The Export of Electoral Systems
| Author | W. J. M. Mackenzie |
| Published date | 01 October 1957 |
| Date | 01 October 1957 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1957.tb00778.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
THE EXPORT
OF
ELECTORAL
SYSTEMS’
W.
J.
M.
MACKENZIE
Victoria University
of
Manchester
THE
SITUATION
THIS
lecture,
I
am afraid, is concerned primarily with some rather dry
questions about the tactics of research in politics, and
I
hope therefore that
you will excuse me if
I
begin by indicating, in a more personal
way,
the
situation which may give these some present interest. Through the kindness
of various sponsors
I
was able last summer to pay a brief visit to East and
Central Africa. There are seven British territories there;2 in all of these, and
in the Sudan too, discussion about the development
of
elections lies close
to the centre of politics. Indeed, there exists already
a
surprisingly large
number of separate electoral systems, because of the introduction of
separate electorates for separate communities.
I
can reckon at least fifteen
of them, and this takes no account of the ingenuity of District Commis-
sioners in devising new systems to fit local circumstances, as they are urged
to
do
under the policy of ‘democratizing’ tribal institutions. These home-
made electoral systems vary
a
good deal, and include some useful devices
which are not in the
textbook^.^
This outbreak of
a
sort of epidemic of electoral systems is at first a little
startling to a politics don, more startling than the related outbreaks
of
Speakers and maces, Permanent Secretaries and Cabinet Secretariats,
Federations and County Councils. It has been the fashion in political
research, in countries where democracy is well established, to deflate the
nineteenth-century notion that in
a
free election the voter decides rationally
between persons and policies: and much excellent work has been done to
analyse Western elections on the basis of such concepts as voting habits,
the party image, the association of political attitudes with types
of
per-
sonality, the relation of such attitudes to more general economic and social
factors. We have begun to see Western elections in terms of what Bagehot
The Sidney Ball Lecture, delivered by Professor Mackenzie in the University
of
Oxford,
*
Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Nyasaland, the two Rhodesias.
I
exclude
As
an example, a brief bibliography, for Tanganyika alone,
is
noted at the end of this
For a clear and moderate statement and summary see
D.
E.
Butler,
The British General
21
Feb. 1957.
Somaliland, which has problems of rather a different kind.
paper.
Election
of
1951
(1952),
p.
3.
Political
Studies,
Vol.
V,
No.
3
(1957, 240-257).
W.
J.
M.
MACKENZIE
24
1
used to call ‘a
cake
of custom’:’ and in doing
so
we have learnt much,
consciously or unconsciously, from the writings of social anthropologists
about the life of isolated pre-literate societies. We no longer underrate the
political wisdom
of
non-Western peoples, and in consequence we have
become increasingly sceptical about the possibility that one can in any real
sense make constitutions for them; yet it is in this period that the construc-
tion of constitutions has become an industry on a grand scale. There has
been much talk of the expansion of Communism, but there are few Marxist
constitutions outside the
U.S.S.R.
and China: whereas the fashion for
government based on free elections has run round the world. Earlier
attempts to establish Western constitutions in the Middle East and in Latin
America have at least partially failed: yet to these old experiments has been
added a series of new ventures in Africa, in the West Indies, the Pacific,
South-East Asia, and the countries of the old Indian Empire. There have
been such inconceivably gigantic operations as the introduction of universal
suffrage in India:2 at the other extreme is the spontaneous imitation of
Western democracy by small groups of people like the
2,000
people of the
south coast of Manus Island, where ‘wait-council’ time is
so
warmly
described in Miss Margaret Mead’s recent book,
New
Lives
for
Old.
An ingenious person might construe this as the march of
a
new type of
imperialism,
a
device for captivation. On the contrary, the ‘imperialists’,
British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Australian, to a slightly less extent Ameri-
can, are no longer Wilsonian: they insist nowadays that it is absurd to sup-
pose that Western institutions can possibly be made to work in oriental or
African countries without long apprenticeship. We have not imposed
Western institutions; they have been demanded, one might say extorted,
from
us,
and we are thus committed against our will to an extraordinary
adventure. We share the commitment because we furnished the model and
will be involved in the consequences of success
or
failure. But now the
experiment is launched we are not invited to participate, indeed we have
neither the wisdom nor the power to do so. Nevertheless, there is
a
challenge
to gain at least an intellectual grasp
of
the situation: it is after a11 an article
of faith within the cycle of beliefs to which free elections belong that it
is
good for
a
rational being
to
give an account of himself. If from academic
observation comes knowledge useful to countries where the transition has
scarcely begun,
so
much the better: but
so
far as practical justification
is
needed it must lie primarily in the fact that independent observation and
analysis is in itself
a
part of free government as we understand it.
Physics
and
Politics,
Longmans ed.
of
1915,
vol.
viii, p.
18.
See the Report
of
the Chief Election Commissioner, Mr. Sukumar Sen (Manager
of
Publications, Delhi,
1955).
5540.5.3
R
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