Johns S. Mill on representation

What is representation and why does Mill think that it is essential to good government? What are its potential evils?

For John S. Mill, representation is the best form of government. “The ideally best form of government is that in which the sovereignty, or supreme controlling power in the last resort, is vested in the entire aggregate of the community; every citizen not only having a voice in the exercise of that ultimate sovereignty, but being, at least occasionally, called on to take an actual part in the government, by the personal discharge of some public function, local or general” (Chapter 3). For Mill, representation is essential to good government because is passes the “test” of good government; it has a high level of order and progress. For Mill, representation “promotes the good management of the affairs of society by means of the existing faculties, moral, intellectual, and active, of its various members” [order], and improves “those faculties” [progress] (Chapter 3).

Representation, for Mill, means that the government is a completely popular government – the people vote. This is necessary in representation because only the individual will consistently stand up for their rights, that an individual is only secure from being disregarded when they get involved and vote for their rights, and that each individual’s vote will even out when they are brought into the aggregate will of the voters. This is the ideal of representation for Mill. This means, according to Mill, that each individual is responsible for the protection of his rights and liberties. Because representation is the only form of government that can protect the individual’s rights and liberties, it is essential for good government.

This does not mean that Mill is an advocate for direct democracy – he is not. He advocates for a representative government. This is where the people, or some “numerous portion” of them, “exercise through deputies periodically elected by themselves the ultimate controlling power” (Chapter 5). For Mill, the “ultimate controlling power” is where one branch of the government can stop all government from doing anything – essentially a veto power. Mill states that in a representative government this power doesn’t have to reside with the people, explicitly, but does rest with them because they appoint the people in the government who then can exercise this power.

One of the pitfalls of representative government can occur when the representative body tries to do the work of the government, rather than simply deciding on the agenda of the government. This leads to inexpert legislation and regulation of various aspects of life. For Mill, this pitfall is easily avoided. Instead of granting the representative body the ability to do the work of the government, the representative body is granted the ability to decide on the agenda of the government, and then the experts in the bureaucracy are allowed to do the work. This prevents the representative body from doing the work that should be done by experts.

An example Mill gives, in Chapter 5, is how to draft legislation. In Mill’s ideal representative government, the representative body would decide what they want covered in a law, then ask the legislation committee – staffed by people who are experts at creating laws – to draw up the law. Then the representative body would vote on the law drafted by the committee and not be allowed to enter any amendments to the law. For Mill, this is a reasonable precaution to take because the representative body is not suited to doing the work – here the legislative commission would be doing the work – but only setting the agenda for the work. This avoids the pitfall of having the representative body doing the work of the government.

These are Mill’s solutions to preventing the representative government form engaging in business for which it has no expertise. The other problem a representative body faces is that the assembly is too close to the industries/people being regulated and are influenced by the very people it is trying to govern (also known as capture). In order to solve this problem, Mill suggest that people be able to vote for whatever representative you wish, and not be governed by geography. An example of this would be voting for the California State Senate in a system where you simply vote for candidates, rather than for candidates from a district.

Additionally, Mill believes that having proportional representation is better than having a majority vote because, he believes, you don’t have to vote for the person that you know, but you simply vote for what the person believes in. This enables government to remove the concept of a “safe district” which makes the elected representatives more responsive to the people and will create better candidates from which the people can elect representatives. This means that as representation improves, and as candidate quality improves, the issue of capture becomes less possible.

According to Mill, representative government can only exist when the people: (1) Are willing to be governed by representative government, (2) Are willing to do what is necessary to maintain the representative government, and (3) Are willing and able to fulfill the duties and functions that they must under a representative government. This means, that when any of these conditions fail, there will be problems in a representative government. These potential evils include: failing to invest enough power in the administration (bureaucracy) to do the work of the government, and the failure to develop active citizens; which is the “failure to develop by exercise the actual capacities and social feelings of the individual citizens” (p. 120). Mill also says that there are two problems that are specific to a representative government: That there are insufficient mental capabilities in the governing body and that the people become subject and controlled by an interest that is not their own (Mill calls these a sinister interest).

All of the issues Mill presents that could be problems in a representative government can be solved by having active participants in government. By “active” it is meant that the citizens take care of themselves, rather than have the government be paternalistic. This involves voting, being educated and looking out for the common good instead of sinister interests.

For Mill, sinister interests include majorities split by race, religion and economic status. These sinister interests don’t consider the good of society as a whole, but consider their majority status and work in their own interests. However, this can be solved by opening districts up so that people can vote for whomever they want. Then a racial minority can band together and get candidates elected to the representative body regardless of geography. The same is true for economic and religious minorities. This prevents great cleavages between classes and will result in a truly representative government, rather than just a majoritarian one.

If the people being ruled by a representative government become passive and are no longer willing to maintain the government, or are no longer willing to be controlled by their interests, Mill’s solution is to have a tyranny take over. He believes that a change in government will make a passive people become more active, which means they can progress from a tyrannical government – which can govern passive people - to a representative government. A change in government type is Mill’s prescription for people that have become passive and are no longer willing to maintain the representative government and do not want to fulfill the duties and functions that they must under a representative government.

