The Public Philosophy > Chapter III. The Derangement of Powers > The Recently Enfranchised Voters
The doctrine of popular sovereignty is ancient and venerable. But until about the second half of the Nineteenth Century, it did not imply the enfranchisement of the people. When, for example, Charlemagne was crowned in 800 A.D., the Pope professed to be declaring the will of the people. This has been called the principle of 'virtual representation.’ Those who do not vote because they lack the franchise, or cannot vote because they are infants or even unborn, are presumed to be represented by someone like the Pope, the king, the parliament, speaking in their name.
By the coronation of 800 A.D. the empire was being transferred from the Greeks to the Germans. A reason was needed to explain why a German prince, rather than the Emperor of Byzantium, was to be henceforth the lawful successor of the Roman Caesars. The office of emperor was not hereditary, and in any event Charlemagne could have made no claim of kinship; the emperor was not appointed by the Pope; he was chosen by the German princes who belonged to the College of Electors. A doctrine was necessary which would justify and could compel everyone to believe that Charlemagne was the legitimate successor of Caesar.
The publicists of the new empire took for a foundation the accepted theory that 'the Imperial power, as successor to the Imperium of the Roman Caesars, was founded originally on an act of transference performed by the people in the Lex Regia.’ They argued that what had happened once at the beginning of the imperial power would have to happen again whenever the throne was vacant. As the imperium 'escheats or reverts to the people’; and the people had then to choose a new emperor, they might even 'translate’ the empire from one nation to another, in this instance from the Greeks to the Germans. Needless to say, 'the people,’ who were presumed to have this power, had neither votes nor any other means of making their will known. It was presumed that they wished to have their power exercised for them. In the coronation of Charlemagne, the Pope did this: he 'merely declared and exercised the people's will.’
All this seems long ago and far away. But if we reject virtual representation, the question remains: if the Pope or the king, or the parliament of magnates, cannot represent The People, how do a plurality of voters truly declare and exercise The People's will? It sounds incongruous to modern ears that the Pope should represent the people. But is it so congruous that the people should be represented by a count of the votes of some persons? The conundrum springs from the fact that while The People as a corporate body are the true owners of the sovereign power, The People, as an aggregate of voters, have diverse, conflicting self-centered interests and opinions. A plurality of them cannot be counted upon to represent the corporate nation.
The distinction upon which I am dwelling does not, as one might suppose, cease to matter when the voters become enormously many. Cannot a multitude of voters be regarded as the practical equivalent of all the people? They cannot be. To multiply the voters makes it no more probable that a plurality of them will truly represent the public interest. Our experience with mass elections in the twentieth century compels us, I think, to the contrary conclusion: that public opinion becomes less realistic as the mass to whom information must be conveyed, and argument must be addressed, grows larger and more heterogeneous.
All this will seem less odd if we remind ourselves that political democracy, as we know it in this century, is a very recent political phenomenon. The moral presumption in favor of universal suffrage may perhaps be said to have been laid down by the American and the French Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. But (until the end of the nineteenth century) the actual advance towards universal suffrage was in fact spasmodic and slow. In 1900, voters in the United Kingdom were only 11 per cent of the population: they were 43 per cent in 1922. The Representation of The People Act in 1918 had very nearly tripled the electorate by simplifying the extremely complex regulations for voting and by extending the suffrage to women thirty years of age and qualified as occupants. In France the voters were 27 per cent of the population in the election of 1881; in 1951 they were 45 per cent. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in most of Western and Northern Europe, the proportion of voters to population was not more than 5 per cent. In 1890 voters in the United States were about 15 per cent of the population. It has been only since the First World War, owing to the enfranchisement of women and, in some measure, of southern Negroes, that the proportion has risen to over 30 per cent.
Large mass electorates are something quite new, much newer than the ideals, the ideas, the institutions and the usages of the liberal state. Political orators often assume that the mass of the people voted their own liberties. But the fact is that they acquired the vote after they had acquired their liberties and, in fact, largely because not being able to vote was felt by free men to be incompatible with their equal dignity. The Bill of Rights is more than two centuries older than universal suffrage in Great Britain. The enfranchised people did not establish the rule that all powers are under the law, that laws must be made, amended and administered by due process, that a legitimate government must have the consent of the governed.
I dwell upon this point because it throws light upon the fact, so disconcerting an experience in this century, that the enfranchised masses have not, surprisingly enough, been those who have most staunchly defended the institutions of freedom.