At the base of representative government stands a custom so conventional as to seem without a history: majority voting. In contrast with consensus systems, a majoritarian system decides by and accords normative weight to vote tallies. In Willliam J. Bulman's telling, majority voting emerged as the dominant practice of the House of Commons at a “Turning Point,” dated to December 1642–April 1643 (120).
To be sure, majority voting had long existed in many settings and had been an established option in the House of Commons. An introduction situates voting practices historically and comparatively to frame the story as the development of majoritarian voting practices in nationally representative institutions where consensus had been the norm. This approach excludes not only numerous local and corporate entities, but also the House of Lords. It also tacitly excludes Italy, early star of the Atlantic Republican narrative. Florence merits a single reference (15n32) and the voting system of Venice, much discussed of late, is not mentioned. For Bulman, the telos is rather the linkage to the world historical importance of British and American parliamentary voting practices (248–49). These defined, for better or for worse, modern majoritarian norms, in turn generating and sustaining party systems and making competitive elections meaningfully majoritarian.
Using natural language processing (27n18), Bulman studies a “unique database of over 150,000 formal decisions recorded in the Commons journal between the reigns of Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II, and tens of thousands of formal decisions made in the colonial lower assemblies in the century and a half prior to the American Revolution” (4). To parse patterns, Bulman engages in a careful, sometimes vote-by-vote analysis using diaries and contemporary comments. Prior to an emergent breakdown in the traditional political order the House of Commons had combined arcane methods, like putting “the ‘previous question’” (39), with the option of majority voting to sustain an image of consensus politics even on obviously divisive issues. In the context of sustained political crisis, however, calculations of honor, status, and safety became irresolvable by traditional means (62). Focusing two chapters on just the years 1640–43, Bulman uses data on division frequency to point to a frequency step change from December 1642 to April 1643, a period when three-fifths of divisions concerned negotiations with the king in the context of civil war (123).
Consensus politics had already eroded under the pressure of crowd and military threats in 1641–42 (109–19). This, in turn, interacted with minoritarian politics (82–84) in which those with no hope of changing the outcome nonetheless insisted on division to mark their dissent. After the inflection point of early 1643, consensus continued to decay under aggressive petitioning (152–53, 159) and pressure from a politicized army (161–64) that perceived rule by parliamentary majority as factious and contrary to its interests, culminating famously in Pride's Purge in December 1648. Amidst the parliamentary experiments of the following years, by 1656 attitudes had shifted. Honor no longer inhered in slowly achieved consensus but instead became attached to resolutely undertaking divisions following debate (172–73). The Restoration did not restore consensus, but rather crystallized the switch from consensual to majoritarian decision-making, a process that started early and was completed by the early 1670s (180–81, 196). The 1670s emergence of party politics, then, was epiphenomenal to majoritarian voting (197).
In his impressive survey of lower legislative houses in Ireland, the Caribbean, and North America, Bulman sifts the variable evidence for majoritarian practices. These may have emerged slightly earlier in places like Maryland (228), but Bulman interprets colonial American practices differently. He sees them as responses to inherited corporate or proprietary voting traditions, ideas of delegatory representation, and the example of the House of Commons itself. He concludes by reinterpreting Locke's notion of the naturalness of majoritarian decision-making as disguising its then very recent emergence as normal English practice (247–48). Reliance on supermajorities and calls for unity reflect continuing disquiet with unabashed majoritarianism.
The core technical analysis of voting practices and its correlation with specific political moments will doubtless be an important contribution. Bulman's study raises thought-provoking questions that should encourage research into the legacies of the many other strands that went into shaping modern politics.
