Competition as a driver of democratization? Suffrage and migration in antebellum USA

In the early USA, suffrage was largely restricted to property owners. However, within a few decades, all states extended the franchise to poorer white men. A prominent theory argues that these reforms were driven by interstate competition for labor, as states broadened voting rights to attract workers. Yet, given the limited state capacity of the period, it is unclear whether workers indeed responded to changes in political rights. Using a contiguous-county, staggered difference-in-differences design, the author shows that franchise extensions causally increased local population growth. An analysis of local age structure suggests that the effect operated through migration rather than changes in fertility or mortality. These findings indicate that, in the antebellum USA, more inclusive political institutions attracted labor, lending support to the interstate-competition hypothesis.