Democracy Confronts Diversity: Descriptive Representation in Victorian Britain

The Liberal Theory of Representation in Nineteenth-Century Britain

A good entry-point is a pair of remarks by two figures characteristic of their age: Bernard Cracroft, Whig-liberal journalist and political scientist; and Walter Bagehot, the essayist, editor of the Economist, and author of such central Victorian works as The English Constitution and Physics and Politics. In the 1850s–1860s the issue that most exercised this duo was political representation or, in the lingo of the day, “parliamentary reform.” Here was how they articulated the principles which they believed ought to regulate the representative system:

These quotations neatly recapitulate the twofold structure of the liberal theory of representation that held sway for much of the nineteenth century.

First, we have a descriptive ideal of representation. As a contemporary of Cracroft’s and Bagehot’s wrote, only those assemblies in which the diverse classes and interests that constituted British society were reflected in accord with their due weight could be said to be “founded on reason and justice.” ⁶ A parliament that inaccurately reflected society by, say, excluding a salient group did not merely suffer from a “blot” or “defect,” but committed an “injustice.” ⁷ Mirroring society in the legislature just was what made a government representative. It was an end in itself.

But, second, this did not mean that representativeness was not, in turn, the source of other benefits. Chief among these was parliamentary deliberation, what Bagehot and many others called the “deliberative House of Commons.” ⁸ The Victorian theory of deliberation was an intricate one, and it is beyond the scope of this essay to enter into all of its details and permutations; suffice it to say here that it operated at two levels. Within parliament, it promoted the enactment of wise policy, and it promoted this through a version of what, in the parlance of contemporary epistemic democracy, is known as the “diversity trumps ability” theorem. ⁹ Even the most virtuous assemblage of statesmen would, in Bagehot’s words, prove “stubbornly stupid” unless “there should be in the House of Commons some persons able to speak . . . the wants, sentiments, and opinions of every section of the community.” ¹⁰ Fortunately, the social reality which the electoral system was meant to translate into the House was a multifarious one composed of several streams of interest and opinion, such that on most issues a working division of epistemic labor would appear. ¹¹ Thus, because a Commons whose membership accurately mirrored society constituted a “fair field of debate” for the “free expression” of all relevant sentiments, the “truth” on any subject of legislation could not but “command [the House’s] assent.” ¹²

Wise policies were not the greatest fruits of this robust discussion, however. The deliberative Commons was also conceived of as the engine of a wider economy of political reason-giving with which the current interest in deliberation pales in comparison. For most political theorists, the idea of an educational impact deriving from politics in the nineteenth century conjures up Tocqueville on the sense of empowerment and industriousness which democracy spread through civil society or John Stuart Mill on the morally-improving power of popular participation in politics. ¹³ But to mid-Victorians, this was not the most common way in which politics was supposed to operate educatively. Instead, the chief educational contribution of politics was the rich debate that transpired in the Commons. ¹⁴ The contestation in the Commons focused the national mind—it gave the public a site in which it could evaluate the different positions on a question; since all facets of society ideally were present there, following its debates gave the citizen an occasion to transcend the limited domains of his region, religion, or occupation and to encounter the nation as a whole in what we might call its reason-giving dimension. ¹⁵ As a leading Whig politician put it, parliamentary deliberation was the preeminent “means of enlightening the minds of the People, and dispelling prevailing errors.” It acted as a spur for “intellectual activity and moral improvement” insofar as it made “those contests for power which are inevitable amongst men, take the form of debates. . . . These debates are thus rendered a valuable instrument for enlightening the public mind.” ¹⁶ Bagehot agreed: without parliamentary deliberation to “quicken . . . and enliven . . . thought all through society,” stultification would overcome all aspects of life, even those, like the natural sciences, which appeared furthest from politics. Hence the reason why Darwin had appeared in England and not elsewhere was, Bagehot immodestly claimed, because England was the nation in which government by discussion had operated most vigorously. ¹⁷

Yet despite—or rather, because—of these deliberative and descriptivist commitments, Bagehot was not a democrat, and neither were any of the other authors mentioned. By democracy, Bagehot and his contemporaries understood uniform universal suffrage—that is, the enfranchisement of all (male) citizens in electoral districts that were roughly equal, with no plural voting; in other words, “one-man, one-vote.” The problem, as they saw it, was that electoral democracy entailed bestowing an illiberal hegemony on the working classes. By virtue of their vast numbers, the working class could potentially outvote all other socioeconomic groups in every district. ¹⁸ While a democratic electorate was not formally exclusive—this is, of course, what made it democratic—it was thought to be practically exclusive: “the views of all other classes” would “inevitably be swamped” because of the greater numerousness of the working class. ¹⁹ To be clear, this analysis was not meant to apply only to socioeconomic relations; the democratic transposition of the largest class into a “providential arrangement to let the voice of no other class be heard at all” held no matter what the salient cleavages were in a society. ²⁰ Indeed, the most acute writer from an early generation of this school, the Whig author-statesman James Mackintosh, chose to illustrate the threat that democracy posed to “just or equal government” with the example of the dynamics between the Catholic majority and the Protestant minority in Ireland. ²¹ In keeping with this flexibility, it was characteristic of this discourse on representation to operate with a very broad notion of class as equivalent to community of interest, where this latter term was in turn interpreted in far from a strictly economistic sense. ²² In brief, whatever the nature of the relevant divisions in a society, ²³ the crux of the liberal-mirroring argument remained the same: that democracy contained no guarantee against the swamping effect which would produce a descriptively inaccurate picture of society in the assembly, and that it would thereby diminish the range of ideas heard and render parliamentary debate partial. ²⁴ As Bagehot’s brother-in-law William Rathbone Greg expressed it, electoral democracy “would hand over the entire representation of the state to one section of the community.” ²⁵

It was in light of this common critique of democracy that Bagehot pronounced himself a subscriber to another outlook on representation. Instead of democracy, he advocated what he called the true, time-honored “system of representation . . . based on a variety of franchises.” ²⁶ To understand what he meant by this phrase, we need to take a brief detour through the history of the parliamentary franchise.

