Rational Choice and the Victorian Voter (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2004
A new rationale is presented for why an elite may want to expand the franchise even in the absence of threats to the established order. Expanding the franchise can turn politicians away from particularistic politics based on ad personam redistribution within the elite and foster competition based on programs with diffuse benefits. If these programs are valuable, a majority of the elite votes in favor of an extension of the franchise despite the absence of a threat from the disenfranchised. We argue that the evolution of public spending and of political competition in nineteenth century Britain is consistent with our model. * The authors are grateful to the NSF for financial support. The second author is also a grateful recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship. We would like to thank the editor Alberto Alesina, three referees,
‘Was There an Alternative to Liberal Representative Government in 1856?’
Julie Kimber, Peter Love and Phillip Deery (eds) Labour Traditions – Proceedings of the Tenth National Labour History Conference, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Melbourne, pp 118-121, 2007
To revolutionise Australia"that was how Edward John Hawksley in early 1854 described the strategy of the radicals in New South Wales. He was the editor of The People's Advocate, which he founded in 1848, but his political involvement in the colony stretched back at least to 1839, when as a recently arrived immigrant he had written a letter to the Catholic radical paper, The Australasian Chronicle, arguing that the only way to achieve a democratic legislative assembly would be to form a working-class political organisation. Earlier, probably during the surge of workingclass militancy after the Reform Act, he is reported to have had a connection with radical journalism in Nottingham. So Hawksley ought to have known what he was talking about. Yet, believing as most of us do in the foundational liberalism of our political culture, we find it very difficult to take seriously his description of radical strategy. In this paper I suggest that we should, and that Hawksley"s kind of democratic radicalism expressed a major political current in the lead up to parliamentary government. 1 Of course, by revolution Hawksley did not mean a bloody uprising or a coup d'état. What he had in mind was the achievement of popular rule by the combination of agitation, education, and electoral campaigning that had been typical of democratic political forces in Britain and other places since the late eighteenth century. In New South Wales it had been developing since 1833, although for the succeeding ten years, when there was no elected institution of governance, the emphasis had to be on agitation and education, and this was a significant fact for the development of democratic practice in the colony, as we shall see.
Labour and socialism in Glasgow, 1880-1914 : the electoral challenge prior to democracy
1988
From the emergence of the 'modern' Socialist movement in the 1880s through to the First World War, the majority of socialists in Britain regarded the achievement of particular reforms and the ultimate goal of Socialism itself, as being realisable only through the ballot box. The subject of this thesis is how that movement, i.e. for independent labour representation, was conducted and with what success in Glasgow prior to the First World War. The whole basis of this electoral strategy, however, is called into question by the sex and class biases inherent in the franchise system, as defined by the Reform Acts 14 not lie in its circulation figures but as an indicator of dissatisfaction with Liberalism and the search, however cautious, for an alternative. Within the columns of the Voice were embodied elements of radical liberalism, land leagueism and labourism, and viewed from the perspective of Maxwell and Glasier's later trajectories, it can be regarded as representing a halfway house between Liberalism and Socialism. The intention behind the Voice of the People was to challenge the Liberal Party supremacy and to act as a tribune for the working class whose interests, it argued, could never be represented by even, "the most Liberal daily newspaper".19 Alongside of the "magnificent increase" in national wealth, which had doubled since 1852, "chronic pauperism" had scarcely diminished.20 Such problems as Labour faced (the terms "Labour", "the people", "the main body of the people", "the working class", were all used interchangeably) demanded "radical treatment", and the key was for Labour to increase its representation in the corridors of power.21 According to the Voice the, "so-called representation of the people in Parliament is one of the greatest shams which delude the people of this country." Labour had only two representatives in the House of Commons, as against the representatives of, "the Fighting Interests", "the Law and Liquor interests", and:22 the Aristocratic and Moneyed interests ... represented in overwhelming numbers with a House of Peers wholly composed of landlords to back them." Yet, it was Labour which, "produces wealth and profit for all and bears the whole social fabric on its broad patient back."23 This acceptance of the labour theory of value and a desire to see the international solidarity of labour did not, however, lead to an acceptance of the class struggle. The Voice equated, "antagonisms between class and class" with that between "nation and nation"
