Citizens and People
| Date | 01 November 1981 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9256.1981.tb00056.x |
| Author | Rodney Barker |
| Published date | 01 November 1981 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Wo~en
~and~~te§
and
EZeetor
Preference
31
replaced by male candidates in October,
it
was, the men on average who fell below
the nationwide trends, Conservative men by
1.5;
per cent and Labour men by
1.2
per cent. From this
it
would seem that women candidates do not make any real
difference
to
the vote, having produced results at about the national average
levels.
If
anything,
if
all other things really are equal, the electorate actu-
ally preferred those standing
in
February to t:heir male counterparts of the
October election
-
a point which selection conferences might bear in mind.
Notes
1.
I
am grateful to Michael English, Editor of the Daily Mail, for permission
to read the National Opinion Polls report in its entirety.
2. Rose also points out that the calculation of swings for the February etec-
tion is further complicated by the redistribution of Parliamentary consti-
tuencies. This meant that for over
300
seats there was no adequate basis
for comparing
1970
and
1974
votes, ruling out any attempt to compare men and
women in the way adopted here.
Eej'erences
Bondfield,
M.
(l950),
A
Life's Work (London:
hutch ins on^,
p.245.
Leonard, R.L. (1968), Elections in Britain
Rose,
R.
(1974), 'The Voting Surveyed', in
February
1974
(London: Times Newspapers).
Rose,
R.
(1975), 'The Voting Surveyed', in
October
1974
(London: Times Newspapers).
(Von
Nos
t
rand).
-
The Times Guide to the House of Commons,
The Times Guide to the House
of
Commons,
-0-000-0-
CITIZENS
AND
PEOPLE
(RODNEY BARK~R)
The question 'who are citizens', or 'who is a citizen' has always been an
important one in political science.
It
has, also, been a neglected one. The
rights of citizens have received far more attention than has the right to be a
citizen. And yet the matter is
of
central importance to many of the principal
concerns
of
political thought. We need not only
to
know what rights and duties
a theory confers, but upon whom
it
confers them.
If
a theory of citizenship con-
fers rights and duties upon all adults, what
iis
an adult;
if
upon all persons,
what is
a
person? An account of democracy must say not only how the citizens
participate in, authorise, or control their own government, but what the quali-
fications for inclusion in the citizen body are in the first place.
tie
has argued that a democratic theory needs
two
elements, the first being that
the demos participates fully and equally
in
the making
of
its own laws, the se-
cond that only members of the
-
demos are subject to those laws.
achieving equality, this is neatly convincing. Dahl develops his argument in
order to deal with the difficulty posed by the question of exclusion from the
demos, the citizen body, on grounds of incompetence. What criteria might proper-
ly be used, he asks, to exclude from the
--
demos those who were nonetheless rightly
subject
to
its laws? The answer lies in qualified theory of incompetence. In
the case
of
children, 'the only defensible ground' on which they can
be
excluded
'is
that they are not yet fully capable of the "exercise of reason". Dahl recog-
nises, though, that whilst the criterion of competence seems to justify the ex-
clusion of children,
it
has an element of 'ar'bitrariness' about
it.
The line
An important recent contribution to this discussion is by Robert Dahl (1979).
As a princple
of
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