How did the struggle for representation increase the level and quality of democracy in the industrial societies? (150 words) (2012, 12 Marks)
In industrial societies the vote was won, not granted. Göran Therborn argued (1977) that democracy arose from working-class struggle against propertied resistance, often clinched by the mass mobilisation of war, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens (Capitalist Development and Democracy, 1992) found organised labour the most consistently pro-democratic force. That struggle raised both the level (who takes part) and the quality (how meaningfully) of democracy.
The struggle
- Britain: the Reform Act of 1832 disappointed its supporters; the Chartists (from 1838) demanded universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, equal constituencies and payment of members — rejected then, mostly enacted later. Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 admitted urban and rural workers; the suffragette campaign won votes for women in 1918 and equal franchise in 1928.
- United States: the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) was nullified by poll taxes and literacy tests until the civil rights movement secured the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
- Women’s suffrage ran an uneven course, from New Zealand in 1893 to Switzerland’s federal vote for women only in 1971, showing that neither wealth nor stability guaranteed inclusion without organised pressure.
- Stein Rokkan‘s four thresholds — legitimation, incorporation, representation, executive power — chart the hurdles each excluded group had to cross; Britain’s 1918 Act followed the mass mobilisation of the First World War.
Raising the level of democracy
- Inclusiveness, in Robert A. Dahl’s sense, expanded from a propertied minority to all adults.
- The secret ballot (Britain, 1872) and payment of members (1911) freed voters from landlord and employer pressure and opened Parliament to non-wealthy candidates.
Raising its quality
- Mass parties with branches, dues and programmes replaced caucuses of notables, as Maurice Duverger showed, bringing programmatic politics.
- Enfranchised workers voted for redistribution, producing the welfare state; T. H. Marshall saw political rights as the hinge between civil and social citizenship.
- Seymour Martin Lipset’s democratic class struggle converted revolutionary conflict into electoral competition; Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson explain franchise extension as elites’ credible concession to avert revolution.
Limits
Robert Michels’s iron law of oligarchy reappeared inside the new mass parties, and Joseph A. Schumpeter reduced democracy to elite competition. Equal votes have not produced equal influence: Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page (2014) found that American policy tracks the preferences of economic elites and organised groups far more than those of average citizens.
Conclusion
The struggle turned representative government from a property-holders’ club into mass democracy and gave it social content. Its unfinished agenda has shifted from who may vote to whose voice counts — a struggle still continuing.