"Oh say can you __": Race and Mental Disability in Performance(s) of Citizenship (Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Winter 2016) (original) (raw)
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Mental Disability and the Right to Vote
Yale LJ, 1979
Nearly forty states disfranchise people based on their mental status. Despite the patchwork of laws limiting the voting rights of people with mental disabilities, one of America's largest minority groups, few researchers have investigated the constitutional strategy utilized for disenfranchisement or the subsequent legal challenges that arose. Through a fine-grained analysis of constitutional and legislative debates, court cases, trade documents, newspapers, and petitions, from the beginning of these suffrage restrictions to the enactment of the 19 th Amendment, I describe a "common sense" disability model-the methodology behind barring people with alleged mental disabilities from the franchise. I consider how and why state legislators prohibited individuals' right to vote based on mental capacity in state statutes and constitutions. I show that two groups-African Americans, and women-were labeled as unfit for suffrage and full political citizenship because of their assumed mental deficiencies, and how each of these groups deployed their own definitions of mental capacity as they fought for the franchise. I then examine the subsequent court and congressional challenges involving people alleged to have voted despite their being judged to lack the necessary mental capacity. I conclude by reflecting on the changed landscape of the twentieth century, as statutory provisions such as the American with Disabilities Act viii and the Voting Rights Act, and political movements such as the disability rights movement challenged the exclusion of the disempowered from the franchise. 2 An increasing number of articles note contemporary difficulties for people with mental disabilities who wish to vote.
Most electoral democracies, including forty-three states in the United States, deny people the right to vote on the basis of intellectual disability or mental illness. Scholars in several fields have addressed these disenfranchisements, including legal scholars who analyze their validity under U.S. constitutional law and international-human-rights law, philosophers and political scientists who analyze their validity under democratic theory, and mental-health researchers who analyze their relationship to scientific categories. This Note reviews the current state of the debate across these fields and makes three contentions: (a) pragmatic political considerations have blurred the distinction between disenfranchisement provisions based on cognitive capacity and those based on personal status; (b) proposals that advocate voting by proxy trivialize the broad civic purpose of the franchise; and (c) the persistence of disenfranchisement on the basis of mental illness inevitably contributes to silencing socially disfavored views and lifestyles. Accordingly, the Note cautions reformers against advocating for capacity assessment or proxy voting, and emphasizes the importance of disassociating the idea of mental illness from voting capacity. * New York University Law School, J.D. expected 2017.
Contemporary Voting Rights Controversies Through the Lens of Disability
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
People with disabilities are the ticking time bomb of the electorate. An estimated thirty to thirty-five percent of all voters in the next twenty-five years will need some form of accommodation. Despite the significant and growing population of voters with disabilities, they do not vote in proportion to their numbers. We can consider voters with disabilities as "the canaries in the coal mine," the people who are an advanced warning of the structural difficulties in voting not just for themselves, but also for the system as a whole. Solving problems in voting for people with disabilities will strengthen the entire system and will help improve the voting process for everyone, especially people from disempowered communities. Furthermore, although election law scholars have largely ignored the unique voting problems confronting voters with disabilities, virtually every major voting controversy in contemporary American electoral politics directly implicates issues of disability.
The Puzzling Place of Disability in Political Science
Disability studies emerged in the 1980s as part of a cluster of politicized identity-based interdisciplinary fields of study in race, ethnicity, and gender that theorized and sought to actualize greater inclusion in academia and society writ large. Political science, however, has been slow to incorporate critical studies of identity and lacks critical sustained engagement with disability. This paper seeks to fill this disciplinary lacunae. I draw from recent theorizing within disability studies and political science to develop a framework for examining how disability structures politics and, in turn, how politics structures disability. I then illustrate the ways in which engagement between disability studies and political science can appropriately center disability within politics and deepen our understanding of political conflict in the United States.
Disability and election administration in the United States: barriers and improvements
Policy Studies, 2020
Although people with disabilities are considerably less likely to vote than those without a disability, empirical explanations as to why remain underdeveloped. The present study investigates whether this discrepancy in turnout rates is directly related to voting procedures. Analyzing data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we assess the ways in which people with disabilities are disenfranchised by election administration barriers. Specifically, we identify how experiences with voter registration, voter identification regulations, and methods of ballot submission impact those with and without disabilities. Also considered is the degree to which disability affects one’s own political competence and political interest. Reflecting on these findings, we offer recommendations for reducing such electoral hurdles and providing pathways by which comprehensive political incorporation of all individuals with disabilities might be achieved.
Contemporary Political Theory, 2022
In this article, I explore the implications of three moral grounds for the justification of supported voting-respect as opacity, respect as equal status, and respect as political care. For each ground, I ask whether it justifies surrogate voting for voters unable to either communicate or give effect to their electoral judgments, due to some cognitive or communicative disability. (Henceforth: incommunicability cases.) I argue that respect as opacity does not permit surrogate voting, and equal status does not justify such support-although the latter account can make sense of the value loss involved in the persistent non-participation of individuals with cognitive and communicative disabilities. Finally, I argue that an account of supported voting based on the ethics of political care can accommodate a pro tanto moral permission to provide surrogate voting as a form of support in incommunicability cases, and it can account for the inclusive approach of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to supported decision-making. However, I show that in incommunicability cases, what the political community and individual caretakers ultimately owe to adult fellow citizens as equal members of the political community is some adequate form of political care -- but not necessarily surrogate voting.
Disability and Domination: Lessons from Republican Political Philosophy
Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2018
The republican ideal of non-domination identifies the capacity for arbitrary interference as a fundamental threat to liberty that can generate fearful uncertainty and servility in those dominated. I argue that republican accounts of domination can provide a powerful analysis of the nature of legal and institutional power that is encountered by people with mental disorders or cognitive disabilities. In doing so, I demonstrate that non-domination is an ideal which is pertinent, distinctive, and desirable in thinking through psychological disability. Finally, I evaluate republican strategies for contesting domination, focusing on the limits of contestatory democracy, and proposing a participatory alternative which better addresses problems of political agency in the mentally disordered and cognitively disabled. Note: This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Tom O'Shea, 'Disability and Domination: Lessons from Civic Republicanism', Journal of Applied Philosophy (forthcoming). This article may be used for non-commercial purposes. Please cite the published version.
A life of one’s own: republican freedom and disability
Disability and Society, 2014
This article outlines a republican perspective on disability. We argue that a commitment to ensuring the republican freedom of disabled citizens offers a promising account of what disabled citizens are owed as a matter of justice. A republican perspective offers a particular diagnosis of the injustice of disability disadvantage, both in relation to individuals (dominium) and the state (imperium), that is congenial to prominent concerns voiced by the disability rights movement. This article also offers a brief outline of three republican remedies: the right of social participation, the right of opportunities for civic contribution, and the right of democratic contestation. These remedies constitute key guidelines for the robust institutional protection of disabled citizens’ republican freedom.