Plural voting and the qualified franchise: should the educated have more votes than the uneducated?

John Stuart Mill, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Universal suffrage is required by justice — every adult affected by the laws should have a voice in making them — but pure equality of votes is not. The educated should weigh more than the uneducated, not as a permanent class privilege but as a recognition that political competence varies and that good government requires informed judgment.1

The vote is not a personal right alone but a public trust; weighting it by educational attainment (open in principle to all) reduces the risk that representative government collapses into class legislation by an uninformed majority. Combined with proportional representation (Hare's scheme, which Mill strongly endorsed), plural voting makes representative government work without sacrificing universal participation.2345

Sources

  1. No arrangement of the suffrage, therefore, can be permanently satisfactory, in which any person or class is peremptorily excluded; in which the electoral privilege is not open to all persons of full age who desire to obtain it.
    Of the Extension of the Suffrage, p. 128
  2. Mr. Lorimer thinks it neither just nor practicable, finally to exclude any one from a vote; and he would apparently have little objection even to immediate universal suffrage. But it must not be equal suffrage. Mr.
    RECENT WRITERS ON REFORM 1859, p. 36
  3. All these suggestions are open to much discussion in the detail, and to objections which it is of no use to anticipate. The time is not come for giving to such plans a practical shape, nor should I wish to be bound by the particular proposals which I have made.
    Of the Extension of the Suffrage, pp. 132–133
  4. But it is a very different thing when the question is between, not some influence and none, but a greater influence and a less. Between something and nothing, the ratio, morally and mathematically, is infinite; between less and more, it is finite and appreciable.
    RECENT WRITERS ON REFORM 1859, pp. 36–37
  5. Democracy is not favourable to the reverential spirit. That it destroys reverence for mere social position must be counted among the good, not the bad part of its influences; though by doing this it closes the principal school of reverence (as to merely human relations) which exists in society.
    Ought Pledges to be Required from Members of Parliament?, p. 156

Where the argument is made

  • Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Chapter 8 (Of the Extension of the Suffrage)
  • Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859)
  • Recent Writers on Reform (1859)

How the argument was received

Modern democratic theorists almost universally reject plural voting as inconsistent with the equal political standing that grounds democratic legitimacy. The standard reading treats the position as Mill's concession to Victorian class anxiety. Sympathetic readers (Thompson, Urbinati) emphasize that Mill's qualification is in principle open to all and is paired with universal suffrage and proportional representation — Mill is qualifying democracy, not rejecting it.