Equality, Proportionality and Statistics: Political Representation from the English to the French and American Revolutions

Abstract

Debates on the proportionality of political representation surfaced repeatedly, and in similar forms, from the English to the American and French Revolutions. They contributed to shaping those revolutions’ outcomes and, through them, to the emergence of modern democracy – especially so as they were linked up with voting rights: demands to make seats in assemblies more numerically proportionate to electorates – in other words, to weigh all votes equally – implied the equal weight of individual votes and thus also entailed calls for more equal standards regarding the right to vote. This did not yet signify voting rights for all: only specific categories of individuals – as a rule, male and propertied – were considered, even by the most ‘enlightened’ writers, to be politically entitled. Nevertheless, it was only one step from here to envisage voting rights for all individuals – or at least, for the time being, for all male individuals – as can also be seen in all three revolutions. If claims for more proportional and equal representation showed their full impact only on the American and French Revolutions, finally, this was due to the intervening emergence of statistics (or ‘political arithmetic’) as a tool of reflection and debate that gave numbers and calculations increasing persuasive power.