Is restricted suffrage such a bad idea?

Thailand, Venezuala, Russia...All countries that would probably be better off if only people who owned property, say, or had a higher education degree could vote.

Obviously I'm cherry-picking examples to bolster a controversial point, but it's not clear to me that we should just assume that universal sufferage is the right approach for any new democracy.

Beyond the obvious benefit of having more educated/intelligent voters make better decisions -- the link between education and sound social-economic policies may be tenuous* but probably applies in the extreme cases, e.g. illiterate farmers' votes -- limited democracy can reduce the risk of ethnic tensions/splintering society. When amassing mass support is necessary, demagogues have a strong incentive to carve out ethnically-based voting blocks. This doesn't disappear in limited democracy, but seems like it would be more limited. In most cases, limited democracy would also be less of an exogenous shock on the traditional social systems, which (making a wild generalization here) tend to have a leaders checked by a limited network of other powerful figures in society (e.g., king/nobles, multiparty clans, etc.) rather than directly from the base of society. And, as long as suffrage were wide enough to avoid oligarchic rule or apartheid-like rule (a real risk if all of your educated landowners are a different ethnicity, as in some South American states), limited democracy should provide a more powerful check on corruption -- it's harder to bribe wealthier / more world-aware citizens.

That said, if the local populace were clamoring for voting rights, denying them would cause significant civil tension. But is the average Afghan goat-herder desperate to vote? I doubt it. Here in Ghana, the typical cocoa farmer answer has been "not very" when asked how important living in a democratic multiparty state is to him. Poor people have different priorities than Western constitution-drafting state department / international development bourgeoisie.

This raises the question of where/when should suffrage be restricted. No one-size-fits-all rule could work (after all, with a blanket rule we'd probably have missed out on the great Indian democratic success). But even if making judgments a-priori is difficult, it seems plausible that, in poor states without a history of democratic systems, we should explore more limited forms of democracy rather than blindly applying our messianic template.

*This argument assumes that there are certain policies that are "sound" (e.g., laws that limit human rights abuse, avoiding sliding into dictatorship, and adhere to some broad outlines of free market capitalism) and some that are not.