Electoral Reform or Not: Party Interests Defeated Principled Arguments in the Late Nineteenth Century and Have Characterised the UK’s Electoral System Since

Abstract

Conti’s Parliament the Mirror of the Nation is an excellent, thorough exploration and explication of nineteenth-century debates over electoral reform as members of Britain’s intellectual elite wrestled with the issue of how to create a system that would ensure that all opinions were advanced in the country’s Parliament without an expansion of the franchise, meaning that the House of Commons was overwhelmed by the working class. A superb contribution to intellectual history, however, it makes little contact with the ‘real world’ of politics, where the short-term interests of the dominant political parties led to pragmatic rather than idealistic resolution to that issue. That resolution, negotiated by leading politicians from the two main parties, led to an electoral reform in 1885 based on single-member, territorially based constituencies that, with modifications only, remains in place today, generating general election results that are both disproportional and biased as a consequence of the system’s geographical construction