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\u201cRepresentative government, vulgo <\/em>democracy\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Norberto Bobbio<\/p>\n\n\n\n From a descriptive point of view, the only one I consider in the following remarks, the expression \u201crepresentative democracy\u201d mostly refers to the political regimes currently predominant in Western societies \u2013 a collective expression including also Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The term democracy, originating from the ancient Greek word \u03b4\u03b7\u03bc\u03bf\u03ba\u03c1\u03b1\u03c4\u03af\u03b1, denoted until the 19th<\/sup> century in European political discourse, based on Aristotle’s classification of political regimes, a flawed government, the rule of the demos<\/em>, 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<\/sup> century when in many Western political systems, half of the population, until then excluded, accessed the right to vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The term democracy is nowadays no more than an empty slogan: “If there is one word that is omnipresent in the political vocabulary \u2026 [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<\/em>“[1]<\/a>. Ludmilla Lorrain, in her recent book La Repr\u00e9sentation contre la d\u00e9mocratie<\/em> (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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n But what is a representative government?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We need to distinguish between les mots et les choses<\/em>, I mean words from institutions. Representation is a tricky term (for the variety of its meanings H. Pitkin\u2019s classical book [2]<\/a> is still now essential). This word was accidentally entered into the political language thanks to Samuel Sorbi\u00e8re, the French translator of Thomas Hobbes\u2019 De Cive <\/em>[3]<\/strong><\/a>. 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<\/em>) via free, competitive, repeated elections. So, in our political language, there is a natural connection between the terms of authority \u2013 authorization \u2013 elections \u2013 representation, and democracy. This is typically the case of the UK\u2019s political regime, notably from 1911, when the absolute veto power of the Lords was abolished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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]<\/a>. It is unclear what the representative represents [5]<\/a>, 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 fond\u00e9s de pouvoir<\/em> \u2013 people authorized to exercise political authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201ccontrol\u201d by the voters on their authorized authority. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em> \u2013 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]<\/a> At the origin, the invention of the elective accountable oligarchy was supposed to be able to select an elite (see B. Manin\u2019s book on The Principles of representative government<\/em>, CUP, 1997) \u2013 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<\/sup> and 20th<\/sup> centuries, the government based on political competitive elections took different forms, from the suffrage censitaire <\/em>\u2013 meaning limited \u2013 to the Parteienstaat<\/em> and, more recently, to the regime dominated by the opinion polls.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we speak of representative democracy from a descriptive point of view \u2013 which, I repeat, is exclusively my perspective here \u2013we mean (I summarize my claims) a government where binding collective decisions are made by a small number of people authorized pro tempore<\/em> 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 \u2013 the Constitutional Courts. That institution works as counterpower and establishes a new form of the separation of power vis-\u00e0-vis the classical version: the one that Montesquieu presents in his Spirit of Laws <\/em>andthat presupposed the Houses of the Lords which was incompatible with the principle of citizens\u2019 equal political rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s bird, wakes up only at sunset!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pasquale Pasquino<\/em><\/strong> is Emeritus Directeur de recherche at the CNRS Paris and Professor in Law and Politics at New York University.<\/strong><\/em> This paper was presented at the workshop on Democracy and Representation Challenges<\/em>, hosted by the University of Exeter and the Observatory for Representation<\/a>, 3-4 October 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [1]<\/a> \u00ab S\u2019il est un mot omnipr\u00e9sent du vocabulaire politique en France, c\u2019est bien celui de d\u00e9mocratie. Tout le monde aime la d\u00e9mocratie, chacun est plus d\u00e9mocrate que l\u2019autre, les condamnations pour esprit anti-d\u00e9mocratique sillonnent les discours et les r\u00e9seaux sociaux \u00bb Luc Rouban, Les Fran\u00e7ais pr\u00e9f\u00e8rent le bien-\u00eatre \u00e0 la d\u00e9mocratie<\/em> (Sciences Po. CEVIPOF, Ao\u00fbt 2024). See also Dario Castiglione and Mark E. Warren, \u201cA New Ecology of Democratic Representation? Eight Theoretical Issues\u201d (2013) 2 Rivista di Storia delle Idee<\/em>, pp. 155-172 at 157) \u201cAs 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\u201d. Claiming as Dario Castiglione does (above p. 158) that democracy implies that \u201cevery individual potentially affected by a decision should have an equal opportunity to influence the decision\u201d seems to me highly unrealistic is it is not reduced to an equal vote in the election (or referendums) \u2013 among other reasons for the points stressed at the beginning of his article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [2]<\/a> The concept of representation<\/em>, Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1967.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [3]<\/a> See my contribution to: Manuela Albertone and Dario Castiglione (eds), La Repr\u00e9sentation politique. Anthologie<\/a>,<\/em> Classiques Garnier, 2018).<\/p>\n\n\n\n [4]<\/a> I developed this point in an article on \u201cPopular Sovereignty,\u201d published in Sovereignty in action<\/em>, ed. by Bas Leijssenaar and Neil Walker, CUP, 2019, p. 144-158.What is represented is unclear. See for instance Dario Castiglione \u201cpeople, interests, values, characteristics, etc.\u201d, Dario Castiglione and Mark E. Warren, \u201cA New Ecology of Democratic Representation? Eight Theoretical Issues\u201d (2013) 2 Rivista di Storia delle Idee<\/em>, pp. 155-172, 161<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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