HKB

← all topics

Universal suffrage transitional problems

1 passages · search this phrase →

Often appears with: proportional representation · justice as a virtue · hare's plan and constituency imprisonment · elections and representation · constitutions and founding law · compromise suffrage arrangements

Usually: argument (1) · censure (1)

Considerations on Representative Government secondary

John Stuart Mill · 1840s–1861 (composition and revision; see publication date omitted)
Chapter I--To What Extent Forms of Government are a Matter of Choice. > Chapter VIII--Of the Extension of the Suffrage. (11/14)

Mill argues that without a system granting plural influence for education and knowledge, universal suffrage would bring severe evils, and he critiques compromises that disrupt Hare’s proportional representation by constituency registration.

to give their votes as such in any constituency in which they choose to register; retaining, in addition, their votes as simple citizens in the localities in which they reside. Until there shall have been devised, and until opinion is willing to accept, some mode of plural voting which may assign to education as such the degree of superior influence due to it, and sufficient as a counterpoise to the numerical weight…