Enfranchisement in Britain and the United States has been a step-by-step process, beginning in the 19th century and successively based on property, gender and age, in parallel with, in the American context, a history of inclusion and exclusion on the basis of ethnicity and race. Subsequently or concurrently to some of these changes, British and American politics have experienced periods of dealignment or realignment, when weakening or changing partisan ties seemed to threaten existing structures. In these contexts, if political parties have often striven to attract new voters in order to secure electoral victories and enlarge their electoral base, it is mostly civil rights organizations, as well as popular and grassroots movements, that have undertaken the process of mobilizing and re-mobilizing various groups of voters, with a view of (re-)integrating them into society. Oftentimes, these grassroots organizations saw the mobilization of voters as a necessary tool to fight off discriminations of all sorts and contribute to social progress.
This collective work offers a historical approach to the issue and, through case studies, aims to expand the field's research agenda by taking into account less familiar mobilizing strategies from various groups or parties, both in Britain and the United States. Two different yet complementary approaches will be used, one from the top down with parties, the other from the bottom up with grassroots organizations, to analyze how these groups either (re)connect citizens with politics or give birth to social movements which durably occupy and change the political landscape of the United States and Britain.