Before 1832, the English electoral system was a “crazy-quilt pattern” of inherited customs that varied widely between constituencies. ²⁷ In a few places universal or nearly universal (male) suffrage prevailed; in others a high property qualification existed; and there were many gradations in between. On the whole, however, the suffrage was highly restricted; typical estimates are that around 12% of the adult male population had the vote. ²⁸

The First Reform Act of 1832 expanded the electorate (to around 20%). In doing so, however, it curtailed the local variation in the franchise. The Reform Act reduced a bewildering mix of voting regulations down to essentially just two: one franchise for all boroughs and another for all counties. A property qualification was required to vote in both kinds of constituency, a lower one in the boroughs than in the counties. ²⁹ As may be inferred, though, from the fact that four-fifths of the male population remained without the vote, this reform had the effect of diminishing the electorate in those boroughs which had lacked a property qualification, had had only a very low one, or had granted the suffrage according to some other criterion altogether (such as membership in a guild or corporation). Thus, though 1832 increased the total number of electors, it disenfranchised many working-class voters who had previously possessed the vote in the assortment of boroughs with expansive suffrage rules, and it thereby decreased the diversity and range of types of electors. ³⁰ (A particularly striking casualty of the diminution of diversity in the electorate effected by the First Reform Act was the formal disfranchisement of women, who in certain circumstances may have possessed the vote under the motley assortment of unreformed franchises. ³¹ ) In sum, the First Reform Act had the paradoxical consequence of making the electorate both more numerous but also, arguably, less inclusive.

To make this history a bit more concrete, we can think about John Stuart Mill. Mill served one term in Parliament (1865-68) for the borough of Westminster. Westminster had historically been one of the most democratic boroughs in England. ³² However, because of the standardizing effect of the First Reform Act, had his father run for Parliament at the peak of his influence in the 1820s he would have faced a wider and more diverse electorate than JS Mill in fact confronted during his 1865 campaign.

Although some of its architects had hoped that they were designing an enduring resolution to the electoral question, in the late 1840s the question of parliamentary reform returned to the front rank of political issues. In the ensuing debate a tremendous number of statesmen and political commentators looked back with nostalgia on the pre-1832 system and its medley of “different rules of franchise” across “different electoral corporations.” ³³ While this outlook had originated with figures in the Whig party—and it would remain identified as a largely “Whiggish” way of thinking—by the 1850s–1860s it was embraced across the ideological spectrum, including by both Tories on the “right” and some working-class radicals on the “left.” So when Bagehot pledged his allegiance to the “liberal doctrine” of “varying qualifications” for the franchise, he was signing up as part of this broad, Whiggish consensus. ³⁴ While these authors usually accepted that the First Reform Act had been in many ways beneficial, they regretted that it had departed from the “principle” of the unreformed system: to wit, that the maintenance of a variety of electoral regulations across different constituencies was a necessary means for creating the mirroring Commons. These thinkers sought to revive this old principle while modifying it to take account of the further social and ideological changes that had occurred in the intervening decades: in particular, they aimed to reintegrate the working classes into the electorate.

From this climate of opinion emerged an array of proposals claiming to have found the constellation of suffrage rules and constituency divisions which would make the Commons a true mirror of society. Yet underlying this plurality of proposals was a common rejection of electoral democracy as a classist mode of regulating the franchise, one in which a single social group might stymie the deliberative process and impose its “mere will.” ³⁵ These authors appealed, sometimes implicitly but often explicitly, to a sociological account of the relative importance of the different “classes, interests, and opinions” (to use a phrase ubiquitous in the era) that made up British society, and they sought to devise electoral arrangements which would yield a match between this sociology and the composition of the House of Commons.

In sum, a major liberal model of representation in mid-nineteenth-century Britain was antidemocratic, but it aspired to a kind of inclusivity that it took to be in keeping with the historical spirit of British parliamentarianism. There were several other features, furthermore, that gave great conceptual richness to this body of thought; the remainder of this section is devoted to highlighting four of them which are of particular import for understanding the character of this view of representation.

(a) First, it is important to note that democracy was not the sole enemy of the champions of electoral diversity. They rejected oligarchy, as well. What they objected to in the democratic formula of “uniform universal suffrage” was not so much the second adjective as the first. ³⁶ The truly “fatal principle,” as one author put it typically, was “uniformity in representation.” ³⁷ The view that “a variety of rights of suffrages is the principle of the English representation” equally ruled out uniform restricted suffrage, which would produce “a mere aristocracy.” ³⁸ While the proponents of the variety of suffrages were mostly concerned to combat the menace of democracy, this was not because their theory dictated that democracy was worse than oligarchy, although some of these authors did believe this. Instead, this greater concern chiefly reflected their perception that the tide of British history had foreclosed any turn towards oligarchy. ³⁹ Indeed, as we will see shortly, the affirmation of universal suffrage could be a component of variety-of-suffragist schemes so long as differentiation in voting regulations and construction of constituencies was preserved.

