Norway Universal manhood suffrage: 1898. 1913
Portugal The 1822 Constitution granted universal manhood suffrage, excluding illiterates; there were some financial restrictions. 1931
Spain Universal manhood suffrage: 1869, repealed in 1878, reinstated in 1890. 1931
Sweden Universal manhood suffrage: 1909 with some restrictions; extended to all in 1919. 1919
Switzerland Universal manhood suffrage: 1848. Women not enfranchised until 1959. Allowed gradually in various cantons. Universal suffrage only in 1971. 1971
United Kingdom Universal manhood suffrage in 1918 for men over 21 and women over 30. Full equality in 1928. 1928
United States 1825: all but three states had universal manhood suffrage; in 1856 property qualifications were removed everywhere. Voting restricted to white males only in most states. 1917: first woman (Jeannette Rankin) to be elected in either House. 1920: Nineteenth Amendment enfranchising women. The Voting Rights Act 1965 makes illegal racial discrimination in voting. 1918
In reality the mere extension of the suffrage is not an adequate index of democratization, nor was the suffrage ever, as a sceptical Karl Marx put it, ‘the miraculous magic wand for which the republican duffers had taken it …’.26
Other factors come into play:
The Actual Power of the Elected Assembly. What if the elected assembly has few powers? What if the executive (the government and the sovereign) can ignore it? Does an unelected chamber have powers of veto? Finland had universal suffrage before any country in Europe (1906) but it was a semi-autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire. The real ruler was the Tsar (with the title of Grand Duke), who could and did ignore the will of the electorate, turning down most of the legislative proposals in the years after 1906 (making a rare exception in the case of the regulation of working hours in bakeries).27 In terms of the suffrage, Germany in 1871 was more democratic than Britain in 1914 since all males could vote, but the Reichstag had fewer powers than the House of Commons, partly because Germany was a federal state and partly because the Kaiser had greater powers than the British monarch. The British House of Commons was faced with a hereditary House of Lords that could veto all legislation until the Parliamentary Act of 1911 (after which the Lords could only delay non-financial bills). Today the House of Lords, though almost totally non-hereditary, is still the only unelected chamber in Europe, indeed one of the few in the world along with those of countries such as Belize, Lesotho, Canada, Oman, and Saudi Arabia.
Electoral Mechanism. The way seats are allocated is a major factor in deciding who wins and who loses an election. An absolutely proportional system leads to a parliament that is the ‘mirror of the nation’, to use a metaphor coined by the nineteenth-century Scottish jurist James Lorimer, but it is unlikely to produce a single-party majority, thus making compromises inevitable.28 If rural areas are over-represented, as they often were and are, it is more difficult for urban-based parties (such as the Socialists) to win power. For instance, in 1907 in Germany the Social Democratic Party (SPD) lost twenty-six seats but gained hundreds of thousands of votes. In Germany at the time it took only 18,000 votes to elect a Conservative but 70,000 to elect a Social Democrat.29
Political Freedoms. This is crucial. Can the electorate choose freely between genuinely independent political parties? Are there laws that stop or make it difficult to form a political party? Is there a free press? Do all the candidates have a similar access to the media, to newspapers, to places where they can speak? Is the ballot really secret? A ‘father of liberalism’ such as Montesquieu thought that open voting was essential to maintain the rule of the aristocracy over the unenlightened petit peuple.30 The ballot became secret in Australia in 1856 and in New Zealand in 1870. Great Britain introduced it only in 1872, Belgium in 1877, Germany in 1903, and France in 1913.31 In Imperial Germany big employers such as Krupp could sack workers for voting the wrong way. When the ballot became secret in 1903, Krupp workers could finally vote for the Social Democrats – and one-quarter of them did so.32 Personal expenditure limits for candidates were introduced in Imperial Germany, where they had been championed by the ‘popular’ parties, notably the SPD and the Catholic Zentrum.33
There may also be de facto impediments in elected deputies taking their seats. For instance, Catholics were prevented from sitting in the House of Commons until the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829. Jews had to wait a little longer. In 1847 an elected MP, Lionel Rothschild, was not allowed to sit in the House, because he refused to swear the oath of allegiance ‘on the true faith of a Christian’. Several attempts were made to modify the practice but all were vetoed by the House of Lords. Only in 1858 could Lionel de Rothschild (who, meanwhile, had been re-elected several times) take his seat. Those elected as republicans (for instance members of Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland) are required to swear allegiance to the monarchy – an oath they have so far refused to swear and so they cannot take part in parliamentary proceedings.
