| dc.description.abstract | The core principles of democracy rest on the notion that the job of government is to represent the interests, and serve at the will of, its people. However, in practice most societies fall short of fulfilling this ideal, and defining who is considered to be a member of the people can vary across time and space. Instead, for various reasons, certain segments of the population, both historically and in modern times, are not permitted to formally participate in politics through voting. By refusing people the right to vote for the leaders that are responsible for crafting the laws that govern their lives, people are not only literally excluded from political decision-making, but are also less likely to be represented and advocated for. In this dissertation I focus on one specific form of political exclusion – criminal disenfranchisement. After establishing the United States as a clear outlier among democracies, both in terms of the size of its custodial population and the severity of its criminal disenfranchisement laws, I exploit the state-level variation in its felony voting laws to analyze the impact they have on society through three empirical strategies. First, I examine the relationship between criminal disenfranchisement rates and democratic performance. Second, I examine how variation in criminal disenfranchisement laws moderates the impact of having a felony conviction on political engagement. Finally, I explore the degree to which current criminal disenfranchisement laws are congruent with the preferences of the mass public. Taken together, although the analyses are conducted from several different vantage points, they all largely point to criminal disenfranchisement laws generally representing a drain on democracy that are out of step with mass public opinion. | |