(b) Second, it is significant that these authors put forth the variety of suffrages as not only a principle of English representation, but the principle. In doing this they privileged the accurate reflection of the varied interests in society over territoriality as the basis for framing electoral districts. This is quite an interesting aspect of their thought, especially in light of the fact that scholars tend to assume without qualification that territory was the bedrock of the English representative system. Nevertheless, our authors had good reason for thinking that descriptive and not territorial representation was the true foundation of the electoral system. Variety-of-suffrage proponents drew on the fact that, since the reign of James I, four seats had been reserved for Cambridge and Oxford universities for which holders of various degrees and positions in the university were eligible to vote regardless of place of residence. ⁴⁰ Moreover, the text of the original university-representation legislation accorded well with the Victorian sense of descriptiveness—the awarding of seats seemed to be anchored in the presupposition that the universities, like organic local communities, constituted an “interest” that could be picked out as distinct from anything reflected in the network of territorial districts. In short, the descriptivism of this school of parliamentary reform ran deep, allowing them to displace the conventional notion that representation was solely of geographically-based communities.

This theoretical subordination of territoriality helped to generate the extraordinary creativity in institutional design which emerged from the quest for a mirroring Commons and contributed to what one historian has called an atmosphere of “unique constitutional experiment” in the run-up to the Second Reform Act. ⁴¹ Some schemes, like Bagehot’s, remained very much within the predominantly territorial character of the current arrangements. We might call his relatively cautious recommendation “Bagehot-mandering” to highlight its resemblance to the current American practice of “affirmative gerrymandering” with regard to majority–minority districting. What he proposed was that universal suffrage be granted to a smattering of large cities while maintaining the property requirements existing in other districts, thus creating working-class majorities in the major urban constituencies such that “adequate exponents of the views of the working classes” would enter into the Commons and concord would be restored between the composition of the legislature and the makeup of society. ⁴²

Many other mirroring reformers were bolder in their attempts to adapt to new conditions “the old principle of variety [which] was preferred and cherished . . . by so eminent a Whig, and so profound a political philosopher as Sir James Mackintosh.” ⁴³ Perhaps the best exemplification of the potential for radical reimagination of the structures of parliamentary politics inherent in the project of making the legislature “an epitome or abridgment of the whole civil body or community” appears in a neglected but marvelous document, The True Theory of Representation in the State by the eccentric man of letters George Harris. Harris began by defining “the essential and real interests of the State [which] ought to be represented in its legislative assembly . . . in due proportion to [their] relative importance,” winding up with a six-fold classification of these vital interests. By a path the logic of which is not easy to re-trace, Harris argued that the results of his sociological inquest would be best reflected in the House by a four-fold division of types of seats, each of which would receive a quarter of the members and be voted for only by those within the relevant identity group. These four sets of franchises were (1) property voters—those possessing wealth and landed estates; (2) professional voters—those working in the professions, “the middle classes”; (3) personal voters—the lower classes, all those male citizens who were not included in either of the two above categories; and (4) “corporate bodies,” from the Bank of England to canal companies to “colleges of surgeons.” Harris wished to grant anywhere from one to a half-dozen seats to each of these various associations. ⁴⁴

Two aspects of the True Theory of Representation are especially striking. First, Harris was virulently antidemocratic, but his plan included universal suffrage: he avoided democracy (i.e., uniform universal suffrage) not through restricting the suffrage but through the use of a variety of mechanisms to apportion the franchise in a manner that respected sociological differentiation. This is an important point because political theorists today have put forward class-specific or sociologically grounded institutions as if they were intrinsically populist. ⁴⁵ But there is no necessarily populist thrust to class-specific institutions; everything depends on the arrangements and intentions in the case at hand. Second, his version of the mirror theory verged on a corporatism that was quasi-Hegelian or proto-Durkheimian. Yet, in Harris’s mind, all he was doing was refining a longstanding national principle. And his contemporaries agreed. The Third Earl Grey, scion of the leading family of the Whig elite and son of the very prime minister who had passed the First Reform Act, promoted a similarly corporatist take on the variety-of-suffrages and emphasized the need to set aside constituencies for “working men”; ⁴⁶ the working-class secularist and cooperative-socialist George Jacob Holyoake condemned electoral democracy as a relic of the old “Radical rut” and signed onto a program of varying qualifications for the suffrage including the “establishment of Guilds” as the necessary preventative of the “partial representation” that would come from not failing to protect against the “absolute power” of any one social group; ⁴⁷ Edward Creasy, one of the most popular Whig historians of the day, and Henry Davis Pochin, an industrialist and radical Liberal, had similar proposals for achieving descriptive but nondemocratic universal suffrage through devising lower-class-specific constituencies; ⁴⁸ and the Tory pamphleteer Augustus Stapleton took the imperative to mirror society to the extreme point of ensuring seats to the clergy of particular religious denominations. ⁴⁹ And a great many other thinkers and politicians swelled the ranks of those proposing electoral mechanisms for reintroducing a “great variety” of “different elements . . . into [the assembly’s] composition.” ⁵⁰