Political theory and Guizot; Representation

Guizot is writing at a time when all of Europe is trying to develop representative government. Some places are failing, and some are failing miserably. During this time, Guizot sees that England almost has a real representative government. He wonders what it is about England that is enabling it to succeed in a representative government when the other countries in Europe are failing. In order to complete this study, Guizot looks at two things: representation and why the history of a political government is important to understand it.
Guizot wants to discover the meaning of the word “representation” as applied to the government of a community. He rejects the notion that “representation” can have a definition that is separate from the facts which surround the desire to define it. In this case, Guizot wants to define representation based in the surroundings of a representative system of government – The creation of Parliament in the English system.
Guizot says that the definition of representation, actually a doctrine of representation, is philosophical. He says that the doctrine starts from the principle that “Truth, reason, and justice – in one word, the divine law – alone possess rightful power (p295).” Guizot goes on to state that the way a society perceives this divine law, based on all the history it has gone through, creates “just ideas” within a society. These just ideas accompany loyal wills. However, just ideas and loyal wills are dispersed throughout society unequally. The distribution is based on the attributes of the individual. Each individual will have part of the just idea and loyal will within them.
Therefore, the concern of the society should be to collect all the fragments of just ideas and loyal wills and bring them into a whole and constitute a government. For Guizot, this is representation. It is the means to arrive at a government which will be legitimate. In order for this government to be legitimate it must subject itself to the reason of the individuals (meaning the decision of the individuals who have part of the just ideas and loyal will within them), over and over again. The process is never complete, but continues for as long as the government continues to be legitimate.
Guizot believes that representation cannot be understood in a country without also understanding the history of a country. Remember that Guizot believes in representation as a doctrine, a process – not simply some ideal. Earlier in his book Guizot stated that all fact, all history, is important to understand what comes next and that nothing happens in a vacuum. This means that, for Guizot, the formation of a representative government in a country cannot be understood without understanding the facts and the history in the country. Unlike Rousseau and others, Guizot does not place the start of a government, even a representative government, in the middle of a forest without any preconceived ideas or needs. Instead, Guizot starts from the notion that each man is not completely open to their own will, but instead recognizes that there are several laws – he calls them divine laws – that must be obeyed regardless. Guizot classifies these laws a truth, justice and morality.
For Guizot, representation is examined, for its definition, when it came into being – at the establishment of the English Parliament. For Guizot, the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the English Parliament – the abuse of charters by the king – helps shape the form of representation that England ends up with, and can offer clues as to how others can get it as close to “correct” as England has done.
England has a history of having small towns/localities. Therefore, when the House of Commons, one of the three parts of the English representative government and the lower house in the English Parliament, came into being, it brought with it the “small town” representatives. There are advantages to having a small area which a person must represent. Guizot states that the representatives of the people must consistently justify themselves and that election, publicity and responsibility (the three institutions which allow individuals to reason whether the people they have chosen as representatives should still remain their representatives) are easier to achieve in a smaller population and geographical area. The small towns of England have this in their advantage. In small towns, so the stereotype goes, people know each other, talk to each other and can trust/verify the activities of other members of the town. If a small town’s representative was to do something against what the small town wanted, publicity would easily bring it to the attention of the town members. Bringing things to the attention of the town members increases in difficulty as the town grows. California’s system of having only 40 state senators for the whole population is opposite of Guizot’s ideal situation. The larger the area, the harder it is to have open elections, responsibility, and the harder it is to publicize information about the representative and what they are doing. For Guizot, size matters.
England maintained this history of having small groups of people choose their own representatives from the first time they were asked to send representatives to the King. The King asked for representatives from the cities, the small closely-knit communities, to advise him along with the barons when it seemed as if the cities might gain too much power. By bringing in local representatives to advise him, along with the traditional nobility advisors, the King founded the basis for the three-part division of power in England: The monarch, the House of Lords and the House of Commons.
This three-part division of power arose in England because of the great inequalities of economics and power among the nobility and the commoners, and even among the various factions of nobility. For Guizot it is this three-sided balance of power, and how it came about, that makes England the example for representative government. Although Guizot does acknowledge that representative government doesn’t have to be structured exactly like England, but that there should be three sides to the power struggle so that one side cannot overwhelm the others. Whether a representative government ends up like England or with another system will largely, according to Guizot, be based in the historical influence of the actual country.
Guizot uses the history of England to say that representation is a continuing process. For Guizot, this process, representation, isn’t simply an ideal; it is a constantly occurring justification of the legitimacy of the government and is aimed at bringing together everyone in the interests of just ideals. England happened upon many of these things by chance, simply because its history influenced events; like the King inviting representatives from the city (precursor to the House of Commons) to advise him. Facts in context make history, and since England is the closest thing to a true representative government Guizot can observe, Guizot uses England’s facts, its history, to explain the doctrine of representation and the relationship of representation to history and representative government.