Rousseau on Voting and Electoral Laws

This chapter focuses on Rousseau’s underappreciated treatment of voting and electoral laws. It argues that these are a worthy and essential part of the Social Contract – a matter of political life and death. First, Rousseau sees universal suffrage as necessary for establishing a political community, for selecting its form of government, and for discerning the general will. Second, electoral reforms are the primary mechanism for reducing the speed of political decline and “death.” The chapter brings together Rousseau’s remarks on the design of electoral districts, the manner of voting (i.e. timing, place, secret vs. open, order of casting ballots, thresholds), and the aggregation of votes, drawing primarily on his examples of flawed but enduring republics such as Rome, Sparta, Venice, and Geneva. Instead of reconstructing Rousseau’s blueprint for the perfectly just republic, the chapter shows how frequent and appropriate electoral reforms allowed these republics to outlive even their less corrupt contemporaries.