Why Does the Majority Rule? A Detective Story about Its Origins

Abstract

It is rare to begin an academic book review by entering a personal plea to disinterested readers, but here a statement of authorial purpose is in order. William J. Bulman’s splendid monograph on the origins of majority rule in the English Parliament is not a book that most readers of this journal would expect to see reviewed here. True, its final chapter does discuss the colonial American assemblies. But this imperial chapter is more an afterthought to Bulman’s dominant concern, which is to provide an extended analysis of rules of deliberation and decision-making in the seventeenth-century House of Commons. The very thought of navigating the dense scholarly terrain of seventeenth-century British history will daunt many readers, even those of us trained as early American historians. After all, what history of any nation over a similar span of years has ever been studied more intensely? Yet at this precarious moment in American history, when our own conventions of majority rule have become both deeply controversial and gravely vulnerable, Bulman’s scrupulously argued book deserves close attention. At one level, The Rise of Majority Rule is a tightly focused monograph that depends on the careful analysis of one main evidentiary source, the legislative journals of the House of Commons, complemented by a few textual sources conveying how its members perceived the changes they were witnessing. Yet the book is also an interpretive work of the first order of significance. It starts with a simple, seemingly naïve question that one would think barely merits an answer: why do we allow majorities to govern? Is this rule of decision not so obvious and self-evident (in the axiomatic sense of the term) that no explanation of its origins is needed? In fact, Bulman demonstrates, this development, like all others, has its own distinctive history. He makes his key claims at the outset: the institutional “turn to majority voting [within Parliament] is more essential to the history of majority rule than the gradual attainment of universal suffrage” or the invention of political parties (p. 1), and this shift in legislative