Electoral Reform or Not: Party Interests Defeated Principled Arguments in the Late Nineteenth Century and Have Characterised the UK’s Electoral System Since
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929919893249 |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Subject Matter | State of the Art |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919893249
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(1) 128 –136
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929919893249
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Electoral Reform or Not:
Party Interests Defeated
Principled Arguments in the
Late Nineteenth Century and
Have Characterised the UK’s
Electoral System Since
Ron Johnston
Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in
Victorian Britain by Gregory Conti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 408 pp., £90
(hardback). ISBN 9781108428736
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
Accepted: 15 November 2019
The issue of electoral reform has attracted interest within certain sectors of British society
for almost two centuries but only occasionally becomes the subject of wider public inter-
est, usually when the current electoral system appears to have performed badly. During
the nineteenth century, when the move towards universal franchise was slowly being
achieved, the nature of an electoral system that might accommodate such a substantial
change in the country’s political life was the subject of considerable debate among sec-
tions of the country’s intellectual elite. This generated a literature that Conti (2019) has
explored in great detail, illustrating how the nature of the electoral system was set in the
context of models of how Parliament should represent the country’s various interest
groups and reach its decisions. When it came to the last of the century’s major changes to
the electoral system, however, those debates and the systems promoted were largely
ignored and instead a system – single-member constituencies defined on geographical
893249PSW0010.1177/1478929919893249Political Studies ReviewJohnston
review-article2020
State of the Art
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