As this brief sample indicates, the range of constituency- and franchise-designs purporting to restore the Commons’s mirroring capacity was very broad. This range of schemes reflected, in turn, a range of assessments of the “weight and worth” of the nation’s constituent parts. For instance, Bagehot, like many commentators, judged that the landed aristocracy remained hegemonic in too many constituencies even after the great “middle-class” reform of 1832, and he wished for further reductions of the traditional nobility’s seats in order to make room for a greater presence in Parliament of the commercial and industrial middle class and of the urban working class. ⁵¹ Other writers judged that the Reform Act had caused the pendulum to swing too far in favor of the bourgeois and professional classes, and sought to bolster the parliamentary delegations at both ends of the spectrum—the traditional nobility and the laboring poor. Still others plans, of which Harris’s is typical, were undergirded by a vision of society that encapsulated an almost dizzying array of interests, identities, and affiliations.

Thus, while these figures were not individualist-egalitarians with respect to the basis of representative government—that is, after all, a view against which they were contending—there was nothing fundamentally conservative about their outlook. On the contrary, even writers who remained most tied to an older language of the “estates of the realm” were progressives in the basic sense of embracing historical change. “The time is ripe for new arrangements which shall bring our political institutions in closer conformity to the altered state of society’”; wrote one mirror theorist; for another, the bare fact that the Reform Act had been passed three decades earlier sufficed to provoke doubt about its current fitness, for “the Representative System cannot be expected to remain as it stood in 1832.” ⁵² The framework of electoral diversity established a goal for representation (descriptive accuracy) as well as tools for its achievement (the differentiation of rules and constituencies), but it did not itself dictate an underlying social imaginary; nonetheless, variety-of-suffragists tended to reject static pictures of society.

(c) A third important aspect of this outlook on representation has likely already occurred to the perceptive reader: namely, that this mode of electoral regulation, and the underlying vision of society and public opinion that attended it, was not an individualistic or aggregative one. The units to be represented through these institutions were not persons but groups—for this band of writers, to believe that the sociologically indiscriminate counting of heads produced government by public opinion was simply to mistake the aim of representation. Here, for instance, is Greg stating his dissent from individualistic premises:

For what is a Nation, in a highly advanced and complicated state of civilisation like ours? Not a mere aggregation of millions; not a homogeneous mass of units; but a congress of ranks and classes . . . having, it is true, one common real ultimate interest, but varying in their characters, occupations, and immediate aims; called to special duties, discharging separate functions, guided by peculiar tastes and desires, representing different phases of intellect and opinion, and considering questions of government and social policy from widely divergent points of view. ⁵³

The constituent parts of the “public opinion” which it was the duty and even the definition of representative governments to render into law were not the views “at the top of the head” ⁵⁴ of an assortment of individuals, but rather social-ideological facts the existence of which transcended what one would extricate from a procedure of random sampling or sociologically unspecified suffrage. In other words, the task of properly constructing parliamentary representation was akin not to the mathematical task of adding up individual expressions of belief but to the work of the cartographer; the political scientist had to map “the area of public opinion,” the surface of which was made of “the various interests and opinions of a great nation.” ⁵⁵

(d) A final point before turning to the democratic response: it ought to be noted explicitly that the schemes just described are not to be confused with the plan of proportional representation (PR) advocated by John Stuart Mill ⁵⁶ —which was, to Victorian eyes, an “individualistic” system. ⁵⁷ It is no coincidence that the first movement for PR occurred in Victorian Britain; Mill and his fellow advocates of the system thought that they had found a way to reconcile democracy with the values of social inclusion and deliberativeness, and thus much was shared between PR reformers and the proponents of electoral variegation. Yet from the Victorian perspective it was far from obvious that proportional representation was consistent with their descriptive ideal, and in the decades under consideration here PR remained more marginal than these variety-of-suffrages versions of mirroring. These traditional mirrorers preferred their model to Mill’s for a range of reasons, but two are of particular relevance to this essay. The first was that PR under universal suffrage would give the working class electoral power in proportion to its numbers—but this was a fate which the mainstream Victorian descriptivist was attempting to avoid, since he was certain that, though the working classes might wield, say, 75% of the votes, they were not 75% of the nation properly understood in its diversity; this vastly exceeded, as Greg put it, the “due share” of the “lower orders.” ⁵⁸ The second reason was that PR is, after all, a purely procedural mechanism of vote aggregation; it dispenses altogether with the sociological phase of the mirror theory as practiced by someone like Bagehot or Harris. While PR may yield outcomes of greater diversity (an issue with which a whole body of political science literature is concerned), it denies the possibility of actually mirroring some truth out there—it folds all the action into the electoral procedure. Objective facts about social-ideological conditions against which the assembly could be compared have no place in PR.

Although this might be pressing the point too far, one implication of taking nineteenth-century political theory seriously is that, in contrast to the conventional wisdom as enunciated by someone like Hanna Pitkin, ⁵⁹ one will come to think that PR is not a form of descriptive representation at all.

Victorian Democratic Theory in Response to the Mirror Theory

The variety of suffrages was, then, a powerful vision of representation, possessing significant liberal credentials and anchored in a compelling interpretation of Britain’s parliamentary heritage. Given its strength, it was incumbent on Victorian advocates of a more democratic franchise to address this alternative on its own terms. Accordingly, this section turns to briefly sketching two lines of democratic counterargument. While these were far from the only reasons offered for uniform universal suffrage, they were as important to democratic theory in this crucial moment as any of the arguments more familiar to us grounding democracy in the equality of citizens, in natural rights, or in the desire for accountability and popular control of government. We might call these two branches of Victorian democratic theory the moderate or diverse democrats, and the radical or undescriptive democrats.

