With 6.1M potential votes affected, felon disenfranchisement policies clearly have far reaching effects on the composition of the federal, state, and local governments in our nation, and so they continue to be a point of contention in the US. Some of the current literature is written from a criminal justice perspective with focuses on the policy’s impact on reintegration and recidivism, but much of the research is politically oriented, some even questioning the status of our democracy. Though there have been many challenges, the perspective of the federal government is that the practice is Constitutionally sound, leaving it up to the states to determine policy and resulting in a wide variety of policies. Political factors such as citizen ideology, party competition, and especially political culture have a significant impact on the level of restrictiveness of a states felon voting policies. Further, Lieske’s new measure of political culture outperforms the older Elazar/Sharkansky measure in predicting the severity of felon disenfranchisements policies
