Please join the Comparative Politics Workshop as they host Iza Ding, Assosciate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.
Why did the British Empire introduce universal adult suffrage in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1931—the earliest and most expansive franchise reform in the non-white world—despite virtually unanimous elite opposition and absent mass demand? Prevailing accounts attribute early democratization to imperial liberalism or bottom-up pressure from mobilized populations. Drawing on extensive archival evidence, this article advances an alternative explanation. We argue that universal suffrage in Ceylon was a strategic colonial intervention designed to undermine Western-educated nationalist elites at a moment when self-rule appeared increasingly inevitable. Faced with an elite nationalist movement seeking “responsible government,” yet still lacking a mass base, British officials expanded franchise to dilute elite power by leveraging – rather than responding to or favoring – socially subordinate groups. By foregrounding elite rivalry amid intrinsically hierarchical relationships in the international system, this study rethinks second-wave democratization and the global politics of democracy promotion more generally.
Iza Ding (Ph.D. Harvard, 2016) is Associate Professor of Political Science. Her research explores the paradoxes and pushbacks attending economic, political, and cultural modernization, such as creative resistance against institutional rigidities, lingering moral traditions against legal development, enduring historical memories against rapid socioeconomic transformations, and humans' simultaneous degradation of nature and attachment to nature. Ding is the author of The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell University Press, 2022). She is currently working on a monograph on global historical waves of environmentalism.
Ariel Sowers
(847) 491-7454
Email