# Is limited suffrage not a limited kind of democracy? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 19, 2017, 6:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774 "2017-04-19T06:58:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![davidmich](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e56c9b/32.png) [@davidmich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/davidmich)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2017, 6:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/1 "2017-04-19T06:58:39Z")
Hi On page 2 of Mike Rapport’s “1848 Year of Revolution” he states: “In 1832 had come the first great modern reform of the system, whereby urban property property owners were given the right to vote, while the critics–many of them hitherto absent or poorly represented at Westminster–were allowed to elect Members of Parliament. This was not democracy, for only one in five adult males (women were excluded as a matter of course) was enfranchised in England and Wales(and only one in eight in Scotland) and the composition of Parliament, which consisted of gentry and aristocratic landowners, remained virtually unchanged.” If the limited suffrage wasn’t democracy at all, what would you call it? I look forward to your feedback. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2017, 7:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/2 "2017-04-19T07:27:10Z")
There are two kinds of Democracy. One is “Democracy” a certain type of utopian world where everything is done The.Correct.And.Democratic.Way (at least according to the person calling for Democracy). Then there is actual democracy, where the Government in power is dependant on a mandate from a the general public at large, not from some other institution. I don’t think that Britain had a limited form of democracy., like say the United States had during the near-century after the end of Reconstruction and the 1965 Act. Voting qualifications, or at least objective voting qualifications which are theoretically achievable for everyone do not constitute limited democracy like say a closed electorate or restrictions on otherwise qualified people do. The result of the Great Reform Act was that a large body was able to become part of the electorate and its members were not beholden to other institutions or had encumbrances which kept them out for all time. ---
**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2017, 8:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/3 "2017-04-19T08:16:00Z")
Well, strictly speaking if even one citizen is denied the right to vote (e.g. for being under 18) then what you have is a “limited democracy”; after that, you’re only arguing about exactly what limitations are to apply. Age? Sex? Felony status? A property qualification? A residence qualification? Or informal but effective limitations, like practical barriers to voting such as few polling stations, onerous identification requirements, elaborate and time-consuming procedures. Which is another way of saying that all real-world democracies are limited democracies to a greater or lesser extent. But being a limited democracy isn’t necessarily the same as not being a democracy at all. As long as you have a sufficient critical mass of the population entitled to vote, and those voters are close enough to the remainder of the citizens to be aware of their concerns, and to care about their concerns, I think you have the makings of a genuinely effective democracy. Adults, for example, can reasoanably be expected to take not only their own personal interests into account in making their voting decisions, but also the interests of their children. (A similar argument would have been advanced in the past with respect to male voters and their disenfranchised female dependents.) And, as all good republicans (note the lower-case ‘r’) will point point out, the voter is not supposed to vote with a view primarily to advancing his personal interests, or even those of his family, but with a view to advancing the good of the whole nation. The more effectively voters accept and act on this principle, the more genuinely democratic a somewhat limited democracy can be. Conversely, the less voters accept and act on this, the less genuinely democratic the system will be, even if they have universal suffrage. ---
**Author:** ![bob\_2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bob_2/32/3341_2.png) [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2017, 8:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/4 "2017-04-19T08:18:53Z")
No democracy in the world has no limits on who can vote. In most places there is some arbitrary age limit which prevents children, presumably on the grounds that they don’t understand the consequences, from voting. In the UK, Peers and lunatics are also barred from the ballot box, and there has been some recent controversy about the rights of people in prison. edit: I see that lunatics are no longer barred. ---
**Author:** ![naita](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naita/32/5862_2.png) [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2017, 9:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/5 "2017-04-19T09:18:40Z")
> [@davidmich](#): > > Hi > On page 2 of Mike Rapport’s “1848 Year of Revolution” he states: > “In 1832 had come the first great modern reform of the system, whereby urban property property owners were given the right to vote, while the critics–many of them hitherto absent or poorly represented at Westminster–were allowed to elect Members of Parliament. This was not democracy, for only one in five adult males (women were excluded as a matter of course) was enfranchised in England and Wales(and only one in eight in Scotland) and the composition of Parliament, which consisted of gentry and aristocratic landowners, remained virtually unchanged.” > If the limited suffrage wasn’t democracy at all, what would you call it? I look forward to your feedback. What would you call it before the reform? I’d say it was an oligarchy and partially a plutocracy. Of course all democracies have some form of limit, but to most there is a vague line where limitations to who gets to influence government disqualifies it from the label. The English parliament appears to have consisted pretty much entirely of people serving there in a great part due to position they had been appointed to by birth or a higher power. I wouldn’t call that democracy. The reform in question appears to have made little difference, so I think it’s fair to say it wasn’t democracy. Now I also think you could describe it as very limited democracy, but as a description of system of government that describes a part of little consequence and fails to describe what decided the actual government. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2017, 1:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/6 "2017-04-19T13:06:26Z")
