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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
In the course of arguing his case for electoral reform, John Stuart Mill proposes a criterion of government by majority which has gone largely unnoticed. Mill holds that any majority coalition of representatives in an assembly must directly represent a majority of electors. A representative directly represents those electors, and only those electors, who voted in his favour at his election. An implication of Mill's version of the principle of majority rule is that, given an assembly of any considerable size, all but a small fraction of the electorate must have direct representation.
À l'occasion de son plaidoyer en faveur d'une réforme électorale, John Stuart Mill traite du gouvernement par la majorité; il suggère un critère qui a cependant fait l'objet de peu de commentaires. Mill maintient que toute coalition majoritaire de représentants à l'intérieur d'une assemblée doit elle aussi représenter directement une majorité d'électeurs. Un représentant ne représente directement que les électeurs qui l'ont appuyé aux élections. Une conséquence de la version de Mill du principe du gouvernement par la majorité est que la très grande majorité de l'électorat doit se trouver directement représentée dans toute assemblée le moindrement nombreuse.
1 Hansard n.s. vol. 188, July 5, 1867, 1103.Google Scholar
2 Sugden, Robert, The Political Economy of Public Choice (New York: Halsted, 1981), 203:Google Scholar “... Mill repudiates the principle of majority rule (‘the government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people’) as undemocratic.”
3 Hogan, James, Election and Representation (Cork: Cork University Press, 1945), 127.Google Scholar
4 Spitz, Elaine, Majority Rule (Chatham: Chatham House, 1984), 73.Google Scholar
5 Burns, J. H., “Utilitarianism and Democracy,” Philosophical Quarterly 9 (1959), 168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Hansard n.s. vol. 188, July 5, 1867, 1103.Google Scholar
7 Mill, J. S., Considerations on Representative GovernmentGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Robson, John M. (gen. ed.), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill 19 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 448.Google Scholar Hereafter, CRG, in Collected Works 19.
8 Ibid., 449. See also Mill, J. S., Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, reprinted in Collected Works 19, 329.Google Scholar
9 Robson, John M., The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 229.Google Scholar
10 Thompson, Dennis F., John Stuart Mill and Representative Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 105–06.Google Scholar
11 Ibid., 8.
12 Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 4.Google Scholar
13 Personal Representation: Speech of John Stuart Mill, Esq., M.P., Delivered in the House of Commons, May 29, 1867 (London, 1867), 7–8, 14.Google Scholar
14 CRG, in Collected Works 19, 450.Google Scholar Italics added.
15 Hansard n.s. vol. 188, July 5, 1867, 1104.Google Scholar
16 CRG, in Collected Works 19, 449.Google Scholar
17 Personal Representation, 14. The context is a numerical example which will not work out otherwise.
18 CRG, in Collected Works 19. 449.Google Scholar
19 Ibid., 505.
20 Hansard n.s. vol. 188, July 5, 1867, 1103.Google Scholar
21 Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, in Collected Works 19, 329.Google Scholar
22 Personal Representation, 14. This, in spirit, was the solution to the “majority of a majority” problem proposed by John C. Calhoun. Calhoun depicts the problem in a quite different way. There is a majority party with a adherents and a minority party with b adherents, b = n–a. Further, the majority party contains a faction in number, and the minority party contains a faction in number, Suppose the majority decision-rule is in use. Then on any question of policy the can conclude the a and the a the whole (the n); and the govern, though they might make up little more than one-quarter of the whole (Calhoun, John C., A Disquisition on Government and Selections from the Discourse [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953], esp. 32)Google Scholar. We now suppose, to establish a parallel with Mill's treatment, that the a elect a representative A and the b a representative B, A taking up the position agreeable to the and B the position agreeable to the Only when A and B take up the same position are the n bound by it. The required unanimity of A and B ensures that any policy adopted will accord with the. wishes of a “true” (Calhoun's “concurrent”) majority numbering a sum which must exceed n/2 It is a plausible conjecture that Calhoun's analysis of the “majority of a majority” problem prompted Mill's own. We find Mill, at a point in one of his speeches, adopting Calhoun's way of looking at the problem (but without, it should be added, adopting Calhoun's solution to it); see Personal Representation, 15, first full sentence.
23 If Mill's majority principle holds generally, then the (s + l)/2 w-constituencies which are smallest in size (number of electors) must together account for at least (n + l)/2 votes assuming odd n and s. The mean size of this subset of the w-constituencies must therefore be at least (n + 1)/(s + 1), and the mean size, w/s, of all s w-constituencies can be no smaller. Therefore w ³ s(n + 1)/(s + 1), and w/n > s/(s + 1).
24 Personal Representation, 15.
25 CRG, in Collected Works 19, 448Google Scholar (chapter heading).
26 There were several versions of Hare's method. The version drawn upon here is—or so internal evidence would suggest, at any rate—the one Mill had before him when he wrote chapter 7 of CRG. Its distinguishing feature is that every constituency is of size n/s. To avoid complication, I suppress Hare's (and Mill's) undertaking to make the nation the electoral district. The modern version of Hare's method is known as the single transferable vote. Its main principles are set out in Mackenzie, W. J. M., Free Elections (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958), chap. 8.Google Scholar
27 CRG, in Collected Works 19, 455.Google Scholar
28 Mill, to Hare, Thomas, June 17, 1859, in Collected Works 15, 626.Google Scholar That representation under Hare's method (in the version here) satisfies Mill's principle can be deduced directly from the assumption that each representative has a w-constituency amounting to n/s electors.
29 Bogdanor, Vernon, What is Proportional Representation? (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1984), 59.Google Scholar Robert. Sugden, in a recent article, cites an argument for proportional representation which holds that representation “should be designed... so that any majority of representatives are in a real rather than nominal sense the representatives of a majority of the citizens.” This, it will be seen, is a rendering of Mill's majority principle. Sugden does not attribute the argument to Mill specifically, but he associates it with Mill's (and others') observations on the “majority of a majority” problem. See Sugden, Robert, “Free Association and the Theory of Proportional Representation,” American Political Science Review 78 (1984), 32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30 Personal Representation, 14.
31 Mill, J. S., “Recent Writers on Reform,” reprinted in Collected Works 19, 359.Google Scholar