meaning of political representation

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The concept of representation central in contemporary interpretations of democracy is in many ways dependent also from the juridical, artistic and religious languages, and the meanings it assumes in this field. This polysemic character has animated the history of political thought, where the concept of representation has been viewed in different and loosely related ways. An important turning point for the contemporary development of the scientific (and political) debate has been the formation of a consensus around the meaning of representation within the context of the neo-Schumpeterian view of democracy, in which the adjective representative referred to the influence of citizens’ opinion on policy-making. The seminal work of Hanna Pitkin shifted the focus on the substantive character of political representation conceived as acting in the interests of the represented. Both approaches were built around the concept of responsiveness, and coexisted as standard references for several decades. Around the end of the twentieth century the concept of representation and the related practices were object of a renewed attention both in response to the progress of the academic debate and as a consequence of the changing political reality.

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representation

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• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Political Representation

representation , in government, method or process of enabling the citizenry, or some of them, to participate in the shaping of legislation and governmental policy through deputies chosen by them.

The rationale of representative government is that in large modern countries the people cannot all assemble, as they did in the marketplace of democratic Athens or Rome; and if, therefore, the people are to participate in government, they must select and elect a small number from among themselves to represent and to act for them. In modern polities with large populations, representation in some form is necessary if government is to be based on the consent of the governed. Elected representatives are also less likely to reflect the transitory political passions of the moment than are the people, and thus they provide greater stability and continuity of policy to a government.

Through the course of long historical evolution, various methods and devices have been developed in attempts to solve the many problems that have arisen in connection with representation. These problems include the qualifications of electors ( see suffrage ); the apportionment of constituencies ( see constituency ); apportionment (electoral); the basis of election ( see plurality system ; proportional representation ); methods of nominating candidates ( see primary election ); and means of ascertaining the wishes of electors ( see referendum and initiative ). Because of the need to formulate systematically the demands of citizens, political parties have come to act as intermediaries between the citizens and their representatives. Political debate along party lines has thus become a characteristic feature of most representative systems of government.

How answerable a representative should be to his electors is an issue that has long been debated. The basic alternatives are that the representatives of the people act as delegates carrying out instructions or that they are free agents, acting in accordance with their best ability and understanding.

The representative principle is not limited to government: it is applied in electing executive officers of large social organizations such as trade unions and professional associations.

Representation: Political

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Introduction

Political representation has a long history in political and social theory. It refers to the notion that elected officials speak for citizens in parliaments and across other political spaces. Liberal democracies around the world are facing number of challenges that make it important to revisit the concept of political representation. These challenges include declining voter turnout, the underrepresentation of oppressed social groups among members of parliaments (including women, ethnocultural/racial minorities, disabled and LGBTQ people), and the lack of congruence between the percentage of the popular vote and the number of seats, at the expense of small political parties. These phenomena have produced a so-called crisis of political representation: citizens no longer believe that political elites are able to, or desire to, represent their views and interests in political spaces, and as a result, there has emerged a general climate of distrust and a corresponding...

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Olivia Kamgain

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Kamgain, O. (2023). Representation: Political. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_1027-1

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Raisons politiques 2013/2 no 50, the meanings of political representation: uses and misuses of a notion.

