The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (67 page)

Delegated (or secondary) legislation is law made by ministers under powers given to them by parliamentary acts (primary legislation) in order to implement and administer the requirements of the acts. It has equal effect in law although ministers can be challenged in the courts on the grounds that specific pieces of delegated legislation are not properly based on powers given by acts. In the United Kingdom, delegated legislation, typically, is made through the force of statutory instruments in the form of ministerial regulations, orders in council, and codes of practice. The amount and scope of delegated legislation has grown as a result of the increasing pressure on parliamentary time. Advocates suggest that it represents an efficient way of relieving Parliament, that much of its subject-matter is uncontroversial, and that Parliament voluntarily gave up power in such irksome business. Critics object to the growing legislative autonomy of the executive from Parliament, and point out that deeply controversial matters, such as immigration rules, have been treated as delegated legislation.
JBr 

 
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Like democracy, the idea of a demagogue has its roots in the ambiguous Greek word ‘
demos
’ meaning ‘the people’, but in the sense of either ‘the population’ or ‘the mob’. Thus a demagogue was, even in classical times, the leader of the mob, but also the leader of a popular state in which sovereignty was vested in the whole adult male citizenry. In this defunct, neutral sense all modern Western leaders are, to some degree, demagogues.
But the modern significance of the idea of a demagogue lies in its pejorative sense, as the leader of a mob, with the implication that those who rouse the rabble always do so for ignoble purposes. In this sense the word came into established use in England in the Civil War period and was used, particularly, by the poet John Milton to describe contemporary activists. A long line of liberal thinkers have expressed fears of demagoguery and the need for constitutions to limit its destructive potential. John Stuart
Mill
invoked the image of the orator inflaming the drunken mob on the subject of the Corn Laws in front of a corn merchant's house to introduce the principle that freedom of speech should be limited in certain contexts. Lord Acton portrayed nationalist and religiously intolerant demagogues as a constant danger of and to democracy. Joseph
Schumpeter
kept these images alive in twentieth-century political theory by drawing on Gustave Le Bon's mob or crowd psychology to suggest that the ‘mob’ is erratic, irrational, and oriented towards violent solutions to problems. Schumpeter was primarily reacting to Hitler's success as a demagogue, but demagoguery did not die with Hitler.
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Term introduced by J. Burnheim , 1985, to denote democracy implemented by selection of people and courses of action by lot rather than by election. Burnheim's criticisms of representative democracy are telling, but most critics have found his scheme of demarchy impracticable.

 
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Greek, ‘rule by the people’. Since the people are rarely unanimous, democracy as a descriptive term may be regarded as synonymous with
majority rule
. In ancient Greece, and when the word started to be used again in the eighteenth century, most of those who used the word were opposed to what they called democracy. In modern times, the connotations of the word are so overwhelmingly favourable that regimes which have no claim to it at all have appropriated it (the German Democratic Republic, Democratic Kampuchea). Even when not used emptily as propaganda, ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic’ are frequently applied in ways which have no direct connection with majority rule: for instance
The Democratic Intellect
(G. E. Davie ) is a well-known discussion of the (supposed) egalitarianism of the Scottish educational system in the nineteenth century. Such uses of ‘democracy’ to mean ‘what I approve of’ will not be considered further here. Issues relating to majority rule which have been controversial include:

(1) 
Who are to count as ‘the people’ and what is a ‘majority’ of them?
Ancient Athens called itself a democracy (from
c.
500 BC to
c.
330 BC) because all citizens could take part in political decisions. But ‘all citizens’ did not mean ‘all adults’. Women, slaves, and resident aliens (including people from other Greek cities) had no rights to participate. Citizens were thus less than a quarter of the adult population. Modern writers have nevertheless accepted the self-description of classical Athens as ‘democratic’ ( see also
Athenian democracy
). Likewise, political theorists have often accepted the claim that a modern regime in which most, or at least a large number of, men have the vote is democratic. Well under half the adult population of the United Kingdom had the vote before the first women were enfranchised in 1918; but 1918 is not usually given as the year in which Britain became a democracy. What minimum proportion of adults must be enfranchised before a regime may be called democratic? This simple question seems to lack simple answers.
‘Majority’ appears to be more clear cut than ‘people’; it means ‘more than half’. In votes between two options or candidates this poses no difficulty; in votes among three or more it does. The difficulty was studied by various isolated people (Pliny the Younger,
c.
AD 105; Ramon Lull in the thirteenth century; Nicolas
Cusanus
in the fifteenth) but first systematically tackled by
Borda
and
Condorcet
in the late eighteenth century. The plurality rule (‘Select the candidate with the largest single number of votes, even if that number is less than half of the votes cast’) may select somebody whom the majority regard as the worst candidate. Nevertheless, countries using this rule for national elections (including Britain, the United States, and India) are normally described as ‘democratic’. Borda proposed to select the candidate with the highest average ranking; Condorcet proposed to select the candidate who wins in pairwise comparisons with each of the others. Although these are the two best interpretations of ‘majority rule’ when there are more than two candidates, they do not always select the same candidate; and the
Condorcet
winner—that is, the candidate who wins every pairwise comparison—sometimes does not exist. In this case, whichever candidate is chosen, there is always a majority who prefer some other, and the meaning of ‘majority rule’ is unclear.
Voting in legislatures is usually by the binary resolution-and-amendment procedure, which always ensures that the winning option has beaten its last rival by a majority (but does not solve the problems mentioned in the previous paragraph).
(2) 
Why (if at all) should majorities rule minorities?
The first coherent argument for democracy in ancient Greece is that attributed by
Thucydides
to Pericles, one of the democratic leaders of Athens, in 430 BC. Pericles argued that democracy is linked with toleration, but made no special claims for majority rule.
Plato
and
Aristotle
both deplored democracy, Plato on the grounds that it handed control of the government from experts in governing to populist
demagogues
and Aristotle on the grounds that government by the people was in practice government by the poor, who could be expected to expropriate the rich. However, Aristotle did first mention as a justification of majority rule that ‘the majority ought to be sovereign, rather than the best, where the best are few…. [A] feast to which all contribute is better than one given at one man's expense.’ In medieval elections, the usual phrase was that the ‘larger and (or ‘or’) wiser part’ ought to prevail. But this formula was deeply unsatisfactory as every losing minority could claim that it was the wiser part. Only in the seventeenth century did a defence of democracy based on an assumption of equal rights for all citizens begin to re-emerge, perhaps as a by-product of the Protestant Reformation.
Hobbes
and
Locke
both assume the political equality of citizens, but neither draws explicitly democratic conclusions. A stronger claim of equality was asserted by Colonel Rainborough of Cromwell's army in 1647, with his claim that the ‘poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee’.
Significant widening of the franchise in Western regimes began in the late eighteenth century. In the French Revolution, the franchise was at first restricted to fairly substantial property-holders, but it was widened to something approaching manhood franchise in the constitution of 1791 and the proposed constitution of 1793. Many of the American colonies had broad suffrage before 1776, and the Constitution of 1787 lays the groundwork for democracy in federal elections by giving each state representation in the House and in presidential elections in proportion to its population (except for Indians and slaves). Except between 1865 and the 1890s, however, Southern blacks remained disenfranchised until 1965. The first British act to widen the franchise was in 1832; universal suffrage was achieved in 1928. The leading commentators of the period from 1780 to 1920 all accepted the basic premisse that the ‘poorest hee’ (and for
Condorcet
and J. S.
Mill
the poorest she) had as good a right to a vote as the richest, although many of them were concerned about the ‘
tyranny
of the majority’ (see 4 below) and Mill proposed weighting votes in favour of the richer and the better-educated. ( See also
Madison
;
Tocqueville
.)
Another strand of democratic thought argues from equal competence rather than equal rights. This revives Aristotle's feast. Democrats who see politics as a matter of judgment rather than opinion (including
Rousseau
and
Condorcet
) argue that, other things being equal, the more people who are involved in arriving at a decision the more likely the decision is to be correct. Condorcet formalized this in his
jury
theorem
, which states that, providing a large enough majority is required, a large number of only moderately competent people can be relied on to take the right decision.
(3) 
Direct v. representative democracy
. Athenian democracy was direct. All citizens were expected to participate, and the attendance at the sovereign Assembly may have been as high as 6,000. When decision-taking bodies had to be smaller, their members were selected by lot rather than by election. Every citizen of Athens had a reasonably high probability of being chief executive for a day.
When democracy was reinvented in the eighteenth century, every system was indirect: voters elected representatives who took decisions for which they were answerable only at the next election. Rousseau argued that this was no democracy (‘The people of England think they are free. They are gravely mistaken. They are free only during the election of Members of Parliament’), but was a lone voice. Interest in direct democracy revived in the 1890s when the
referendum
became more popular, and to a greater extent in the 1960s, when many people especially on the
New Left
revived Rousseau's criticism of representation. Modern communications and computers have removed many of the technical obstacles to direct democracy, but it is not popular either among politicians (whose jobs it imperils) or among political philosophers (the majority of whom accept Schumpeter's argument that direct democracy is incompatible with responsible government).
(4) 
Is democracy merely majority rule or are other features necessarily part of the definition?
Most of the classical theorists of democracy were liberals; and they all saw a tension between democracy and liberty. If the majority voted to invade the minority's rights, this could be tyrannical. Therefore Madison proposed the divisions of powers, both among branches of government and between levels of government, that are a feature of the US Constitution; and Mill proposed to weight the votes of the more educated. Although Madison's scheme protects only some groups from majority tyranny (until 1954 it did nothing for black people in Southern states), the Madisonian principle has been accepted by Schumpeter and many other modern theorists of democracy. Schumpeter's opponents argue that he ‘posed a false dilemma’ because the persecution of minorities ‘cannot be squared with democratic procedure’. This suggestion leaves undetermined the many cases in the world where majorities vote to persecute minorities: not only are places like Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and the West Bank not democracies, but they would not be democracies whichever faction controlled them. It is probably better to restrict ‘democracy’ narrowly to majority rule, and treat toleration, entrenchment of rights, and so on as preconditions for democracy but not as constitutive of democracy itself.