Voting behind bars: Explaining variation in international enfranchisement practices

Recent attention to the issue of extension of the vote to prisoners has been paramount in the form of significant court cases in South Africa, Canada and the European Court of Human Rights as well as proposed legislation in the United States to ban the practice of ex-prisoner disenfranchisement. Surprisingly, however, no systematic work in an international setting on the subject has been conducted to explore country-by-country practices or explain variation in these approaches. In this article we explore a range of probable determinants of the extension of the ballot to prisoners, including structural determinants (conditions on voter registration, availability of voting, and mandatory voting), political determinants (democratic and non-democratic countries, and levels of political freedom) and cultural determinants (race, colonial legacies, and conceptualization of crime and criminals). We find that countries that extend more political rights to their citizens (but not necessarily democracies) and those that have expanded provisions for absentee ballots are more likely to allow prisoners to vote, while countries in Latin America and Africa, as a result of colonial legacies and civil strife, are less willing to allow prisoners to vote.