• By Yves Sintomer

Translated from the French by JPD Systems

Pages 13 to 34

Journal article

• [1] Pierre Bourdieu, 2001, “La délégation et le fétichisme politique,” in Langage et pouvoir symbolique (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 260.
• [2] This viewpoint was put forward at various symposia, retreats, and conferences. I would like to thank everyone who contributed to lessen its imperfections with their critiques and suggestions and who provided additional arguments. I am particularly indebted to Samuel Hayat for his comments on a first draft of the paper.
• [3] Walter Gallie, “Art as an Essentially Contested Concept,” The Philosophical Quarterly  6, no. 23 (April 1956): 97-114.
• [4] Carlo Ginzburg, “Représentation: le mot, l’idée, la chose,” Annales ESC 6 (November-December 1991): 1219. Reprinted in À distance: Neuf essais sur le point de vue en histoire. (Paris: Gallimard, 2001).
• [5] Hanna F. Pitkin. The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967/1972), 8-10.
• [6] Hasso Hofmann, “Le concept de représentation: Un problème allemand?” Raisons Politiques 50, no. 2 (2013): 79-96.
• [7] Hofmann, “Le concept.” Hasso Hofmann, Repräsentation: Studien zur Wort – und Begriffsgeschichte von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974/2003. See also Adalbert Podlech, “Repräsentation,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland , vol. 5, edited by Reinhart Koselleck, Werner Conze, and Otto Brunner, 509-47. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 2004, (Fr. tr. in Paula Diehl, Yves Sintomer and Samuel Hayat, eds., La représentation politique/Die politische Repräsentation. Trivium Revue Franco-Allemande de Sciences Humaines et Sociales , May 2014).
• [8] Marcel Gauchet. La révolution des pouvoirs: La souveraineté, le peuple, et la représentation, 1789-1799 . (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 48.
• [9] Samuel Hayat, L’invention de la République: Participation et représentation autour de la révolution de 1848. (Paris: Seuil, 2014).
• [10] Michael Saward, The Representative Claim. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
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• [12] Pierre Bourdieu, “La représentation politique.” In Langage et pouvoir , 213-58.
• [13] Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire de la langue française (1690), cited in Roger Chartier, “Le sens de la représentation,” in La vie des idées, 2, (2013). Accessed from: http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Le-sens-de-la-representation.html . See also the Spanish dictionary cited by Roger Chartier in the same paper, Diccionario de Autoridades (early eighteenth century). See also Roger Chartier, “Le monde comme representation,” Annales ESC 6 (November-December 1989): 1505-20; “Pouvoirs et limites de la représentation: Marin, le discours, et l’image.” Annales HSS (March-April 1994): 407-18. Both papers were reprinted in the collection Au bord de la falaise. (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009), 75-98, and 203-24.
• [14] Louis Marin, Le portrait du roi. (Paris: Minuit, 1981); Opacité de la peinture: Essais sur la représentation au quattrocento (Paris: Usher, 1989); Les pouvoirs de l’image . (Paris: Seuil, 1993).
• [15] Hofmann, Repräsentation, 46.
• [16] Carlo Ginzburg, “Idoles et images.” In À distance: Neuf essais . The same thing occurred in popular culture with the relics of saints (Carlo Ginzburg, “Représentation,” 1226-8). Many centuries later, in its early days, photography provoked fear that the nearly perfect image might take with it something of the person represented (Muriel Pic, “Le devenir image de la relique à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique: Photographie, copie, et métaphore,” In Reliques modernes: Cultes et usages chrétiens des corps saints des Réformes aux Révolutions , vol. 2. ed. Philippe Boutry, Pierre-Antoine Fabre, and Dominique Julia, (Paris: EHESS, 2009), 845-61.
• [17] The second commandment says, “Ye shall not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4).
• [18] Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Figuration de invisible et catégorie psychologique du double: le colossus,” vol. 2, in Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs: Études de psychologie historique (Paris: Maspero, 1965), 70.
• [19] On the link between representation and icon in the Church, see Oleg Kharkhordin, “… et unus non solus, sed in pluribus: A Citizen as Eikon,” in Politics of the One: Concepts of the One and the Many in Contemporary Thought , ed. Artemy Magun. (London: Continuum Press, 2012), 203-20.
• [20] Gospel of John 6:54-56.
• [21] Hofmann, Repräsentation , 68.
• [22] Ginzburg, “Représentation,” 1230. Incidentally, “intransitive” representation is strongly presented in Aquinas (1224-1274) (Hofmann, Repräsentation , 77-8).
• [23] The first manifestation of Protestantism saw the rise of a specific iconoclastic movement between 1523 and 1566. See Olivier Christin, “Le roi idole? Iconoclasme protestant et pensée monarchomaque,” in Comportements, croyances, et mémoires: Europe méridionale 19 e -20 e siècles – Études offertes à Régis Bertrand , ed. Gilbert Buti and Anne Carol. (Aix: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2007), 171-82.
