If you want to see a man running very quickly over thin ice, follow this link and watch Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg present the Coalition’s Draft Bill and White Paper on House of Lords reform.

Of course, Mr Clegg is not helped by the fact that hardly anyone thinks an 80 per cent elected, 20 per cent appointed, 300 member senate is a good idea. Conservative backbenchers jeered, intervened and objected. Conscientious Liberal Democrats gently probed the prospective constitutional pitfalls. And, in the mode of the Alternative Vote referendum, even Mr Clegg opposed his own policy: he, along with the Labour front bench, would prefer a fully elected House.

But then pretty much everything about this debate is strange. For David Cameron, House of Lords reform is a “third term priority”. Yet he seems prepared to spend substantial political capital on it in the second year of his first term.

Mr Clegg began his speech by stating the principle, apparently non-negotiable, that “in a modern democracy, people must choose their representatives”. Yet no-one seems to have told him that ‘people’ find having elected members in the House of Lords, or the Senate which may replace it, low down their list of priorities when it comes to the upper house. Indeed, research shows that they value effective function over elected form.

Even more ironic is the fact that the Government feels bound to ensure that the reformed Upper House, though ‘more democratic’ than the current House of Lords, is not ‘too democratic’ (i.e., not ‘more democratic’ than the House of Commons) lest senators be perceived to carry a greater mandate than MPs. So they would be elected, probably under the Single Transferrable Vote system, but only for a single term of fifteen years, never to return to the ballot box. And all this is in the hope that the new House would accept its subsidiary role, even though there is no existing constitutional framework through which that principle could be enforced.

At the heart of this is a conceptual confusion, which is that democracy is simply that which emerges when people vote, rather than the character of a political culture as a whole. Thus, the proposals seek to build the reformed House over the fault line which lies between formation (i.e., election and selection) and function (revising and advising). Implausibly, it seeks to move the former radically, while insisting that the latter will be completely unchanged. To use a biblical phrase, it will be the pouring of new wine into old wineskins.

Democracy is a more textured thing than the mere act of voting. It requires the rule of law, a broad and non-discriminatory system of suffrage, free speech and a free press, the guarantee of basic civil rights, the propensity of people to engage with political institutions between elections, the openness of those institutions to that engagement, and a vibrant civil society. We know this because elected politicians can easily destroy their mandate by undermining this broader democratic culture. Likewise, it is an insight of Christian theological tradition that, no matter how people achieve power, what they do with power when they achieve it, remains a matter of supreme significance.

There’s no doubt that the House of Lords needs to be reformed, but concepts should be deployed more carefully. Democracy is not a matter of amounts but of kind, best judged in the context of a system as a whole.

Paul Bickley is Senior Researcher at Theos.