‘The Origins of Majority Rule’
William Bulman – Associate Professor of History and Global Studies (Lehigh University)
When: 28 April 2017 2:00-3:30
Where: University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.
The majority vote is the foundational element of representative assemblies, party politics, and democracy in today’s world. While nearly all academics and the public at large have come to see this way of making decisions as natural to the political realm, it is actually an historical accident. The prevalence of the majority vote today is due to the fact that it suddenly became the practice of the English House of Commons and the North American colonial assemblies when the Britain’s empire first took shape. Yet this process has never been narrated or explained. Professor Bulman’s talk will introduce us to his current project, which aims to do both.
