Labor markets and representative institutions: Evidence from colonial British America

What leads to democratic emergence and transformation? This dissertation traces the evolution of suffrage restrictions in the thirteen British American colonies through a quantitative analysis, a formal model and historical evidence focusing on the period from the early seventeenth century to the American Revolution. Unlike recent theories emphasizing the primary role of inequality in determining representative institutions, this work highlights how labor markets interact with the income distribution to affect the suffrage. The dissertation argues that in cases of a labor shortage, elites will use the suffrage as a tool to attract workers, and thus liberal representative institutions will emerge despite high inequality and redistribution pressures. Only when labor demand eases do those in power have an incentive to contract the suffrage when there is an unequal income distribution, as predicted by inequality-democracy arguments.;Instead of following the standard cross-country regression approach, in the first part of the dissertation I test the theory by exploiting a unique colony-level dataset. While voting laws in the South were relatively liberal in the seventeenth century, they were tightened significantly with the introduction of slavery due to the transition from production that depended on poor white workers to plantation agriculture. On the other hand, since Northern production was dominated by small family farms throughout the colonial period and no additional labor supply was needed, suffrage restrictions there hardly changed. The second part of the dissertation uses historical analysis to show that the interaction of labor markets with the income distribution explains the evolution of representative institutions in colonial Virginia. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the House of Burgesses granted the right to vote to all whites in order to attract British migrants. As labor pressures and tobacco demand eased in the second half of the seventeenth century, elites gradually tightened the suffrage. Similarly, the shock of slavery in the early eighteenth century further increased labor supply and motivated the disfranchisement of landless freemen. The dissertation also examines extensively the role of alternative mechanisms, such as only inequality and income per capita, and concludes that such factors have imperfect explanatory power.