The removal of the property qualification for voting in the US was among the more important events in the history of democratization.The authors adopt the theories and methods of formal analysis to discover patterns and regularities across historic cases, to attempt a more systematic understanding.
'Justin Moeller and Ronald F. King have written by far the most searching and persuasive study of a fundamental aspect of the history of American democracy. Political parties, it turns out, were more the creators than the creation of the expanded suffrage, a proposition pertinent to recent and current politics as well as to the early national and antebellum United States. It will quickly become essential reading for anyone who wants to know how America's version of democracy came to be.'-Sean Wilentz, Princeton University, author of The Rise of American Democracy