Finally, there is also the issue of payment for members of parliament. In the nineteenth century it was usual for parliamentarians not to receive any salary or expenses. Consequently only people with an independent income could afford to be elected and to pay not just for their upkeep but also for the cost of elections, travelling, entertaining, networking etc.
Political Power. Some people and organizations are more powerful, have more money, can influence those who can influence others, have a disproportionate weight in the media, or belong (by birth, accident, or design) to influential networks. In 2015 the British government came under criticism for having an excessive representation of people who went to the same public school (Eton). So it should not be surprising that even after considerable electoral reform in the mid-1880s, 5 per cent of the Lower House in the Austro-Hungarian Parliament were aristocrats when aristocrats already occupied the whole of the Upper House.34 Then there is the question of political corruption. Are voters bribed or threatened? Are elections rigged? How widespread is political corruption? In the late nineteenth century, between 1865 and 1884, even in the so-called ‘mother of parliaments’, the title the British invented for its parliament, there were cases of corruption at elections in at least sixty-four English boroughs.35
And there are more problems: what if only a few electors bother to vote? What if voting is made difficult by the sparse numbers of voting stations? What if one is forced to queue for a long time? What if the level of information available to the electorate is limited?
The difficulty in establishing a democracy index is apparent from contemporary attempts to do this. The 2012 Democracy Index established by the Economist Intelligence Unit listed twenty-five countries as being ‘fully democratic’, followed by a number of ‘flawed democracies’, ‘hybrid regimes’, and ‘authoritarian regimes’.36 France turns out to be a ‘flawed democracy’ like Portugal, Greece, and Italy, even though the turnout in the 2012 and 2017 presidential elections in France was around 80 per cent while the turnout for presidential elections in the United States (a ‘full democracy’) is usually around 60 per cent, in spite of the enormous sums of money spent by the leading candidates.37 By 2014, France was promoted by the Economist Intelligence Unit to the lower echelons of ‘full democracy’ and one wonders which flaws were put right in two years, yet the fix must not have been very convincing because by 2016 France was flawed again, along with Belgium and Japan, and just below Cabo Verde, while even the USA was downgraded to ‘flawed democracy’. The United Kingdom remains a ‘full democracy’ despite having a hereditary head of state and a non-elected upper house. Russia ranks as a fully fledged ‘authoritarian regime’, though it has elections, an (embattled) opposition, and at least some independent newspapers. Although no one would view Russia as a full democracy, it seems that ranking it 122nd in 2012 (squeezed between Jordan and Ethiopia – where the ruling party and its allies ‘won’ all parliamentary seats in the 2010 and 2015 elections) and 132rd in 2014 (well below Belarus and Cuba) may be unduly
severe. It calls into question the simplistic and naive methodology of surveys such as these. Perhaps there should there be an index of such surveys: very flawed, deeply flawed, etc. These issues exemplify the difficulties facing the comparative analyst of democracy, one of the most used and misused concepts of modern times – perhaps because it is one of the most important. Above all the notion that there is a ‘will of the electorate’ must be a fiction since the whole point of elections is that the ‘people’ are divided and that they do not and cannot express a single will. Elections are an act whereby the ‘people’ reveal their differences and divisions. Ultimately, the value of the democratic mechanism is that it legitimizes the victorious candidates.
In France the road to democracy was particularly complex due to the significant changes of regimes in the period between the French Revolution and the final establishment of the Third Republic. For the first half of the nineteenth century the norm in France and in almost all ‘democratic’ countries was a restricted suffrage based on income and property, thus withholding power from the broad masses who might use it in the ‘wrong’ way.