• [24] Reversals in meaning can come about, with the term Vorstellung being used, for example, to refer to a theatrical representation and the presentation of someone being called jemanden vorstellen .
• [25] Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, II/III, Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer, 150.
• [26] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. (London/New York: Verso, 1998).
• [27] Doris Kolesch, “Politik als Theater,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 42 (October 13, 2008): 35-40; Ronald Hitzler, “Inszenierung und Repräsentation. Bemerkungen zur Politikdarstellung in der Gegenwart,” in Figurative Politik. Zur Performanz der Macht in der modernen Gesellschaft , ed. Hans-Georg Soeffner and Dirk Tänzler. (Opladen: V.S., 2002), 35-49 (Fr. tr. in Diehl et al., La représentation politique ; Inszenierungen der Politik: Der Körper als Medium , eds. Diehl and Gertrud Koch (München: Fink, 2007); Paula Cossart and Emmanuel Taïeb, “Spectacle politique et participation: Entre médiatisation nécessaire et idéal de la citoyenneté,” Sociétés & Représentations 31 (April 2011): 137-56.
• [28] Louis Marin, Le portrait ; Doris Kolesch, Theater der Emotionen : Ästhetik und Politik zur Zeit Ludwigs XIV. (Frankfurt-am-Main: Campus, 2006).
• [29] Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays In Interpretive Anthropology (Basic Books, 1983).
• [30] Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Anchor, 1967).
• [31] Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique , 2 vol. (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1981); Max Weber, Sociologie de la domination. (Paris: La Découverte, 2013).
• [32] Bourdieu, Langage et pouvoir.
• [33] Brice Laurent, “Du laboratoire scientifique à l’ordre constitutionnel: Analyser la représentation à la suite des études sociales des sciences,” Raisons Politiques 50, no. 2 (2013): 137-55; Bruno Latour, “Si l’on parlait un peu politique?” Politix 15, no. 58 (2002): 143-65; Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
• [34] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?”, in C. Nelson, N. Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture , Basingstoke, MacMillan (1988): 271-313.
• [35] Hofmann, Repräsentation .
• [36] On the medieval reinterpretation of the quod omnes tangit of the Justinian code, see Miruna T?taru-Cazaban, “ Quod omnes tangit : Le problème du consentement politique de Thomas d’Aquin jusqu’à Nicolas de Cues.” PhD dissertation, Università di Bologna, 2007.
• [37] Nadia Urbinati and Mark E. Warren, “The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democracy,” The Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008): 387-412; Jane Mansbridge, “Rethinking Representation,” American Political Science Review 97, 4 (2003): 515-28; Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
• [38] Hofmann, Repräsentation , especially chap. 5.
• [39] Hofmann, Repräsentation , 211.
• [40] Hofmann, Repräsentation , 213.
• [41] Léo Moulin, “Une source méconnue de la philosophie politique marsilienne: L’organisation constitutionnelle des ordres religieux,” Revue Française de Science Politique  33, no. 1 (1983): 5-13; “Les origines religieuses des techniques électorales et délibératives modernes,” Politix 43 (1998): 117-62; Werner Maleczek, “Abstimmungsarten: Wie kommt man zu einem vernünftigen Entscheidung?” in Wahlen und wählen im Mittelalter , ed. Reinhard Schneider and Harald Zimmermann. (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1990), 79-134.
• [42] Hofmann, Repräsentation , 221-4.
• [43] Hagen Keller, “Wahlformen und Gemeinschaftsverständnis in den italienischen Stadtkommunen (12/14. Jahrhundert),” in Schneider and Zimmerman, Wahlen und wählen …  , 345-74; “‘Kommune:’ Städtische Selbstregierung und mittelalterliche ‘Volksherrschaft’ im Spiegel italienischer Wahlverfahren des 12.14. Jahrhunderts,” in Person und Gemeinschaft im Mittelalter , eds. Gerd Althoff et al. (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1988), 573-616.
• [44] Hofmann, Repräsentation , 224-6.
• [45] Ginzburg, “Représentation,” 1120 and 1230.
• [46] Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, Princeton University Press: 1957). The corpus mysticum was initially supposed to represent the body of Christ in the sacraments.
• [47] Hofmann, Repräsentation , 275 ff., 286 ff.
• [48] Martin Luther, “Disputatio de potestate concilii,” in Werke, kritische Gesamtausgabe  39, part 1. (Weimar, 1926), 181-97, especially theses 18-26 and argument 7. I would like to thank Ariel Suhamy for his translation of the Latin text).
• [49] For a close analysis of variations on this theme, see in particular Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies .
• [50] Ernst Fraenkel, “Die repräsentative und die plebiszitäre Komponente im demokratischen Verfassungsstaat,” in Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Repräsentation und Repräsentativverfassung , ed. Heinz Rausch. (Darmstadt, 1968).
• [51] Emer de Vattel, Le droit des gens, ou principes de la loi naturelle appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains vol. 1. (Leiden, 1758), ch. 4 and 40, cited in Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory. (Duke University Press Books, 1988).
