Population Equality and the Distribution of Seats in the British House of Commons

Abstract

One of the important commonalities of electoral politics in the AngloAmerican democracies in the 1960s was the problem of population inequalities among legislative constituencies. The so-called reapportionment revolution in the United States culminated in the wholesale redrawing of the electoral map of the country.l In Canada and Australia, redistributions have been taking place in national and provincial parliaments, and political debate about malapportionment continues to excite attention.2 Postwar redistributions of parliamentary seats in the United Kingdom have attracted comparatively little public discussion, although the November 1969 decision by the Labour Government to use its parliamentary majority to reject the Boundary Commissions' redistribution recommendations evoked a fairly recriminatory debate in the House of Commons. Briefly, two competing conceptions of parliamentary representation provide the familiar philosophical ground over which the political debate about the geography of legislative constituencies occurs. One conception stresses the representation of interests, and in the Burkean vein argues the importance of maintaining the identity and integrity of communities of interest in the formulation of the electoral map. The other conception stresses population equality, and argues that there ought to be a very