William J. Bulman. The Rise of Majority Rule in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire.

Abstract

Using the experience of English representative ­­institutions in the early modern era as a case study, William J. Bulman’s ambitious and extraordinarily successful monograph, The Rise of Majority Rule in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, seeks to problematize and recover the hitherto uninvestigated origins of majority rule as the primary mode of ­­decision-making in modern democracies. Unabashedly, the author, defining institutions as “systems of social factors that together seem to generate a regularity of pattern of social practices” (23), presents it as a history “not of ideology, ideas, discourses, or norms” but “of practices and institutions” (6). Observing that scholars have long focused so intently upon explaining “the period’s great constitutional and ideological watersheds,” from the English Revolution to the American Revolution, “to the exclusion of equally important transformations in institutions and mundane patterns of political practice,” he argues they have failed to consider “the long-term importance of...