Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain, by Gregory Conti

Abstract

Reviewed by: Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain by Gregory Conti Philip Harling (bio) Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain, by Gregory Conti; pp. xi + 408. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, $120.00, $34.99 paper. Thomas Hare is one of those eminent Victorians you have probably never heard of. A barrister and sometime assistant commissioner of London Charities, his hobby was to make the British electoral system perfect, and Hare scribbled a lot in pursuit of this goal. His magnum opus was Treatise on the Election of Representatives (1859). This was a formidably dense tome that nevertheless spoke to John Stuart Mill, who teamed up with Henry Fawcett to write a pamphlet that sought to translate Hare’s ideas into plainer English. The biggest of those ideas involved proportional representation (PR) and the single transferable vote (STV). PR was an electoral system in which the preferences among voters were intended to be reflected more proportionately within the elected body than could be achieved via pluralities or bare majorities within a winner-take-all [End Page 452] system, which “wasted” the votes of losing candidates (203). STV was Hare’s prescription for achieving PR in a way that made every vote count toward the electoral outcome. Today, STV is popular in Australia and Ireland, while PR—usually the party-list variety, and simpler than STV—is in wide use in Europe and far beyond, from Austria to Argentina, Italy, and Indonesia. There is therefore no doubting the global impact of this Hare-brained scheme. And while Hare’s home country still clings to the winner-take-all, first-past-the-post system, the debate about its relative virtues and vices compared with the PR alternatives continues to this day. If that debate within Britain remains vigorous now, it was even more so in Hare’s day. In Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain, Gregory Conti guides us through this Victorian conversation with skill and erudition. His book is a history of political thought and, as such, some of us who are not chiefly political thinkers will get lost from time to time within the denser thickets of that erudition. But Conti convinces that even this sort of reader should care about Victorian debates about STV and PR, in part because they are germane to our growing contemporary anxieties that the composition of our political bodies inadequately reflects the diversity and divisions within our societies. Even more, we should care because those debates show that the Victorians believed deeply, a lot more deeply than we do, in what Conti calls “the transformative, world-altering character of political deliberation” (364). They felt a moral urgency to get their electoral system right, as they did about so much else. Like his admirers and critics, and virtually all mid-Victorians, Hare thought that the British people were the greatest on earth. The proof of their greatness lay in the soundness of their democratic political institutions, which held firm while the Continent veered between bloody revolution and bloodier reaction. The British Parliament has never been held in higher esteem than it was in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. There was nevertheless much talk of improvement. How could Parliament be made a more accurate image of the society for which it made laws? How could it be made a proper mirror of the nation? This was the ruling theoretical question, Conti convincingly argues. The most common answer involved improving upon the 1832 electoral settlement by increasing suffrage. Thus Whig-Liberals like Walter Bagehot and Henry Davis Pochin could agree with Conservatives such as Henry Warwick Cole that parliamentary seats needed to be redistributed and consolidated so as to bring so-called respectable workingmen more squarely into the political nation. Free-thinking radicals like G. J. Holyoake could likewise concur with Tories such as Augustus Stapleton that corporate interests needed better representation within the post-1832 British Parliament, even if they disagreed about which of those interests merited better access to the House of Commons. Arrayed against these varieties-of-suffrage...