Over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries the right to vote was progressively extended to all adults regardless of property, race or sex, beginning with New Zealand's grant of women's suffrage in 1893. Successive reform acts, revolutions and new constitutions widened the franchise, though many countries withheld it from women or racial minorities until well into the twentieth century. The change replaced narrow propertied electorates with mass democratic participation. It transformed the size and social composition of those to whom governments answered.
It made political authority rest on the whole adult population rather than a propertied minority. The resulting mass electorate underpinned the welfare state, public housing programmes and democratically accountable city government.
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