In general, the way that a constituency is constructed effects what common interests voters in that constituency have.

Pretty much every Western liberal democracy evolved out of only giving (white, male) land-owners the vote. As such, it’s hardly surprising that they group constituencies based on residency in a rough geographical region: land-owners within an area have common interests together.

Syndicalists, by contrast, propose a system of union-based democracy: they wish for workplaces to elect representatives to industries, and for industries to elect representatives to society/the economy/the state. This is based on the idea that those who work within the same workplace have common interests.

Bookchinites group people into neighborhood-sized voting groups, organize the groups by city, and so on vaguely upwards. This much smaller grouping differs from western liberal democracy, despite superficially resembling it — instead of assuming that common interests come from ownership of land in the same geographic area, Bookchinites assume that common interests are found between people who live close enough together to meet face-to-face on a regular basis.

Corporatists, in the old fascist sense, believe that people within functional groupings of society (often, but not always, those who work in the same industry) should form constituencies together — as was practiced in fascist Italy and Portugal, and as is practiced in modern Hong Kong and Macau. This differs from the syndicalist model both by organizational layering and by the inclusion of the owning class.

These all do the same thing: they choose a way that people can have a common interest, and group such people’s voices together. By grouping their voices (and power) together, you make them express that sort of common interest, and not a different one.

If you group things geographically, large-scale economic and infrastructural interests will be brought to the fore, because such people will have that in common — and the interests of minority groups will mostly be suppressed, because they will be minorities.

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If you group interests by workplace and by industry, the interests that people have outside of work — including non-workers (unless there are wages for housework, a pensioner’s union, a union for the disabled, etc, etc) — will be ignored.

If you group interests by neighborhood, the boundaries of a neighborhood — always arbitrary — will begin to take on almost occult significance in the minds of those who live there, and any interests that straddle neighborhood lines may be suppressed.

Photo by Liz Sanchez-Vegas on Unsplash

Constituency construction always causes people to think and act in ways that confirm the assumptions underlying that construction. Such a constituency choice always inevitably comes to seem natural and without alternative: a given constituency always makes ancient political choice look like eternal human nature.