The course is devoted to the cultures of voting from classical antiquity to nowadays. If during the last 250 years the vote is become the main tool, for every citizen, to participate in the political life of a national community, it represents a far more ancient presence in the institutional panorama. The course presents the various uses to which it has been directed throughout the centuries, aiming at better understanding the limits and the future of our electoral democracies.
The students who attend the class will prepare their exam by the means of the materials distributed during the lessons. To those who cannot attend the course it is requested the study of both these textes:
a. Bernard Manin, Principi del governo rappresentativo, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2010;
b. Raffaele Romanelli, Electoral systems and social structures: a comparative perspective, in How did they become voters?, edited bY R.Romanelli, London, Kluwer Law, 1998, pp. 1-36
Learning Objectives
Making the student able to face and to critically discuss a long-term institutional subject, through an active participation to the class.
Prerequisites
General preparation in modern history and political science.
Teaching Methods
The class is conducted in seminar form. Didactic materials will be distributed during the semester.
Type of Assessment
The test at the end of the lessons will be in oral form.
Course program
Electoral cultures from classical antiquity to the post-modern era
In today’s world, the electoral vote is the indispensable tool to legitimize political rulers. But the the practice of designative voting does not constitute a peculiar mark of the modern age. The electoral gesture has a long history behind it, whose knowledge is an important acquisition for every political scientist.
In this framework, the course's purposes are the following:
a. show how electoral practices were widespread well before modernity, but in contexts where they performed functions very different from those of our present ;
b. give account of the manner in which the advent of modern electoral practice was realized in relation to the emergence of the representative constitutions of the Eighteenth-Nineteenth century;
c. (try to) set a criticism to the contemporary electoral vote, in a context marked by the crisis of the national-representative dimension of politics.
Part I. An archeology of the electoral vote
1. The vote in the ancient city
- Ancient democracy in Greece; the primacy of the lottery
- In Republican Rome: mixed government and elections without representation
2. The vote in the Early Middle Ages (VI-X cent.): loss and slow regaining of the majority principle
3. The Late Middle Ages: the endo-city elections.
- The electoral systems of the medieval cities and their significance; the emergence of the concept of representation and its use in relation to the internal selective procedures in use in the urban world
4. The Late Middle Ages: the elections to the Proto-Parliaments
- The birth of the first cetual parliaments and the electoral practices associated with them. In particular, the selective procedures for the members of the English Parliament (XIII-XVI centuries); the elections to the French General States (from the first fourteenth century to 1614).
5. Electoral practices and absolute state (continental Europe, sec. XVII-XVIII).
- Widespread survival of infra-corporate electoral practices throughout the old regime. An European-level catalogue of these practices.
Module II. - The new meaning of electoral voting in modern Europe
6. Birth and consolidation of the modern vote in 18th-century England (from James I to Edmund Burke).
8. Political vote and birth of national representation during the French Revolution (the debate of the 1770s-1980s; the voting systems of revolutionary constitutions; the temporary failure of French electoral democracy).
9. In nineteenth-century liberalism: the laborious conquest of the individual vote at the national level
- England and France, two opposite paths of electoral modernization.
- The Italian path from 1814 to 1914 as a further case of consolidation of electoral citizenship.
10. Twentieth-century fractures: from parliamentarianism notabiliary to party democracy
11. The further fracture of the end of the 20th century: from 'party democracy' to 'audience democracy'
- The voter from militant to costumer
- Beyond public democracy: end of elections?