• [52] Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’écriture sainte (1709) , ed. Jacques le Brun (Geneva, 1967), cited by Podlech, “Repräsentation,” 515.
• [53] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 1, 16.
• [54] Horst Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes - Der Leviathan: Das Urbild des modernen Staates und seine Gegenbilder. 1651-2001 (Oldenbourg Akademieverlag, 2003).
• [55] Pierre Rosanvallon, La démocratie inachevée: Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 195 ff.; Nicolas Mariot, Bains de foule: Les voyages présidentiels en province, 1888-2002. (Paris: Belin, 2006).
• [56] Max Weber, Political Writings, (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
• [57] Pierre Bourdieu, “Le mystère du ministère,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 140 (December 2001): 10.
• [58] Arthur de la Guéronnière, Napoléon III: Portrait politique (Paris, 1853), 93, cited by Rosanvallon, La démocratie , 193.
• [59] Speech delivered on January 23, 2010. Accessed from: http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/internacionales/66703 . For a generalization of situational analyses of this kind, see Bourdieu, “La délégation,” 265.
• [60] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Chávez, el legado y los desafíos.” Accessed from: http://www.other-news.info/noticias
• [61] Keith M. Baker, “Representation,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. Keith M. Baker, vol. 1, The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), 469-92; Gerhard Göhler, “Politische Repräsentation in der Demokratie,” in Die politische Klasse in Deutschland: Eliten auf dem Prüfstand , ed. Thomas Leif, Hans-Josef Legrand, and Ansgar Klein (Bonn/Berlin: Bouvier, 1992), 108-25; Diehl et al., Représentation politique .
• [62] Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
• [63] Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, “Dire sur la question du veto royal,” in Écrits politiques . (Paris: Édition des Archives Contemporaines, 1985), 238.
• [64] Edmund Burke, “Speech at the Conclusion of the Poll to the Electors in Bristol,” 11/3/1774 Works 2, 1889: 36, cited by Podlech, “Repräsentation,” 528.
• [65] On this point, it is interesting to note that the artistic and literary avant-gardes of the twentieth century rose up against the classic idea of making a unified “sovereign” representation and created a multiplicity of representations that were decades in advance of the political practices still strongly marked by the monism of symbolic representation.
• [66] Gauchet, La révolution des pouvoirs .
• [67] Friedrich Tezner, Die Volksvertretung. (Vienna, 1912), 8, cited by Hofmann, Repräsentation , 349.
• [68] Olivier Beaud, “ Repräsentation et Stellvertretung : Sur une discussion de Carl Schmitt,” Droit 6 (1987):11-19; Hofmann, “La représentation.”
• [69] Schmitt, Constitutional Theory , 344, translation adapted by the author.
• [70] Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, “Demokratie und Repräsentation. Zur Kritik der heutigen Demokratiediskussion” in Staat, Verfassung, Demokratie (Frankfurt 1991); Gerhard Göhler, “Political Representation Reconsidered” in Paula Diehl, Alexandre Lescudier (eds), La “représentation” du politique. Histoire, concepts, symboles , Cahiers du Cevipof , February 2014 (57): 15-26.
• [71] The link to what Anglo-Saxon political theory is analyzing with the notion of “advocacy representation” warrants systematic development in the future.
• [72] Manin, Principes ; Bourdieu, Langage et pouvoir ; Daniel Gaxie, Le cens caché (Paris: Seuil, 1978).
• [73] Gottfried Boehm, ed., Repräsentation, Präsentation, Präsenz: Auf den Spuren des homo pictor (Leipzig: KG Saur, 2001).
• [74] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 2013); Ernst Hans Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton University Press, 2000).
• [75] See some relevant intuitions in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image-Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
• [76] Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1981); Le peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1998); La démocratie inachevée .
• [77] Yves Sintomer, Petite histoire de l’expérimentation démocratique: Tirage au sort et politique d’Athènes à nos jours (Paris: La Découverte, 2011).
• [78] Luis Vicente León, “Chávez es como tú.” Accessed from: http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/chavez-entro-en-la-historia/130305/chavez-es-como-tu .
• [79] Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Harvard University Press, 1997); Parite!: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (University Of Chicago Press, 2005); Éléonore Lépinard, L’égalité introuvable (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2007); Jane Mansbridge, “Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women ? A Contingent ‘Yes’”, The Journal of Politics , vol. 61, n° 3, August 1999, 628-657.
• [80] Anne Phillips, The Politics of Presence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
• [81] Sintomer, Petite histoire .