The idea that owning property uniquely qualified one to vote has a long and distinguished pedigree. William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century jurist and a progressive Tory, wrote in his celebrated and massively influential Commentaries on the Laws of England that since those who are indigent cannot be expected to protect property, they should be excluded from voting.38 Immanuel Kant, in 1793, also thought that only ‘citizens’ should be allowed to vote. Who were the citizens? Citizens were those who were their own masters, he explained, and the propertyless cannot be their own masters, because they serve others.39 Although in favour (in principle) of equal rights of individuals, he was really defending inequality of outcomes: ‘this thoroughgoing equality of individuals within a state … is quite consistent with the greatest inequality in terms of the quantity and degree of their possessions …’40 He then added: ‘The quality requisite to this, apart from the natural one (of not being a child or a woman), is only that of being one’s own master (sui iuris), hence having some property … that supports him …’41
It was better to have a restricted suffrage, which is a real check on the executive, than give ineffectual votes to everyone, explained the liberal thinker Benjamin Constant in the Mercure de France on 18 January 1817.42 In an earlier text (‘Principes de politique’, now part of the collection Écrits politiques), having praised the labouring classes (‘Je ne veux faire aucun tort à la classe laborieuse’) and declared them just as much part of the nation as all the others, Constant explained that in order to exercise the suffrage properly it was necessary to have the time to acquire wisdom and proper judgement (‘l’acquisition des lumières, la rectitude du jugement’). Thus only the possession of property can make men capable of exercising their political rights (‘La propriété seule rend les hommes capables de l’exercice des droits politiques’).43 And if one is going to have a hereditary monarchy then one must also have a chamber based on the principle of heredity alongside an elected assembly.44 The best model, declared Constant, as did almost all French liberals of the time, was Great Britain.45
The fear of the mob, namely of unpredictable people, was commonplace among progressive opinion. Thus the Abbé (Emmanuel) Sieyès, one of the protagonists of the French Revolution, stated in no uncertain terms that ‘the mob belongs to the aristocracy’, meaning that the people would be under the hegemony of the nobility.46 If we were dealing with a ‘new people’ (‘un peuple neuf’), he explained, then one would unhesitatingly advocate equality of rights, but, since we are dealing with people who have had to endure centuries of oppression, one must take further precautions against the enemies of freedom.47 There were major dissenting voices. Jean-Paul Marat, in particular, was alarmed. If the suffrage is restricted to such an extent that only the rich will be citizens, he argued in his newspaper L’Ami du peuple (30 June 1790), then the people will be at their mercy: ‘What would we have gained if, having destroyed the aristocracy of the nobles, it is replaced by the aristocracy of the rich. And if we have to suffer under the yoke of these new parvenus, we might as well have maintained the privileges of the old order.’ 48
The first elections after the Revolution were based on property qualifications. There was no major drive for universal suffrage at least until 1830 when the Bourbon dynasty was overthrown and replaced with the Orléans dynasty, and even then universal suffrage was advocated only by minorities.49 And the great liberal Alexis de Tocqueville, speaking in the Chamber of Deputies on 29 January 1848, worried that in-justices would spark rebellion:
Observe what is going on in the working classes … have you not noticed that their passions once political have become social? … that all those above them are incapable and unworthy of ruling them? that the present distribution of wealth is unjust? … and do you not think that when such opinions … penetrate deeply into the masses, that they will lead, I do not know when or how, to the most redoubtable of revolutions?50
When the French monarchy was finally overthrown the new provisional government of the Second Republic established by decree (March 1848) universal manhood suffrage. It was declared that ‘The Republic excludes none of its sons, calls all to political life; it will be for you like a rebirth, a baptism, a regeneration.’51
The fear of the conservatives was not justified: the ballot was used to elect moderates and to defeat the more radical popular insurrection of July 1848. Then, later in December, the people elected Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte as the first French President of the Republic with almost 75 per cent of the vote. His subsequent coup d’état on 2 December 1851 (analysed famously by Karl Marx in his 1852 ‘instant book’ The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon) was endorsed by a popular referendum or plebiscite with an unlikely 92 per cent of the vote, a further sign that even dictators had to pay some obeisance to the idea of democracy. A year later Louis-Napoléon became ‘Napoléon III, Empereur des Français’, again with overwhelming popular backing.
