Posted by ccld201
15 October 2024“Representative government, vulgo democracy”
Norberto Bobbio
From a descriptive point of view, the only one I consider in the following remarks, the expression “representative democracy” mostly refers to the political regimes currently predominant in Western societies – a collective expression including also Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The term democracy, originating from the ancient Greek word δημοκρατία, denoted until the 19th century in European political discourse, based on Aristotle’s classification of political regimes, a flawed government, the rule of the demos, a term meaning the lower social classes, or the mob rule. Only in the 19th century did the term (absent in classical Latin vocabulary) gain a positive connotation and ended up meaning a government based on universal suffrage – universal indeed only in the 20th century when in many Western political systems, half of the population, until then excluded, accessed the right to vote.
The term democracy is nowadays no more than an empty slogan: “If there is one word that is omnipresent in the political vocabulary … [in France,] it is democracy. Everyone loves democracy, everyone is more democratic than the other, disapprovals for anti-democratic spirit appear constantly in speeches and social networks“[1]. Ludmilla Lorrain, in her recent book La Représentation contre la démocratie (Classiques Garnier, 2o24, p.11), reminds us that the term is used in the official language to designate, paradoxically, only three contemporary states: Nord Korea, Algeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo (sic).
But what is a representative government?
We need to distinguish between les mots et les choses, I mean words from institutions. Representation is a tricky term (for the variety of its meanings H. Pitkin’s classical book [2] is still now essential). This word was accidentally entered into the political language thanks to Samuel Sorbière, the French translator of Thomas Hobbes’ De Cive [3]. From the institutional and legal point of view, representatives are people making decisions that bind the citizens, and they have this power because they are authorized by voters (pro tempore) via free, competitive, repeated elections. So, in our political language, there is a natural connection between the terms of authority – authorization – elections – representation, and democracy. This is typically the case of the UK’s political regime, notably from 1911, when the absolute veto power of the Lords was abolished.
To claim that the representatives, more exactly their majority, represent something like the popular will or the popular sovereignty is a rhetorical fiction based on political mythology [4]. It is unclear what the representative represents [5], and it would be much better to stop using that term and speak of Members of Parliament or with an old French expression that I like, of fondés de pouvoir – people authorized to exercise political authority.
Now, in what we call representative government, the people deciding for us have no tenure. Our political representatives are indeed accountable to the voters. The representative government, notably in its British version, I mean parliamentarism, is nowadays dominant on the European continent and is based on a two-step mechanism of accountability (the same as the absence of tenure). The citizens, on the basis of the existing electoral laws, can refuse to renew the mandate of elected officials. And the government (the executive) is constantly accountable to the parliament. Considering the accountability of the political representatives, it is important to focus on the function of “control” by the voters on their authorized authority.
To begin with, this control is a sovereign function because it is arbitrary. The voters do not need to justify their individual decisions – each one can say, like the absolute king: stat pro ratione voluntas – meaning I do not need to justify my decision because it is my power to decide according to my will. Can we make sense of such a procedure based on aggregating arbitrary individual decisions? (Consider, moreover, that the algorithm aggregating individual preferences, I mean the electoral system, plays a crucial role. If it is modified, the majority inside the representative assembly changes, which means that the parliamentary majority as such is not an expression of a given popular majority but is shaped by the electoral law and the party system!) [6] At the origin, the invention of the elective accountable oligarchy was supposed to be able to select an elite (see B. Manin’s book on The Principles of representative government, CUP, 1997) – which was both a hope and the only way to give legitimacy to the new political power, the enemy of colonialism, in the US and of absolute monarchy, in France. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the government based on political competitive elections took different forms, from the suffrage censitaire – meaning limited – to the Parteienstaat and, more recently, to the regime dominated by the opinion polls.
When we speak of representative democracy from a descriptive point of view – which, I repeat, is exclusively my perspective here –we mean (I summarize my claims) a government where binding collective decisions are made by a small number of people authorized pro tempore by the citizen-voters through competitive, free, repeated elections. This is essentially what Joseph Schumpeter wrote in 1942. On the European continent, this regime, known as the Westminster model, was modified after WW2, introducing in the new constitutions a state organ – the Constitutional Courts. That institution works as counterpower and establishes a new form of the separation of power vis-à-vis the classical version: the one that Montesquieu presents in his Spirit of Laws andthat presupposed the Houses of the Lords which was incompatible with the principle of citizens’ equal political rights.
My conclusion is that we (most European political-constitutional systems) need a new theory of our government that makes sense of the existence and the function of a state organ that produces binding decisions without being elected and electorally accountable to the citizens. As you know, and as Hegel said, theory like Minerva’s bird, wakes up only at sunset!
Pasquale Pasquino is Emeritus Directeur de recherche at the CNRS Paris and Professor in Law and Politics at New York University. This paper was presented at the workshop on Democracy and Representation Challenges, hosted by the University of Exeter and the Observatory for Representation, 3-4 October 2024.
[1] « S’il est un mot omniprésent du vocabulaire politique en France, c’est bien celui de démocratie. Tout le monde aime la démocratie, chacun est plus démocrate que l’autre, les condamnations pour esprit anti-démocratique sillonnent les discours et les réseaux sociaux » Luc Rouban, Les Français préfèrent le bien-être à la démocratie (Sciences Po. CEVIPOF, Août 2024). See also Dario Castiglione and Mark E. Warren, “A New Ecology of Democratic Representation? Eight Theoretical Issues” (2013) 2 Rivista di Storia delle Idee, pp. 155-172 at 157) “As with all things we care about, democracy suffers from an excess of meaning, written into the concept by a long history of usage, and further complicated today by its identification with so many good things, which, like all political concepts, is stretched even further by opportunistic usages”. Claiming as Dario Castiglione does (above p. 158) that democracy implies that “every individual potentially affected by a decision should have an equal opportunity to influence the decision” seems to me highly unrealistic is it is not reduced to an equal vote in the election (or referendums) – among other reasons for the points stressed at the beginning of his article.
[2] The concept of representation, Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1967.
[3] See my contribution to: Manuela Albertone and Dario Castiglione (eds), La Représentation politique. Anthologie, Classiques Garnier, 2018).
[4] I developed this point in an article on “Popular Sovereignty,” published in Sovereignty in action, ed. by Bas Leijssenaar and Neil Walker, CUP, 2019, p. 144-158.What is represented is unclear. See for instance Dario Castiglione “people, interests, values, characteristics, etc.”, Dario Castiglione and Mark E. Warren, “A New Ecology of Democratic Representation? Eight Theoretical Issues” (2013) 2 Rivista di Storia delle Idee, pp. 155-172, 161
[5] I cannot discuss here the different possible meanings of representation that Pitkin presented in her book. I want to stress only that in the systems we call representative democracy, whatever the meaning we attribute to the term representation, on one side, the governing elite must be authorized via competitive elections and be accountable, and on the other, the citizens ought to obey its decisions.
In his article (Dario Castiglione and Mark E. Warren, “A New Ecology of Democratic Representation? Eight Theoretical Issues”, Rivista di Storia delle Idee 2:2 (2013) pp. 155-172, p. 160) Dario Castiglione writes: “Political representation involves a representative X being held accountable to constituency Y with regard to good Z.” What is Z? Voters have, in general, different Z.
[6] “But the principal itself needs to be constructed and identified in relation to the larger political community to which the principal may belong” (Dario Castiglione, above, p. 161)