Parliament the Mirror of the Nation

Gregory Conti’s contribution to the Ideas in Context series is a penetrating investigation of a major theme of Victorian constitutional discussion: the question of how, and how far, Parliament should mirror the social composition of the nation—what he calls ‘descriptive representation’. He starts from an apparent paradox: nowadays we measure the quality of democracy largely in terms of its perceived ability to reflect the full range of social groups and interests, but Victorians who argued that Parliament should be reshaped in pursuit of that ideal did so in order to prevent democracy and outwit its advocates. Conti’s analysis divides nineteenth-century commentators on this topic into three schools. His first group includes two of the most well known polemicists of the decade before the 1867 Reform Act, Walter Bagehot and the third Earl Grey, but also more obscure writers such as the Broughamite legal reformer, George Harris. Their admitted aim was

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