Clearly there was little to fear from universal manhood suffrage. Democrats backed the extension of the suffrage out of principle, conservatives out of self-interest. The socialists were less sure. Some were optimistic. Egged on by Engels, the socialist Paul Lafargue (Karl Marx’s son-in-law) wrote to the Socialist leader Jules Guesdes on 14 November 1892: ‘Universal suffrage will become a formidable weapon now that the workers are beginning to learn how to exploit it.’52 But not trusting the people was not just a prerogative of the aristocracy. A man of the left such as Eugène Sémérie, a supporter of the Paris Commune, wrote in La République et le peuple souverain (1871) of the ‘absurd theory of popular sovereignty’ whereby each vote is the same as any other. The real culprits were, of course, the peasants, the bastion of reaction. The peasant, he explained, is barely aware of the meaning of civic life (‘la vie civique’): ‘He understands nothing of the great human questions which inspire, perturb and arouse the cities.’53 The historian Hippolyte Taine wrote in Du Suffrage universel et de la manière de voter (1872) that ‘the ignorance and credulity of the rural population are astonishing … The peasant spends the whole day in the fields and agricultural work stultifies human thought.’54
Gustave Flaubert, who held an aristocratic conception of politics (‘the best should rule’), in letters to the eminent novelist George Sand, declared quite simply, ‘Je hais la démocratie’, adding a few months later that he was ‘tired of the ignoble worker, the inept bourgeois, the stupid peasant, and the hateful priest’ (‘je suis las de l’ignoble ouvrier, de l’inepte bourgeois, du stupide paysant et de l’odieux ecclésiastique’).55 He complained that free and compulsory education would only increase the number of ‘imbéciles’,56 and added that universal suffrage is ‘more stupid than the divine right of kings … the masses, the greater number is always idiotic’.57 Of course, Flaubert liked being contre-courant. Politically, he counted for very little and he knew it. By 1887 even Philippe d’Orléans, heir to the Frenc
h Crown as the grandson of Louis Philippe I, the last King of France, formally embraced universal manhood suffrage, though few took him seriously.
Not surprisingly, reactionary nationalists such as the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke warned, in the 1890s, against the rule not just of the working classes but also of the middle classes, who ‘will determine Europe’s future’ and who ‘are not free from a certain preference for the mediocre’. He decried the ‘yoke of public opinion’, which ‘presses heavier than elsewhere in the freest great States of modernity – in England and the United States’. The solution was to increase the role of the state ‘that protected our forefathers with its justice’.58 Every society is a natural aristocracy. ‘Logic has decreed,’ he explained, ‘that millions of people work, forge and labour so that a few thousand can devote themselves to scholarship, the arts and poetry.’59
At least France, even in 1848, had universal manhood suffrage, which was not the case in the United Kingdom. Before the 1832 Reform Act, the UK, the world’s ‘oldest democracy’, was remarkably undemocratic. The electorate was tiny and constituencies were unequal in size. Cities such as Sheffield, Leeds, and Manchester did not return any MPs while small towns in Cornwall returned two members. As Thomas Babington Macaulay famously said in the House of Commons on 5 July 1831 during the debate on parliamentary reform: ‘For who can answer plain arithmetical demonstration? Under the present system, Manchester, with two hundred thousand inhabitants, has no members. Old Sarum, with no inhabitants, has two members.’60
The struggle for electoral reform had not been entirely peaceful. In 1816 a large gathering took place in Spa Field in Islington (London). It quickly turned into the so-called Spa Fields Riots. In 1819 a massive demonstration (60,000 people) gathered in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, only to be attacked by the cavalry, leading to some ten to fifteen dead and hundreds injured (in an obvious reference to Waterloo, this became known as the Peterloo Massacre). The demonstration, which had been entirely peaceful, moved Shelley to celebrate it in his famous poem The Mask of Anarchy (1819):
The Anxious Triumph Page 46