Abstract
We have seen that political parties and pressure groups represent interests, attitudes and values in the political system, but there is often confusion over what is meant by the term ‘representation’. Adolf Hitler once said that he had the greatest claim to be called representative of his people, and this claim must be based on different grounds than those of liberal democratic systems which demand periodic and competitive elections. The British House of Commons is said to be a representative assembly, but this does not mean that it mirrors the geographical, class, sex, age and religious distribution of the British population.1
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References
See A. H. Birch, Representative and Responsible Government (London, 1964) pp. 13–17 for a discussion on the different usages of the term.
The Social Contract (Everyman’s Library ed., London, 1913) p. 78.
Quoted in S. H. Beer, Modern British Politics, 2nd ed. (London, 1969) p. 5.
Quoted in A. D. Lindsay, The Essentials of Democracy, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1935) p. 12.
For a fuller account of the demands of the Levellers, especially those contained in the debates with the army leaders in 1647, see A. S. P. Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty (London, 1938).
See B. Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967) chs 6 and 7.
See Birch, Representative and Responsible Government for an outline of British theories of representation. For the development of the American liberal consensus, see L. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955).
See R. Hoftstadter, The American Political Tradition (London, 1962) pp. 26–32.
Quoted in R. A. Dahl, Democracy in the United States (Chicago, 1976) p. 73.
J. S. Mill, Representative Government (Everyman’s Library ed., London, 1910) pp. 280–90.
R. A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago, 1956).
Ibid. p. 4.
Ibid. p. 50.
An example of the work of the English idealists in the twentieth century is to be found in Lindsay, The Essentials of Democracy.
For an account of these early socialist theories, see G. Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism (London, 1968).
The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Books ed., Harmondsworth, 1967) p. 92.
G. Ionescu, The Politics of the European Communist States (London, 1967), points out that in theory ‘communist states are said to be direct and not representative democracies’, but that ‘in practice it has not worked out at all like that’ (p. 29).
L. G. Churchward, Contemporary Soviet Government, 2nd ed. (London, 1975) pp. 226–7.
See D. Butler and A. Ranney (eds), Referendums. A Comparative Study, Practice and Theory, (Washington, 1978). The Polish government’s defeat in the 1987 referendum provides a dramatic exception.
Time Magazine, 16 February 1970.
See L. Lewis et al., An American Melodrama (London, 1969) pp. 230 and 509.
See T. H. White, Breach of Faith. The Fall of Richard Nixon (London, 1975). Also G. Liddy, Will (London, 1980); John Dean, Blind Ambition, The White House Years (London, 1977).
See M. Harrop and W. L. Miller, Elections and Voters. A Comparative Introduction (London, 1987) pp. 21–4.
I. Crewe, ‘Tories Prosper From a Paradox’, The Guardian, 16 June 1987.
See M. P. Wattenburg, The Decline of American Political Parties 1958–80 (Harvard, 1984).
A. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York, 1957).
I. Budge and D. Farlie, Explaining and Predicting Elections (London, 1983) p. 41.
For American evidence see N. Nie et al., The Changing American Voter (Cambridge, Mass., 1974). There is a wealth of new studies of voting behaviour particularly in Britain: see A. Heath et al., How Britain Votes (Oxford, 1985); R. Rose et al., Voters Begin to Choose (London, 1986); P. Dunleavy et al., British Democracy at the Crossroads (London, 1985); D. Robertson, Class and the British Electorate (Oxford, 1984). See also H. Himmelweit et al., How Voters Decide (London, 1981) for some support for the rational voter approach. For an overview sec Harrop and Miller, Elections and Voters.
For a discussion of perceptions of ‘left’ and ‘right’, see D. Butler and D. Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed. (London, 1974) pp. 323–37.
See V. Wright, The Government and Politics of France (London, 1983) 2nd ed. Appendix 8.
See E. C. Ladd, ‘On Mandates, Realignments, and the 1984 Presidential Election’, Political Science Quarterly, 100, 1 (Spring, 1985) pp. 1–25.
ITN/Harris Exit Poll, The Independent, 13 June 1987.
See P. Whiteley, The Labour Party in Crisis (London, 1983) pp. 94–107. See also, Dunleavy et al., British Democracy at the Crossroads, pp. 121–46.
See Heath et al., How Britain Votes, pp. 13–44.
See A. Kriegel, The French Communists. Profile of People (Chicago, 1972). Of course, both the 1985 French elections and the Italian elections saw a weakening of the support for the Communist parties, the French far more seriously than the Italian.
See A. R. Ball and F. Millard, Pressure Politics in Industrial Societies (London, 1986), pp. 211–16, for a discussion of the problems of calculating and defining church membership.
See D. McKay, American Politics and Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1985) p. 105. Also see C. T. Husbands, ‘Race and Gender’, in Developments in British Politics, 2nd ed., H. Drucker et al. (eds) (London, 1986) pp. 304–13.
For a discussion of ‘age cohorts’, see Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, p. 62.
L. G. Edinger, West German Politics (New York, 1986) p. 114.
See K. Newton, ‘Mass Media’, in Developments in British Politics, pp. 314–17.
See A. Abramowitz, ‘The Impact of a Presidential Debate on Voter Rationality’, American Journal of Political Science, 22 (August 1978) pp. 680–90.
See Glasgow University Media Group, Really Bad News (London, 1983). This is the third book in the series, the first being published in 1976. See also P. Dunleavy, ‘Fleet Street: its Bite on the Ballot’ New Socialist, January 1985, pp. 24–6.
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© 1988 Alan R. Ball
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Ball, A.R. (1988). Representation, Elections and Voting Behaviour. In: Modern Politics and Government. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19347-9_7
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