ABSTRACT
Party competition in open elections is the principal institutional device used in modern political systems to implement the ideals of democracy and to secure representative government. Of course, there is nothing in the history of elections, let alone party competition, that associates them uniquely with democratic values. Indeed, as Manin (1997) has shown, selection by lot was the classical democratic device for choosing those to hold political office, and elections were seen over many centuries as aristocratic devices. Rousseau (1762: book 3, chapter 15) notoriously asserted that the British people thought they were free, but were only really so at the moment at which they chose their government. Between elections, not directly governing themselves, they were slaves. So, there is no simple inference from the ideals of democracy to the practice of representative government chosen by election. Yet, since the emergence of modern democracy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, elections have been viewed as the means by which governments could be rendered accountable and responsible to those whom they governed. James Mill’s (1822) account of the incentives that elections gave to governors to pay attention to the interests of the governed is an early, influential and paradigmatic statement of what is now orthodoxy among most political commentators, political scientists and political theorists of democracy.