Electoral Reform and the Political Modernization of England, 1832–1841
Parliaments, Estates, and Representation, xxiii (2003), 49-67, 2003
Philip Salmon re-examines the place of the Reform Act of 1832 in English parliamentary history as a supposed turning point which averted revolution. Recent scholarship has shown that already before 1832 English radical traditions favoured popular constitutional reform over republicanism, and that changes to the electoral system were in practice not extensive after 1832. The analysis of pollbooks reveals, however, that the incidence of party-based voting was higher after the reform. The author explains how changes in the electoral laws, including those for local elections in the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, altered the nature of electioneering. The new, more bureaucratic electoral laws on voter registration and qualification, on the manner of taking the poll, and on permitted election costs, all placed a premium on party organization for both local and national elections. The legal complexities led to the formation of local party associations to tackle them, as especially the registration of party supporters as voters required constant vigilance between elections. The adversarial system of registration was a key element in the rise of party-based voting in the 1830s. Confrontational electoral practices politicized the electorate for local as well as national contests, and so contributed to the advance of more persistent party allegiances at both levels. This constitutional realignment underpinned the growth of a more modern English representative democracy.
Economic Interests and the Origins of Electoral Institutions
A recent wave of studies explores the effects of electoral institutions on economic interests. This paper instead examines the effects of economic interests on electoral institutions. We argue that electoral rules are a function of the nature and geographical dispersion of economic interests.
Parties, Agents and Electoral Culture in England, 1880-1910
2016
The reforms to Britain’s electoral system between 1867 and 1885 significantly changed how elections were fought. By the end of the process the House of Commons was elected from constituencies of roughly equal size, with larger cities and counties subdivided. There were limits to how much candidates could spend on their election campaign, which helped to reduce corruption through bribery and treating. While there was no manhood (let alone universal adult) suffrage, there was now a mass electorate to which the parties needed to appeal in order to win elections.
Review article: Elitism and Anti-elitism in Nineteenth Century Democratic Thought
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1016 J Histeuroideas 2006 04 002, 2012
It is disappointing that while scholarship abounds on the intricacies of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism and On Liberty, relatively little work has been done on his associated theory of representative government. Certainly, this deficiency has diminished in recent years, with scholars such as Eugenio Biagini paying close attention to the Athenian influences on Mill's democratic thought, but scholarly books on this part of his corpus remain relatively scarce. This is merely one reason why we should be grateful for Nadia Urbinati's Mill on Democracy. Her common ground with Biagini is indicated by her book's subtitle: 'From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government' (although she has disagreements on specific matters of interpretation). 1 The book has five main chapters. In the introduction, Urbinati directs the reader's attention to Mill's classical writings, arguing that there one finds the key to his republican political theory. She argues that: Mill realized that a discursive approach to politics demands a kind of liberty whose foundation is interaction and cooperation without necessarily excluding interference. A free and open process of consent formation occurs among individuals who exchange, influence, and thus ''interfere'' with one another's opinions, but who do not perceive this as amounting to a lack of liberty. 1 At the heart of this approach stood a faith not in individual reason so much as in free discussion between educated and critical citizens. For Urbinati, Mill's guiding conviction was that the various spheres of public interaction build upon one another, entailing that equality in the political realm is incompatible with power inequalities in civil society. 'Mill's entire theoretical work can be seen as a construction configured by three related dynamics: the deliberative form of politics, the authority of individual judgement, and a cooperative model of the polity, family and economic relations. yA democratic polis needs to presume a social order that does not bluntly contradict its political principles'. 1