To delineate these two strands of democratic advocacy, it is helpful to recall the structure of the Victorian variety-of-suffrages/mirror theory. As we have seen, it consisted of a claim about ends—that the House of Commons should mirror society and thereby achieve a nexus of representative–deliberative–epistemic goods—and a claim about means or technique—that a variety of constituencies and electoral regulations was the best way to bring all this about.

The first line of democratic response was to affirm the ends of their opponents but reject their means; these moderate democrats wanted to show that uniform universal suffrage was consistent with a representative and deliberative House of Commons. In light of the condemnation of democracy as an absolutist, classist regime, democrats had to make the case that a key premise of the antidemocratic argument was false: namely, the premise that the working classes could be expected to think and act as a unified body. Without this unity, the fact of the “overwhelming preponderance” of its “numbers” would be far less threatening to liberal ideals; ⁶⁰ it was only because it could be expected to constitute a consolidated ideological–political force that the entrance of the working class into the electoral arena would block the other streams of interests and opinion from the Commons. Consequently, a great deal of the debate about the democratization of the franchise hinged on disputes about the sociology of opinion among the then-currently-disenfranchised classes.

The argument that the beliefs of the working classes reached this necessary threshold of multiformity took, in turn, two basic forms. The first was a simple empirical claim about the present distribution of working-class opinions.

For our purposes, the Scottish barrister, agriculturalist, and politician John Boyd Kinnear can be said to exemplify this “empirical” line of thought about working-class diversity of belief. Kinnear was a radical figure in many respects, and yet he devoted more of his political treatise to the heterogeneity of working-class belief than to any more overtly radical-sounding justifications for democracy. “All our fear” and “half the folly that is uttered on this topic” of working-class enfranchisement would dissipate, he assured his readers, if they acknowledged that “there is not a single question on which they are united and form ‘a class.’” He went on: “it is not a ‘working class’ that is to be admitted: it is ‘the working classes.’” ⁶¹ This decision to pluralize “working class,” which is consistent across a number of these authors, is a rhetorical move that is very revealing of the priorities and concerns of the Victorian democratic movement.

Figures like Kinnear attempted to draw on the political experience of the already enfranchised portions of the population to make this point. They hoped that even upper-class conservatives could be brought to acknowledge that the normal condition of socioeconomic classes was ideological heterogeneity, since a basic fact of parliamentary life was that it engaged members of the upper classes in debates and conflicts with fellow members of their own ranks. If this multiformity of belief and allegiance obtained in the classes already enfranchised, then surely, democrats judged, it was reasonable to attribute the same variations to the working classes. Thus, Kinnear argued that one must expect diversity among the working classes

simply and necessarily because the working classes are composed of men, not of electric clocks, all worked by a central battery, and because each man among them thinks as much for himself as the average of those above them do. . . . [We must] try to remember that we really have not to deal with any huge vague image of some unknown and awful power, but only with a certain number of individuals who act and think under the same rules as ourselves. ⁶²

To presume unanimity among the lower orders was, according to Kinnear, nothing less than to conflate a difference of socioeconomic status with a difference in human nature. To democrats of Kinnear’s bent, it was merely unjustified frightfulness to believe that the deliberative, pluralistic ethos which had undergirded England’s long history of parliamentary government would suddenly disappear under a democratized franchise.

In addition to this argument about the current extent of diversity, the thesis of the sufficient diversity of opinion among the working classes appeared in another guise.

This second argument punted on the question of whether the working classes currently contained one or multiple viewpoints and agendas. Instead, it offered a forecast about the distribution of opinions among them once they were granted the suffrage. Dire prognoses of deliberative politics succumbing to a united lower-class ideology were irrelevant, ran this line of argument, because one could not generalize from the condition of mass opinion under an exclusive franchise to its condition under an expansive one. Even if lower-class beliefs in the 1860s were homogeneous, political participation could be trusted to produce the optimally diverse allocation of opinions.

This prediction was the offspring of two quintessential tenets of Victorian political thought. The first was the idea that widespread ideological diversity was natural to modern, “civilized” societies like the England of their day; ⁶³ the second, touched on above, was the deep faith in the educative power of political life. If the engagement with public affairs that followed receipt of the vote could be expected to call into play latent intellectual and moral faculties, to draw attention to complex problems and new modes of thought, it could accordingly be expected to increase diversity. Whatever unanimity existed among the working class up to the present time was thus best understood as an artifact of the intellectual dormancy which naturally attended political exclusion. “In proportion as [the newly enfranchised citizens] are taught to argue” and “have learned to think on such subjects,” the popular reformer Lord Houghton averred, “their inductions will be various, their conclusions contradictory,” and “diversities of thought” will emerge among them. ⁶⁴ “Great differences of opinion,” wrote R. H. Hutton, a friend of Bagehot who nonetheless opposed him on the franchise question, were sure to be an important part of working-class politics. ⁶⁵ In short, diversity, fragmentation, contestation—these phenomena were intrinsic to politics itself, rather than peculiar to any particular governmental forms. ⁶⁶ The deliberative political culture that was so valued by the exponents of the variegated suffrage was accordingly in no danger from democracy, for the nondemocratic electoral arrangements they lauded had never in fact been the cause of the enlightening interplay of different views that had happily marked English political history. In light of these encouraging truths, democrats of this sort could confidently lay claim to the goods of deliberative-parliamentary politics prized by the variety-of-suffragists.

