Representation and Democratic Theory

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

Democracies have problems. The first-past-the-post system allows a
political party with less than 40 percent of the popular vote to win a
majority of the seats in the House of Commons and provincial
legislatures. Quebec’s Liberals have often won more votes than the
victorious party (Union Nationale until 1966, Parti Québécois
thereafter) because the provincial Liberals had tens of thousands of
votes to spare in West Island Montreal ridings while their opponents
squeaked to victory in numerous ridings elsewhere. On the other hand,
Israelis—who have proportional representation—have never elected a
majority government, and fringe parties have disproportionate influence.

Vital as these issues are, the authors do not deal with them. Nor do
they deal with the problems of democracy in huge countries such as the
United States and India. Given the expense of operating national
campaigns—or even statewide campaigns (for senator or governor)—in
the United States, and given India’s tradition of electing members of
the Nehru/Gandhi family as head of government, it is reasonable to ask
whether democracy is compatible with magnitude.

However, the authors deal with a number of important questions, all of
which make the book worthwhile. Avigail Eisenberg discusses problems
with referendums. How democratic are they if the voters receive a loaded
question? Can a majority (heterosexuals or Serbs) impose tyranny on a
minority (homosexuals or Albanian Kosovars)? What happens if an elite
dislikes the outcome and holds referendum after referendum, as seems to
be the case in Quebec? Peter Ives notes that English is the de facto
language of the European Union, an association of democracies, but that
the EU lacks an official language policy and that with 21 different
official languages, there are 420 possible combinations (e.g.,
Portuguese to Finnish, Hungarian to Danish). The opening sentence of
Melissa Williams’s contribution is “Aboriginal people in Canada are
starkly underrepresented in Canadian legislative institutions.” Susan
Henders discusses the fate of such minorities in China as the people of
Hong Kong and Tibet, as well as of Corsicans and Catalonians in Europe.

This book is a good beginning, but believers in democracy need more
than the offerings it provides.