Right to Universal, Plural and Secret Vote: On the Lib-eral and Conservative Paradoxes of Mill's 'Elitist' De-mocracy

Abstract

During the era witnessing the development of representative democ-racy, Mill defended the right to “universal suffrage” and believed that individu-als should not be deprived of their political rights. This can be seen as a reflec-tion of his modern, liberal, and democratic attitude. However, by defining cer-tain mandatory prerequisites to have such voting right and adding that taking votes of each individual with an equal impact would be impossible, Mill also showed a contradicting position against his liberal and democratic attitude. The paradoxical limitations brought by Mill to the universal suffrage right can be interpreted as his presentation of an elitist democracy theory. In this paper, the reasons behind Mill’s elitist democracy approach are discussed in details and the nature of his theory of democracy is examined.