“It is because the signifier exists, because it represents (through symbolic action), that the group being represented and symbolized exists and that in return, it causes its representative to exist as representative of a group.” Pierre Bourdieu, “La délégation et le fétichisme politique”  [1]

1 How should we understand “political representation”?  [2] Is it a generic term, one of those “essentially contested”  [3] notions from the political vocabulary, or is it a concept that could have an encompassing and rigorous definition? This paper seeks to contribute a response to this question. The initial hypothesis is that “representation” designates a semantic domain that is historically constructed and strongly dependent upon the specific linguistic resources of Latin languages or of languages influenced by Latin. With Western Europe having won global hegemony through the gradual colonization and economic domination of the planet, its vocabulary of representation was exported to the rest of the world and today seems universal, at least apparently. Yet substantial differences continue to exist at the semantic level. Going beyond words, there are highly contrasting notions at work in the history of political ideas in context. Moreover, the relativization of Europe’s position in the world order is likely to have repercussions for the hegemony of a particular vocabulary of representation.

2 A transnational project covering the conceptual history and sociology of representation is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, the following pages, envisioned as the first phase of a more global research project, will focus on Western Europe. The objective is to propose a differentiation of ideal types in the semantic field of representation. Drawing heavily from Weberian methodology, the construction of these ideal types goes through a process of abstraction beginning with uses of the term as identified by historians and sociologists. This construction is therefore established at an intermediary level between a purely philosophical construction of the concept and an empirical presentation of the nearly infinite multiplicity of uses.

3 In the first section, I will begin by rejecting any attempts to define the essence of political representation. In the subsequent sections, I will address two sets of meanings linked to representation as an activity, one concerning symbolic representation, the other concerning juridical-political representation. Each set is held internally by a conceptual dichotomy involving the making an absent present again as opposed to the exhibition of a presence in the first case and mandate representation as opposed to embodiment representation in the second. The fourth section will analyze three metamorphoses in embodiment representation within modern democracies. The fifth section will address another dichotomy that cuts across the first three, namely distinction representation as opposed to descriptive representation. To conclude, we will propose some hypotheses on the heuristic interest of these different notions for understanding political transformations in the twenty-first century.

On the “Deceptive Familiarity” of Words

4 When we approach the current transformations of political representation, it is particularly important to follow the strategy proposed by Carlo Ginzburg: “Destroy our deceptive familiarity with words such as ‘representation’ that form part of our everyday language.”  [4] One of the major risks of facts that seem obvious to us in the present is that they hinder an open analysis of transformations in progress. Yet political theory was constructed largely on the basis of this “deceptive familiarity” mentioned by Carlo Ginzburg. From this starting point in particular, Hanna Pitkin, in a seminal book that marked a divide in contemporary Anglo-Saxon theoretical formulations, states that “representation” has an identifiable meaning and that it is not a “vague and shifting” notion but a “single, highly complex concept that has not changed much in its basic meaning since the seventeenth century,” that the etymology of re-presentation is “to make present or manifest or to present again,” and that it is therefore possible to give it a definition that is both precise and sufficiently complex to show in an encompassing way the multiple meanings theoreticians have given the word.  [5] Hasso Hofmann, the great German historian of the concept of representation, had already protested against such reductionism by partitioning it off as a common meaning from contemporary North American political theory.  [6] Against any attempts to propose the essence of the term “representation” and to suggest a definition for it, the strategy of pluralizing the meanings of “representation” can draw on the German conceptual history that, in the tradition of Reinhart Koselleck, contributed key writings on the term and its associated concepts,  [7] and on the highly valuable contributions of numerous French, Anglo-Saxon, German, and Italian historians, even if these were less systematic and focused on shorter periods of time.

