Political Inequality

Abstract

Since the publication of Duncan Black’s Theory of Committees and Elections (1958) and earlier Anthony Downs’s An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), the theoretical search for conditions underlying political equilibria or their absence has largely been carried on under assumptions of political equality among voters in single, well-defined constituencies electing representatives to unicameral legislatures. This is as it should be in normal science, for the study of conditions guaranteeing the presence or absence of equilibria has been sufficiently difficult without introducing the asymmetries associated with political voting inequality, peculiarities of particular representational districting schemes, or bicameralism.

After close to two centuries of intermittent agitation, democratic ideologists have firmly established the democratic principle of universal, equal suffrage as an article of the American faith. And further, democratic politicians have actually embodied much of that ideal in institutional practice. It is no mean praise of the achievement of seven generations that this chapter on suffrage in American democracy could concentrate so much on the lapses from the ideal That very emphasis itself suggests that Americans need not be convinced of the value of voting and that the basic steps toward realization of the ideal have been taken. We are well over half-way on our road to the operational goal of democratic theory.

Important as some of the derelictions from the ideal of “one-man, one-vote” still are, we can take hope from the fact that the democratic conscience is now quite aroused.

William H. Riker (1965a, p. 82)

I dissent in each of these cases, believing that in none of them have the plaintiffs stated a cause of action.

Mr. Justice John M. Harlan, Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 at 625 (1964)