Book: Catechism of Parliamentary Reform

Overview
Jeremy Bentham’s 1817 Catechism of Parliamentary Reform is a utilitarian blueprint for rebuilding the British representative system so that it serves the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Framed as a catechism of questions and answers, it compresses a sweeping diagnosis of corruption and oligarchic control into a set of practical remedies, insisting that institutional design, not appeals to virtue, determines whether rulers are accountable to the public or to their own separate and sinister interests.

Diagnosis of the Existing System
Bentham portrays the unreformed House of Commons as captured by boroughmongers, patrons, and the Crown’s patronage networks. Rotten boroughs, property qualifications, open voting, long parliaments, and unpaid membership combine to make legislators dependent on wealthy proprietors rather than on constituents. Public money is wasted in sinecures and pensions, offices are used to buy votes, and debate is distorted by interests hostile to the public. Against the doctrine of virtual representation, he argues that dependence on patrons cannot substitute for genuine accountability to the many.

Principle and Aim
The guiding principle is utility: every rule of representation must be evaluated by its tendency to promote the greatest happiness. Accountability is the mechanism that connects rulers’ interest to the public interest. A parliament is good, not when it is aristocratic, dignified, or ancient, but when incentives bind members to the will and welfare of their constituents. Reform must therefore minimize the influence of narrow, sinister interests and maximize the efficacy of the public opinion tribunal.

Key Remedies
Bentham advocates frequent elections so that constituents retain a real power of censure. Annual parliaments are his boldest instrument: short terms keep representatives in a state of habitual responsibility, counteracting the moral laxity that long tenure breeds. He urges the secret ballot to break the two main engines of corruption, bribery and intimidation, by severing the observable link between inducement and vote. He supports greatly extended suffrage, making the electoral body large enough that no patron can purchase majorities, and he favors near-equal electoral districts to extinguish rotten boroughs.

Payment of members is central: without salaries, only the independently wealthy can serve, and the House becomes a club of proprietors. By compensating representatives for time and travel, Parliament opens to talent and binds attendance to duty. He also presses for publicity of proceedings, strict attendance rules, and the exclusion or careful control of placemen and pensioners whose dependence on the executive compromises legislative independence.

Replies to Objections
To the fear that frequent elections breed instability, Bentham answers that dismissal is a remedy against misrule, not a cause of it, and re-election preserves continuity where it is merited. To the complaint that the people are ignorant, he replies that rulers kept ignorant by secrecy and dependence on patrons are more dangerous than voters educated by publicity and practice. To claims that the ballot is cowardly or un-English, he counters that secrecy in voting is a security against oppression, like the secrecy of the jury room. As for expense, he argues that costs will fall when bribery loses its purchase and contests are decided by opinion rather than by purses.

Method and Tone
The catechism format makes each reform proposition stand trial before reason. Questions elicit precise definitions, distinctions, and consequences; answers are terse, empirical, and oriented to institutional effects rather than to tradition. The rhetoric is unsparing toward oligarchic pretensions, yet consistently practical.

Significance
The program anticipates several later democratic advances, vote by ballot, paid members, expanded suffrage, more equal districts, greater publicity, and arms them with a coherent theory of accountability. Its enduring contribution is the insistence that the architecture of incentives, not the pedigree of persons, is the soul of representative government.