It’s also worthwhile to judge the situation in 1850 by the worldwide standards of 1850. Not those of 2017. The change in electorate from purely the landed gentry to the landed gentry plus a smattering of wealthy city merchants was a step from extremely limited democracy to rather highly limited democracy. If we focus on just the direction of movement and not the position or magnitude we see progress, not regress. In that sense it was brave leap into the very much not Conservative unknown. ---
**Author:** ![davidmich](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e56c9b/32.png) [@davidmich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/davidmich)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2017, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/7 "2017-04-19T14:05:19Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > It’s also worthwhile to judge the situation in 1850 by the worldwide standards of 1850. Not those of 2017. > > The change in electorate from purely the landed gentry to the landed gentry plus a smattering of wealthy city merchants was a step from extremely limited democracy to rather highly limited democracy. If we focus on just the direction of movement and not the position or magnitude we see progress, not regress. > > In that sense it was brave leap into the very much not Conservative unknown. Thanks all. But if you had to give the system at the time a name, what would you call it. It isn’t democracy a we know it today. I don’t think you could call it autocracy as it existed on the European continent at the time either. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2017, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/8 "2017-04-19T14:07:17Z")
IIRC, too, wasn’t one of the advances of that Act the redistricting that eliminated “pocket boroughs”? The original distribution of parliament hadn’t changed in centuries, so some formerly large population centers (Old Sarum, e.g.?) had a member in parliament for a handful of voters, while other new population centers had one representative for very large city. Some pocket boroughs supposedly you could become a member of parliament by paying off both the voters in the riding. So another aspect of representative democracy is the relative weight of each vote in selecting a representative. As the old George Bernard Shaw joke goes: “Would you sleep with me for a million pounds?” “Well, it is a large amount, I probably would one time…” “How about for five pounds?” “What do you think I am!??” “We’ve already established that, we’re haggling price now” They are all democracies, some are just more representative than others. You’re haggling over degree. The much-vaunted classical Greek democracies, for example, maybe one in 10 could vote - male citizens, not women or slaves. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2017, 2:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/9 "2017-04-19T14:20:16Z")
> [@davidmich](#): > > Thanks all. But if you had to give the system at the time a name, what would you call it. It isn’t democracy a we know it today. I don’t think you could call it autocracy as it existed on the European continent at the time either. I’d answer that by quoting > [@naita](#): > > What would you call it before the reform? I’d say it was an oligarchy and partially a plutocracy. > > Of course all democracies have some form of limit, but to most there is a vague line where limitations to who gets to influence government disqualifies it from the label. > > The English parliament appears to have consisted pretty much entirely of people serving there in a great part due to position they had been appointed to by birth or a higher power. I wouldn’t call that democracy. The reform in question appears to have made little difference, so I think it’s fair to say it wasn’t democracy. > > Now I also think you could describe it as very limited democracy, but as a description of system of government that describes a part of little consequence and fails to describe what decided the actual government. The name is less important than understanding the reality. English is naturally fuzzy and imprecise. Especially when talking across the centuries. It’s a fundamental category error to think that by naming something you’ve explained what it _is_. The closest term we’d use now is oligarchy. Recognizing that the various -archy words about who _governs_, not about who _votes_. In some sense the US today is mostly an oligarchy (see congressional and executive branch millionaires and presidential billionaires) even though the electorate has fairly completely universal suffrage. I doubt English really has a spectrum of words to describe degrees of suffrage as such. If such words exist, they’re terms of art known only to political scientists. Which is to say that using them in front of a lay audience (such as most of us here) would not be clear communication, but rather obfuscation. ---
**Author:** ![Alan\_Smithee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/2acd7d/32.png) [@Alan\_Smithee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alan_Smithee)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2017, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/10 "2017-04-19T14:38:09Z")
What difference does it make? (I’m not threadshitting; I promise!) Every society is set up at least slightly differently, with different rules for whose voice counts and what the qualifications and procedures are. There is no bright line between a dictatorship in which only one person gets to vote and a pure democracy in which every person gets to vote, and the various situations in between can’t always be ranked neatly. Rather than thinking of each situation individually, though, humans think by creating categories as a sort of shorthand for clusters of individual situations. The categories are often arbitrary and fuzzily defined (“What counts as a democracy?” “When a lot of the people can vote.” “How many is a lot?” “Eh, I’ll know it when I see it.”) but it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a shorthand–a way of compressing information by ignoring the specific details. In the passage you quote, however, we don’t need a shorthand, because the author gives us the details. We know what proportion of the people could vote, and what the qualifications were. Labeling it “a democracy” or “not a democracy” doesn’t add any information, it’s just a way of expressing the author’s approval or (in this case) disapproval. Depending on why you read the book and what you think of the author, that disapproval may or may not be interesting or useful to you. I haven’t read the book and don’t know anything about the author, so it means nothing to me. Or are you merely asking what the conventional name is for the category just to the “dictator” side of “democracy” on the dictator-democracy scale? In that case, the answer is either “limited democracy” or “oligarchy,” depending on how finely divided the scale is. ETA: Damn, I was more or less ninjaed by LSLGuy, who made the same point somewhat differently while I was typing. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2017, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/11 "2017-04-19T15:21:54Z")
