Stuff:Electoral campaign

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This page documents the modern, mass electoral campaign as though it were a generic design for broad-based decision guidance.1

Notes

  1. ^ Though actually it is not, because it is insufficiently participatory to be classed as broad-based system guidance. See Stuff:Designs for broad-based decision guidance#Interpolations.
  2. ^ a b Max Weber. 1919. Politics as a vocation. In From Max Weber: essays in sociology. Oxford University Press, New York. 1946. pp. 77-128. http://media.pfeiffer.edu/lridener/dss/Weber/polvoc.html
  3. ^ a b The three reform acts in Britain (1832, 1867, 1884) expanded voting rights to roughly 14%, 40% and 60% of adult males. See Getting the vote, and Reform Act 1884.
  4. ^ Frank O'Gorman. 2007. The secret ballot in nineteenth century Britain. In Cultures of voting: the hidden history of the secret ballot. pp. 16-42.
  5. ^ a b Dating from Gladstone's win over Disraeli in the Midlothian campaign. The first campaign to employ the newly developed caucus system on a national scale, it centralized control of the Liberal party under Gladstone's leadership. "The occasion for this development was the democratization of the franchise."2 The Second Reform Act of 1867 had expanded the electorate to roughly 40% of adult males.3 "In order to win the masses it became necessary to call into being a tremendous apparatus of apparently democratic associations. An electoral association had to be formed in every city district to help keep the organization incessantly in motion and to bureaucratize everything rigidly."2 Meanwhile the Secret Ballot Act of 1872 was shifting power from the local notables to the centralized bureacracy.4 Before leaving office Gladstone's government would pass the Third Reform Act, expanding the franchise to roughly 60% of adult males.3
  6. ^ A mass electoral system is guided.5
  7. ^ a b c Nothing prevents the campaign running interminably for as long as the party exists. Therefore we recognize the party as the essential candidate on offer to the electorate. The personal candidates endorsed by the party may be important to the success of the campaign, but they are never essential to the campaign itself, or to the party. The campaigners offer the party-as-candidate to the electorate as a single choice (1), holding no alternatives in reserve. But it is a mutable candidate because it is centrally controlled.
  8. ^ a b As for the electoral system that is guided.
  9. ^ It is a traditional practice, long established.