These purveyors of a—present or predictive—sociology of diverse opinion among the working class were, we might say, the deliberative democrats of their day, and they made up the moderate wing of democratic reform. Yet there was another school of democratic thought which diverged more radically from the prevailing framework. I want to illustrate this radical outlook through the thought of an eminent Victorian: Albert Venn Dicey. ⁶⁷

Dicey’s argument was considered the “most unflinchingly democratic” of the moment. ⁶⁸ What separated him from his moderate “descriptive” counterparts was that he rejected altogether the so-called “principle of the English constitution, that Parliament should be a mirror.” While Dicey did not exactly put the issue in this vocabulary, the crux of his objection to the mirroring ideal was that, however compelling one found it as a general statement of the desirable composition of the legislature, this vision of parliamentary representation fell short of the standards of mutual acceptability and action-guidance. What he meant was this: the variety of suffrages was not meant to be instituted at random, with, say, different voting rules and qualifications allocated by lottery across constituencies. Such a method of random allocation was unacceptable because there was no reason to imagine that a haphazard distribution would track social diversity in the relevant ways. In consequence, these schemes presupposed a definitive sociology which could guide the process of electoral design. ⁶⁹ And yet any such sociology would itself be contestable; given that the society which they were seeking to represent was heterogeneous and multi-faceted, consensus on how to translate this sociology into parliament was not to be expected. Hence any particular variety-of-suffrages plan was liable to a charge of arbitrariness—that is, of imposing on the nation’s politics one contestable vision of society which was not acceptable to all parties. As Dicey’s friend George C. Brodrick wrote:

To divide citizens into classes, and marshal them according to their comparative claims to power, simple as it seems, is to undertake the responsibility of deciding beforehand in what proportions the great political jury is to be packed, and thereby virtually to anticipate their verdict.

Brodrick continued: all reform proposals that purported to “give to each [of the various elements of which the nation is composed] its proportionate weight and influence” and in consequence to actualize “that equipoise of conflicting forces which has come to be regarded as the capital problem of political dynamics” were guilty of “petitio principii.” ⁷⁰

Related to this issue of arbitrariness or unacceptability was an accusation that the descriptive ideal failed to be action-guiding—that it lacked resources internal to itself to select among the antagonistic visions which could claim its mantle. “The object [of the mirrorers] is to give “due” weight to each interest,” wrote Dicey, “but no standard exists by which the ‘due’ weight may be measured.” There was “no test,” he repeated, “by which to decide between the correctness of [Conservative party leader] Mr. Disraeli’s views and the views of his opponents.” ⁷¹

To be clear: Dicey, who, like almost all liberals of his age, was bullish about the burgeoning social sciences, did not mean to suggest that there was no fact of the matter about the relative contributions of different “orders” of society to the nation’s social, intellectual, and economic life. His point, part-political, part-epistemological, was that there was no uncontroversial criterion by which “persons of opposite views, such as Mr. Mill and Mr. Disraeli, could be brought to agree on the proportion of influence which ought to be retained” by the various classes. ⁷² As the great late-nineteenth-century philosopher Henry Sidgwick, who built Dicey’s concerns into the core of his discussion of democratic representation, put it, such theories were doomed to founder on the “impossibility of a satisfactory criterion” for making the kinds of finely-tailored adjustments and gradations of the suffrage required for their realization. Hence, the injunction to produce a mirror of society or a just balance of classes was valueless because it did not provide rules for selecting among the diverse lights in which these phenomena could be reasonably regarded. ⁷³ While the designer of a variety-of-suffrage scheme might be confident that his proposal had more “reality” in it than either the “sham” that was the “present system” or any contending scheme, Dicey had no patience for the thought that “political reason” alone could produce such a mirror; ⁷⁴ there was, in his eyes, no getting around the problem that any particular mirroring plan would lack reasons to justify its instantiation even in the eyes of those citizens who supported the ideal of a mirroring parliament but who did not attribute the same “weight and importance” to the discrete elements of society as did the designer of the scheme. ⁷⁵ The normative foundation of parliamentary authority, these democratic thinkers concluded, would have to lie elsewhere than in its descriptive accuracy.

This point about mutual acceptability can also be seen as what in today’s parlance would be called a defense from encroachments on its domain of the integrity of the political—understood as a set of structures meant to enable citizens to come to authoritative decisions about their collective life. We might say that for democrats of Dicey’s frame of mind, democracy was envisioned as a way of opening up the political sphere to possibilities that could not be captured by the sort of “sociological” inquiry prized by the traditional variety-of-suffrages liberal. Inherent in the “idea of Parliament being a mirror of the nation” was the unacceptably apolitical “assumption that theorists can sketch out the future of the nation,” or—to use a different formulation—the assumption that a “stereotype” of the nation could be imprinted on the electoral arena. ⁷⁶ What’s more, this stereotype would inevitably be to some degree parasitic on one’s sympathies in the very political conflicts which it was hoped that a parliament authorized by the nation would resolve in the first place. Brodrick was especially eloquent in making this charge:

The relative importance of these mysterious aggregates [“classes” and “interests”] is ordinarily measured . . . by the weight which the individual writer may be disposed to attribute to each.