> [@](#): > > Democracy: a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives. In your example, all the eligible members of a state could vote. Therefore it was a democracy. The deeper problem is thinking that one single qualification is sufficient to determine the political structure of a state. Allowing citizens to vote is necessary, but it may not be [sufficient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy). > [@](#): > > According to political scientist Larry Diamond, democracy consists of four key elements: (a) A political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; (b) The active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; (c) Protection of the human rights of all citizens, and (d) A rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens. Note that that definition doesn’t address percentages of citizens voting. A limited democracy is certainly a possible form of government. The U.S. had various forms of limited democracy until the 20th century, but it was considered a democracy nonetheless. The very word “democracy,” which had a narrow definition and not widely used application, gathered as its prime exemplar the American form of government starting in the 19th century, even though that democracy was limited by modern standards. Governments don’t slot neatly into definitions, and definitions themselves change over time. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2017, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/12 "2017-04-19T17:00:13Z")
Democracy would/should simply mean that a significant number of people not part of the government can vote and change who is the government/executive power of the country. If people at large (some or all) can change who governs, it’s a democracy. If it’s a one-party state, no matter how open the elections, it’s not. If contrary votes are ignored, it’s not. Presumably, those other enumerated benefits flow - eventually, we hope - from the ability to change government. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2017, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/13 "2017-04-19T22:56:07Z")
Absolutely, democracy (with a small d) has to be seen as a continuum with absolute dictatorship at one end, and a full liberal democracy with universal suffrage at the other. Claiming it is an all other nothing thing is just stupid. No one could claim that the US before the 19th amendment was passed (or the voting rights act, if you being even more pedantic) was no more democratic than Soviet Russia or some other contemporary absolute dictatorship. ---
**Author:** ![igor\_frankensteen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/839c29/32.png) [@igor\_frankensteen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/igor_frankensteen)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2017, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/14 "2017-04-20T00:15:47Z")
> [@davidmich](#): > > Hi > On page 2 of Mike Rapport’s “1848 Year of Revolution” he states: > “In 1832 had come the first great modern reform of the system, whereby urban property property owners were given the right to vote, while the critics–many of them hitherto absent or poorly represented at Westminster–were allowed to elect Members of Parliament. This was not democracy, for only one in five adult males (women were excluded as a matter of course) was enfranchised in England and Wales(and only one in eight in Scotland) and the composition of Parliament, which consisted of gentry and aristocratic landowners, remained virtually unchanged.” > If the limited suffrage wasn’t democracy at all, what would you call it? I look forward to your feedback. The key to answering this particular question is to ask Mike Rappaport what HIS definition of democracy is, and why he said that this wasn’t one. There is no independent and decisive “democracy authority” in the world. ---
**Author:** ![TSBG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/77aa72/32.png) [@TSBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TSBG)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2017, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/15 "2017-04-20T02:39:56Z")
Even before parliamentary form, there were non-violent changes of government from one party/faction to another, based on the political support of people who at least notionally represented the interests of their (what do you call them? Boroughs? Ridings?) districts. It’s a form of limited democracy, perhaps extremely limited, but it’s not monarchy or dictatorship. It may be oligarchical in a sense, but I don’t think true oligarchies really trade off power like this. Although, I’m now dimly recalling the history of a South American country (Venezuela? Colombia?) which for a long time was run by the Colorados and Blancos, two factions of, more or less, the richest folks, and who did trade off power from time to time without factional fighting. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2017, 2:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-limited-suffrage-not-a-limited-kind-of-democracy/784774/16 "2017-04-20T02:46:47Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > Absolutely, democracy (with a small d) has to be seen as a continuum with absolute dictatorship at one end, and a full liberal democracy with universal suffrage at the other. Claiming it is an all other nothing thing is just stupid. > > No one could claim that the US before the 19th amendment was passed (or the voting rights act, if you being even more pedantic) was no more democratic than Soviet Russia or some other contemporary absolute dictatorship. real democracy (as practiced by a subset of Greek city-state inhabitants) everyone eligible to vote could show up and express their opinion and vote. _ **Representative** _ democracy, by definition, is a limited compromise, just as is limited sufferage.