Fifteen years ago the principle of majority elections became applicable to all phases of public life in Sweden; and along with the movement for democratization there developed the idea of proportional representation. This principle was urged especially by Conservatives, who feared that if elections to Andra Kammaren (the Lower House) should be based upon universal suffrage with the retention of the majority system, the Conservative party would be completely annihilated.
In: Canadian journal of economics and political science: the journal of the Canadian Political Science Association = Revue canadienne d'économique et de science politique, Band 4, Heft 2, S. 192-208
I speak as an economist and not as a physical scientist or an engineer. I accept as an accomplished fact, or as a fact in process, that ours is an age of technological advance. I assert that in all this there is only a limited significance unless its benefits come to the masses of the people. The lead that the British nation has given toward industrial democracy over three-quarters of a century through collective bargaining and through the other expressions of the will and desires of the workers is one of the finest achievements of modern civilization. Marching with political democracy and the democratization of education, it represents the most widespread set of benefits, materially and morally, that has come to humanity in our day and the day of our fathers and grandfathers. And I say this in full knowledge of the limited success of the British Labour party while in power in Parliament.First, the political expression of labour in Britain is a part of the recognized functioning of democracy and as such is freely admitted. Second, the co-operative movement represents in a limited way the democratization of the property institution. Control over the buying and the production is as wide as the membership, and there is no profit running with investment. Third, the organization into unions partakes also of the nature of democracy so far as relations within the unions is concerned. But beyond that, when it comes to dealing with the powerful competing elements in an organized economy, viz., the capital-owning and profit-taking interests, it drops in large measure the democratic methods of discussion and decision and concern for the individual expression of every man. It takes up rather the weapons of the capitalist economy, viz., the concentration of power to drive hard bargains and even to force them upon the other party. Unionism—and I am thinking chiefly of its chief strand, the collective bargaining unionism—assumes a continuing opposition of interest between the propertied and controlling interests on the one hand and labour on the other, and between them battle must be done. That assumption brings in a point of view that is narrower in its compass than a democratic concern for the whole society and a methodology that seeks to elevate a single group with little concern for other sections of the community.
Out of an Irish dilemma has come one of the most striking legislative experiments in modern government. After a short life from 1922 to 1936, the first Irish upper house proved so inept as to be abolished. Then came an interval of unicameralism, and now under the constitution of 1937 another senate has been brought into existence, differing radically from the old. In the early days of her independence, Ireland was confronted with the problem of precisely how to constitute an upper house, how to differentiate it from the lower house, and whom to represent in it. Now, after a vicissitudinous history, she has embarked upon a course of advanced ideas in parliamentary practice—upon a plan which attempts to secure vocational representation.Why has it been difficult to fit a second chamber into the structure of the Irish state? In feudal society, class cleavage produced assemblies of more than one house. Since democratization of the social order, this basis of separation, has lost significance, but the tradition persists in the bicameralism of such countries as England.
The British parliamentary system presumes a working government majority, or else an appeal to the electorate, with the inevitable confusion of issues involved therein. Hence, in studying the conduct of foreign relations throughout the British Commonwealth, little profit is to be gained from analysis of anomalous instances where governments and parliaments are found to have been at variance on external policies. Whatever familiarity with the "checks and balances" tradition may incline us to assume, such cases are no adequate criterion of democratization of control. On the contrary, this is to be found in the degree to which parliaments not merely are called upon to ratify governmental acts and policies, but are taken into the confidence of governments and consulted before decisions are conclusively formulated. In the second place, "external relations" should, in the case of the Dominions, include relations with other members of the Commonwealth, especially the mother country. These still comprise the bulk of their external contacts; and from the standpoint of the problem now under discussion, no actual difference in kind exists between them and truly foreign affairs. Moreover, it is upon the procedural foundation of the one that the principles governing the conduct of the other have been based.As it happens, the issue of parliamentary control has been agitated most zealously in connection with representation at the Imperial Conference, the supreme council of the British League of Nations.
Expansion and Contraction of the Franchise. Between the theory and practice of the American Revolution there was a wide breach. The ruling caste of property owners retained control in spite of the legendary democratization of that era. Jefferson's declaration of the equality of man was not fully applied to suffrage requirements until the time of Andrew Jackson. Since then, suffrage restrictions of property, color, and sex have suffered the fate of houses built upon sand. The floods of democracy have now smitten upon these limitations for more than a century. In the rise of the common man, both the property-owning and taxpaying qualifications for voters disappeared even in the original commonwealths. Once these restrictions which separated the old aristocracy from the new proletariat had been vanquished, the requisites of color and sex were likewise abandoned.With few exceptions, suffrage had been granted to practically all adult male white citizens before the Civil War. Yet counter-attacks were waged by the advocates of a limited electorate. The theory prevails that a steady swing toward universal suffrage characterizes the American franchise. The pendulum has also swung in the opposite direction. Connecticut and Massachusetts, where the reaction against suffrage extension was rapid, were the first states to retrench on the policy of adult male white suffrage. In place of property qualifications, literacy restrictions appeared. The purpose of these restrictions set up by Connecticut in 1855 and Massachusetts in 1857 was to bar the ignorant immigrants from the voting class.