To know what is a just balance of classes, we must have determined beforehand what degree of weight each ought to possess in the State, and have solved most of the problems which it is the special function of a reformed Parliament to investigate. ⁷⁷

To radical democrats, the proper response to these problems was to drop all mirroring aspirations and accept that the only fair way of organizing Britain’s public, collective life was to enact a conception of democracy as equal voting power for all citizens.

That is not to say that this branch of Victorian democracy was without misgivings. Dicey allowed that the theory of representation which he was rejecting contained (to use the Millian idiom of the era) a “partial truth”: namely, the respect for diversity and the conviction that including it within Parliament was advantageous. “No candid critic can deny,” he conceded, “that the introduction into the legislative body of members belonging to different orders of the community would tend to improve the character of the legislature.” ⁷⁸ Nevertheless, the epistemological problems of indeterminacy and the moral problems of unfairness and unacceptability outweighed these benefits. In this regard, Dicey was closer to a defender of the variety of suffrages like Bagehot than he was to a moderate sociologist of diverse working-class opinion like Houghton. For both Dicey and Bagehot, democracy and the descriptively representative, deliberative legislature were irreconcilable: but where Bagehot chose representativeness and deliberation, Dicey chose democracy.

Conclusion

As observed in the introduction, theories and practices of descriptive representation have been undergoing a renaissance. The examination of Victorian debates provides an occasion to consider the nature of this development with fresh eyes.

To begin with, the study of Victorian thought about representation opens an alternate perspective on the familiar tension between democracy and liberalism. When a clash of democracy and liberalism is invoked, what is usually meant is that the people can will ends which violate some set of rights. ⁷⁹ The history of political thought, however, demonstrates that a distinct front of the war between liberalism and democracy occurred within the electoral-representative domain. It is not a new observation that democracy has become a kind of umbrella ideal, ⁸⁰ encompassing a wider set of values and aspirations than in many earlier historical contexts. ⁸¹ But as a result of the capaciousness of current conceptions of democracy, much of the nineteenth-century liberal anxiety about the coming of democracy risks looking illegible to us. What to the Victorians appeared as a conflict between democracy and descriptive representation is now largely treated as a discussion about different options for interpreting democracy and realizing it institutionally. This is an important shift in the normative and conceptual landscape of Anglophone political thought over the last century-and-a-half, although its occurrence has drawn little notice.

This point about the lack of awareness of the shifting intellectual-historical fortunes of descriptive representation is related to another lacuna in contemporary theory: insufficient attention has been paid to the truth that descriptive representation has no intrinsic connection to democracy. Depending on one’s underlying sociological presuppositions, one may be led to endorse electoral arrangements that are distinctly undemocratic while remaining faithful to the principle of descriptive representation. Descriptive representation can be—and, as our investigation of the Victorian era bears out, has been—an alternative to, rather than a mode of, democratic government. Indeed, although proponents of descriptive representation today are counted in the democratic ranks, ⁸² historically this affiliation is rather the exception than the norm.

Nothing in the foregoing analysis is meant to suggest an identity between Victorian and contemporary ideas of descriptive representation. Both the history of political thought and contemporary theory are characterized by a plurality of conceptions of descriptive representation. A number of competing ethical-political visions have laid claim to the institutional devices of descriptive representation and to the norms of inclusivity and fair representation of the diversity of groups in society; ⁸³ quotas and special constituencies for religious, gender, ethnic, linguistic, or regional groups have been instituted or advocated from a range of motivations. ⁸⁴ In particular, there is no direct analogue in the Victorian era for that strand of contemporary theory which sees descriptive representation as demanded by the goal of rectifying historical injustice and marginalization. ⁸⁵ On this view, descriptive representation, while based in a “sociology of groups” and seeking to be responsive to facts about the salient divisions in the society governed, ⁸⁶ also has a compensatory function that was absent in the Victorian mirrorers. The embrace of descriptive representation as a counterweight to what are understood as entrenched hierarchies of power had no place in an understanding of descriptive representation as an imaging or reflection of social reality—even if, as shown earlier, Victorian mirroring was not anti-progressive, and its values and language could be employed to advocate for the parliamentary presence of previously excluded groups. Thus, there is an important difference between the likes of Bagehot and Harris and advocates of descriptive representation today who are animated by the issue of historical injustice.

It does not follow from recognizing this difference, however, that there is nothing to be said about the overlap between contemporary and Victorian outlooks which goes beyond observing their endorsement of similar institutional forms and instruments. On the contrary, commonalities that persist across this gap become all the more revealing; they are of special theoretical interest because their appearance in discrepant circumstances gives them a (prima facie, at least) claim to consideration as essential rather than accidental aspects of descriptivism. Before closing this paper, it is worth briefly highlighting three.

