political competition is fierce, however, the incentives of parties to mobilize are so strong that parties are more likely to reach out even to the costliest voters, such as under-mobilized women, provided that the ‘cheaper’ men voters are already mobilized.

Parties and women: the vicious cycle of under-mobilization

Women’s electoral participation in Pakistan is hindered by a plethora of cultural and structural obstacles, from lower literacy and employment rates to limited mobility and a gendered sense of what women should (and should not) do (UN Women Pakistan, 2023). In fact, recent data indicate that a third of electors, both women and men, believe that discussing politics is a man’s job (Khan, 2020). However, these de facto barriers to voting are only one piece of the puzzle; the other is parties’ disinterest in engaging women. We know this for a fact because scholars have talked to women and men voters (Cheema et al, 2019). While many interviewees reported that women face obstacles to voting in general, most did not see those as detrimental; instead, they pointed to the lack of interest from politicians and party workers.

However, the lack of party interest and obstacles to voting go hand in hand of course. If voting is more challenging for women than men, let us say because some women are discouraged or prevented from voting, then parties will have a lesser incentive to engage with women in their campaigns. However, if women are not seen as a constituency by political parties, they will feel unmotivated and disinterested in participating, further disincentivizing parties to engage them. Indeed, highly participating men are more likely to report that they have been contacted by party workers than anyone else (Liaqat et al, 2020), suggesting that parties allocate precious resources to mobilize ‘easy to win’ voters whose mobilization is less costly, largely leaving women out.

The 2024 general election

While we do not have qualitative evidence for whether parties’ mobilization strategies regarding women vary with electoral competition, a quick glance at sex-separated election data might provide some answers. Consistent with women facing barriers to voting, women’s turnout lagged behind men’s across all regions in the 2024 general election (see Figure 1). Interestingly, the extent to which women’s turnout trailed behind men’s varied substantially across regions. While only 25 per cent of women in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) North Region voted in the 2024 election, which resulted in a 20-percentage-point gap between women’s and men’s turnout, 49 per cent of women in Punjab South voted, reducing the gender turnout gap to 7 percentage points there.

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Women’s and men’s turnout in the 2024 general election by Gallup region

Citation: European Journal of Politics and Gender 2025; 10.1332/25151088Y2024D000000066

Note: Women’s (men’s) turnout in dark (light) grey.

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The question is: why did women sometimes manage to go to the polls in relatively large numbers? This is where the ‘new suffrage scholarship’ might offer a plausible answer: it may be that women were more likely to vote relative to men in the most competitive regions. Indeed, the gap between women’s and men’s turnout varies with electoral competition, with the largest gap in regions that were least competitive on average (see Figure 2). This is consistent with the expectation that parties are more likely to directly or indirectly mobilize women in the most competitive places where most men are already mobilized.

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Gender turnout gap and margin of victory by Gallup region

Citation: European Journal of Politics and Gender 2025; 10.1332/25151088Y2024D000000066

Note: ‘Gap’ refers to an average percentage-point difference between women’s and men’s turnout across districts in each region; ‘margin’ refers to an average percentage-point difference between votes for the winner and the runner-up across districts in each region.

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Of course, without further analysis, we do not know whether these patterns reflect parties’ greater mobilization of women directly or parties’ greater mobilization of husbands to bring wives out to vote, or whether they can be attributed to a greater effort of husbands regardless of party efforts, or even whether women are somewhat more politicized and independent in the most competitive regions. However, the figures suggest that political competition matters in an expected way: women’s under-mobilization in Pakistan may at least partially reflect limited electoral competition and the mobilization of everyone.

Despite more electors voting in 2024 than in the 2018 election, the 2024 campaign lacked traditional fanfare, as competition was suppressed and mobilization restricted. FAFEN (2024a) identifies several failures in this respect, including a crackdown against party leaders and workers, rally and nomination obstructions, uncertainty about the election timeline, the last-minute delimitation of constituencies, and questions about the integrity of the outcome. Suspicions of gerrymandering in the run-up to the 2024 election would not have helped either (Malik, 2024). While these often procedural democratic failures attracted substantial attention, a quick glance at the election data suggests that they also had an impact on women’s turnout, undermining the best electoral context in which women could exercise long-held suffrage rights. Whether we consider women’s under-mobilization in the past or today, fierce electoral competition reflects democratic quality, not only because it spurs mobilization overall but also because it disproportionately mobilizes precisely those whose voices are marginalized the most.

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, Grant Number ES/T01394X/1, ‘From Suffrage to Representation’.

Author biography

Mona Morgan-Collins has published extensively on women’s electoral participation at the turn of the 20th century. Her work on suffrage has appeared in the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics and Comparative Political Studies and has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council – UK Research and Innovation and British Academy/Leverhulme Trust.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.