Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't by John Jr. (books that read to you TXT) 📕

helps to explain much of the federal government’s growth up to the 1960s. In the forty-five years after the adoption of suffrage, women’s voting rates gradually increased until finally matching the men’s rates. This delay by newly enfranchised groups in fully exercising the vote is not rare, as groups that are denied the vote generally pay less attention to politics than those who are enfranchised—after all, there is not much of an incentive to follow politics if one is unable to participate.13 As a result, it often takes decades for a newly enfranchised group to cultivate an interest in politics and a habit of voting that matches the involvement of groups with a longer voting history. The significance of this gradual increase in the women’s vote between the 1920s and the 1960s is that the size of state and federal governments expanded along with it as women became an increasingly important part of the electorate.14

But the battle between the sexes does not end there. During the early 1970s, just as women’s share of the voting population was leveling off, something else was changing: the American family began to break down, with rising divorce rates and increasing numbers of out-of-wedlock births.

There is a close relationship between marital status and women’s voting patterns—generally, as divorce rates have increased, women voters have become more liberal. Over the course of women’s lives, their political views on average vary more than those of men. Young single women start out being much more liberal than their male counterparts and are about 50 percent more likely to vote Democratic. As previously noted, these women also support a higher, more progressive income tax as well as more educational and welfare spending. But for married women this gap is only one-third as large, and married women with children become even more conservative. But divorced women with children suddenly become 75 percent more likely to vote for Democrats than single men.15

Perhaps not too surprisingly, government policies have helped to create more support for still more government. For example, no-fault divorce laws helped to drive up divorce rates, resulting in more divorcées who tend to support big government programs. Suppose, for example, that a man wants to leave his wife. With at-fault divorce, the husband must get his wife to agree to the divorce and essentially has to pay her for the right to leave the marriage. The more that the wife has invested in the relationship, the more she will demand in compensation before she will let the husband have the divorce. But no-fault divorce laws reverse this situation and greatly weaken the wife’s bargaining position—if the husband wants to leave, the wife has to bargain to try to convince him to stay in the marriage. Thus, with no-fault divorce, women face a real risk if they invest heavily in family life; the more they invest in the family, the weaker their bargaining position becomes. Consequently, women are more likely to keep their careers in order to retain marketable skills in case their marriage fails. And the tendency to invest less in family life and more in preparation for a possible life after divorce makes relationships more fragile and divorce more likely.

Women’s suffrage ushered in a sea change in American politics that affected policies aside from taxes and the size of government. For example, states that granted suffrage were much more likely to pass Prohibition, for the temperance movement was largely dominated by middle-class women.16 Although the “gender gap” is commonly thought to have arisen only in the 1960s, female voting dramatically changed American politics from the very beginning.

Suppressing Voter Turnout: The Poll Tax, Secret Ballots, and Literacy Tests

Most Americans today would agree that secret ballots were a great boon to democracy, while the poll tax and literacy tests—which were often designed to suppress the African American vote in certain states—were terrible injustices. These suppositions are doubtlessly true, but studies show a surprising effect of these measures on voter turnout: while the poll tax significantly reduced voting participation rates, secret ballots also lowered turnout. In contrast, literacy tests actually had little effect on voting rates during most of the years in which they were used.

The poll tax—a fee that must be paid before a citizen can either register or vote—was originally meant to ensure that those voting on government expenditures would also contribute something—even if just a symbolic amount—to the state coffers.17 Yet, the poll tax became the clearest-cut example of a policy that discourages voting.18 Sixteen states implemented a poll tax since 1870, although by 1963 only five still retained such fees, which were finally banned from federal elections in 1964 and from state elections in 1965.19 While the poll tax was only used in a few northern and western states, including Massachusetts, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, it was implemented in all eleven southern states, primarily as a means to discourage African Americans from voting. Indeed, many southern whites viewed the practice as “the main solution to the suffrage problem of disenfranchising African Americans without disenfranchising too many whites.”20 Although poll taxes were relatively small (usually just a dollar or two) and changed little over time, they effectively reduced voter participation rates by around 10 percentage points.21

Poll taxes were in effect for so long that voting rates were still depressed long after their elimination. When the taxes were abolished, voter participation rates rose a mere 4 percentage points in the following election. It took over two decades before voting rates returned to their pre-poll tax levels. For Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia, turnout rates were still reduced by around a percentage point even into the early 1980s.22 Here we see the same delay in fully exercising voting rights that was evident after women gained the vote. Among African Americans, many would-be voters had lost interest in political issues while the poll tax prevented them from voting. After the tax was rescinded, it took African Americans a generation to recapture their previous level of political