The first feature common to descriptivism both then and now is a concern for the quality of deliberation. Although contemporary theorists are attentive to ways in which certain notions of group representation and of deliberation can pull apart, ⁸⁷ for the most part satisfactory representation and the accompanying good of deliberation are treated today as dependent on a measure of shared group-identity between representatives and citizens, as was the case for the Victorian descriptivist but not for the Victorian democrat. Furthermore, convictions of contemporary advocates of descriptive representation about why pluralism, inclusivity, and deliberation are required for the generation of “impartial” and “just” decisions share many of the intuitions and lines of argument of a Grey or Mackintosh about the deliberative defects of a monolithic or homogenous parliament. ⁸⁸ In light of the history of English political thought, it is not surprising to see that the fortunes of descriptive representation and deliberation have risen to some degree in tandem. Victorian parliamentarians would have assented wholeheartedly to Jane Mansbridge’s contention that descriptive representation is a matter of urgency to deliberative but not to aggregative accounts of politics. ⁸⁹ The canonical tenet of deliberative democracy, to which contemporary descriptivists also subscribe—that politics must involve persuasion and not merely the adding up of a set of pre-formed preferences ⁹⁰ —was a core belief of Victorian descriptivism, as well.

A second point of similarity is connected to this hostility to “aggregative” conceptions of politics among contemporary proponents of descriptive representation and to certain allied strands of deliberative-democratic theory. While contemporary descriptivists and deliberativists are egalitarians in a way that Bagehot and company were not, the vision of society and public opinion undergirding their analyses of representation are (like the Victorians’) often not individualistic ones. ⁹¹ Theorists of descriptive representation and some of their counterparts in the deliberative-democratic literature share with the Victorian descriptivist a disposition to think of political representation in terms of a social-ideological landscape that is not reducible to the tabulation of individual preferences. ⁹² Despite the differences in their moral commitments, both eras of descriptivism are therefore at odds with what in the idiom of the Victorians would be called the unmodified “rule of numbers.”

It is perhaps in this dissatisfaction with the notion of democracy conceived in individualistic–aggregative terms that those contemporary democratic theorists who endorse descriptive representation differ most decisively from Victorian democratic thought. For, different as they were, the two camps of Victorian democratic theory sketched in section two were united in treating democracy as a simple value: equal electoral power conceived individualistically. For Dicey, building other values into the concept of democracy—here, paradigmatically, descriptive representativeness and deliberation—was anathema because he believed that the value of equal electoral power stood in conflict with these other values, and he considered the former to be more important than the latter. Likewise for the moderate brand of Victorian democrat, the treatment of democracy as a complex concept in which the values of “true liberals” like Bagehot inhered analytically ⁹³ was anathema, for they wanted to support democracy only if it could be shown that democratic institutions would perform in accordance with a deliberative ideal which they held independently. In other words, they did not reason from democracy to deliberation, but from deliberation to democracy. In this respect, moderate Victorian democrats find a modern analogue in epistemic democracy. ⁹⁴ As epistemic democrats seek to justify democracy before an independent criterion of correctness, so our first group of Victorian democrats sought to vindicate the practical operation of democratic institutions in light of norms of deliberation and representativeness that possessed a venerable nondemocratic lineage. In sum, contemporary descriptivists’ approach to deliberation, and their hostility to politics conceived as an individualistic–aggregative endeavor that takes no account of social groups, share certain features of Victorian Whig-liberalism but differ decisively from Victorian democratic ideas.

Third, contemporary descriptive representation, like the nineteenth-century version, has faced challenges on the score of selectivity and mutual acceptability. ⁹⁵ As in the Victorian period, disagreements about what would constitute the fair representation of groups are present in recent discussions about descriptive representation. ⁹⁶ Contemporary descriptivists are themselves increasingly alert to the indeterminacy of the ideal of descriptive representation. Anne Phillips, for instance, has observed the way in which “populist” discourse draws on ideas of descriptive representation. ⁹⁷ The contestability of particular descriptivist proposals raises the issue of how to adjudicate between competing claims and of how a specific scheme for fair group representation can be said to enjoy greater democratic legitimacy than its rivals. ⁹⁸ In this way, programs of descriptive representation across dissimilar contexts will remain vulnerable to versions of the charge of arbitrariness from those who adopt a more Diceyan notion of democracy.

Viewing contemporary political philosophy from the vantage point of Victorian thought, then, helps us to gain clarity about the nature of the theory of descriptive representation. Given their importance to these discrepant contexts, there is a strong case for understanding the three elements just discussed as perennial or essential components of descriptive representation: to wit, the emphasis on deliberation; the dissent from an individualist-aggregative underlying political sociology; and the vulnerability to challenge from certain understandings of mutual acceptability and democratic legitimacy. By contrast, other facets of a descriptivist outlook—whether it is elitist or anti-elitist; corrective or preservative of inequality; geared toward a small number of groups or built on a more polyphonic sociology—are more contingent.

Studies in the history of political thought cannot settle the question of the institutions which one ought to support or the values which one ought to endorse in the present. But they can be aids to reflection. In particular, they can stimulate inquiry into how we ought to grasp the relations between different concepts, values, and institutional arrangements. Our historiographical finding of the depth of the clash between democracy and liberalism within the sphere of representation, and our identification of a core set of elements within the theory of descriptive representation that are common to both the nineteenth-century and the contemporary contexts, raises the question of whether it is best to understand the revival of descriptive representation in contemporary politics and political theory as an effort to deepen and enrich democracy, or rather as an attempt to rehabilitate and adapt other ideas and techniques of representation than democratic ones. At the least, engagement with the Victorians can impress a sense of the depth and persistence of the tensions and tradeoffs between rival views of representation. While political circumstances and normative commitments have changed, conflicts over representation are as present now as in the past—even if all the participants to the current debate regard themselves as democrats.

Supplementary Material