5 In this perspective, at least three obstacles must be overcome. The first involves accepting without reflection the semantic content associated with the word “representation” in French (and more generally in Latin languages and languages influenced by Latin, such as English). In German or Chinese, for example, there are several non-substitutable terms to translate what we mean in everyday language by “representation.” Although the multivocalic nature of French certainly makes possible associations that can be rich in meaning, relying on them carelessly can easily lead to conceptual short circuits. Thus when Marcel Gauchet, one of the principal historians of French political ideas, writes that

democracy, being essentially representative and far from reducing itself to the people’s exercise of sovereignty, inseparably requires the institutional production of this sovereignty in its true nature. It seeks a collective disposition of its own, but a disposition that only exists if self-signified and for which it is not less indispensable to be imagined than to be executed,  [8]

7 he correctly emphasizes crucial symbolic dimensions of political representation as we mean it in French, but he does not explain why these would be intrinsically related nor why the figuration of the collective would necessarily or exclusively go through representatives elected within the framework of representative government. The second obstacle is the identification of political representation with elections, as is the case for most actors in political life as well as many theoreticians of Western democracies. However, the field of political representation is much wider, and it is undoubtedly only with the failure of the worker’s revolution in 1848 that this assimilation became the rule in France, to the point of bringing about the loss of other possible meanings.  [9] Today, we are witnessing a pluralization of political representative claims,  [10] and it is important to give this pluralization serious attention. The third obstacle is to reduce the legitimacy of elective representation to the mandate given by the electors to the elected. Although this dimension may be central in modern democracies, it is not exclusive of other, considerably better integrated dimensions that must be explained specifically.

Symbolic Representation: Making the Absent Present again vs. Exhibition of a Presence

8 What are the major conceptual matrices in this perspective on what the French call “representation?” Chronologically, the first refers to what Marcel Gauchet calls “figuration,” what Hasso Hofmann calls the dialectic of the model and image ( Urbild/Abbild ),  [11] and what, following Bourdieu, we might call “symbolic representation”,  [12] but intending the very generic meaning of the word “symbolic” (having to do with symbols as well as with images from the social world, signs, rituals, etc.). The word repraesentatio appeared at the time of the Roman Empire and to date has been discussed in theology, philosophy, and aesthetics. One widely accepted idea is that the notion of figuration representation in its most generic sense refers to the act of rendering present again a reality or person who is absent. However, this first meaning is not exclusive of another, nearly opposite meaning, in which “representation” can also refer to the exhibition of a presence. Roger Chartier demonstrated with particular emphasis how seventeenth-century dictionaries already differentiated these two meanings. Thus, the famous Dictionnaire de la Langue Française published by Furetière in 1690 notes: (1) “Representation: image that reminds us of objects that are absent and that paints them for us as they are,” but also (2) “Representation, is said (…) of the exhibition of something (…) Sometimes said of living people. About a serious and majestic appearance, we say: Here is a person of lovely representation.”  [13] Following the art historian Louis Marin,  [14] Roger Chartier labels the first relationship “transitive” (we represent something or someone), and the second as “intransitive” or “reflexive” (we show ourselves in the act of representing). Incidentally, these two meanings seem to have been present since the inception of the word, with the “intransitive” representation found in Tertullian (150-220) and in the constitutions of Emperor Justinian in 530-531.  [15]

9 This dichotomy is far from purely semantic and was first expressed in the domain of theology and liturgy. The Christian religion was innovative in distinguishing between images and idols, the first referring to an absent reality whereas the second was banned because those who believed in idols claimed that they were inhabited by divine beings.  [16] This was not an issue for the Jewish and Muslim religions, which prohibited images of the divine.  [17] Neither did it exist for the Greeks since when constituting religious signs, their statues sought to establish contact between humans and the divine while revealing the latter as “otherworldly, belonging to an inaccessible elsewhere.”  [18] The distinction between images and idols opened a major field of tension that was manifested virulently in the debates about Byzantine iconoclasm between 730 and 787 and then between 813 and 843  [19] and that also concerned the Western Church. When Christ states in the Last Supper that, “Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. / For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. / He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him”  [20] were these words meant to be understood figuratively, with the presence of Christ in the sacraments being purely symbolic, or in the literal sense, with Christ actually present? This tension, which surfaced in the twelfth century,  [21] increased after the adoption of the dogma of transubstantiation in 1215, with which “it is not possible to speak simply of ‘contact’ but of presence, in the strong sense (the strongest possible sense) of the word. The presence of Christ is an omnipresence.”  [22] In fact, this tension grew and played a role in the split between Protestants and Catholics, the former interpreting the Eucharist symbolically,  [23] whereas the latter imagined the real presence of Christ in his representation. Today something of these two meanings of “representation” continue to be partly expressed in German: Vorstellung , signifies an interior “representation,” and Darstellung the (re)presentation of something before an audience  [24] , and Freud played with the semantic pair in opposing Vorstellung as a conscious representation of an object of thought and Darstellung , where unconscious affects bypass the inhibited person to manifest themselves without distance in dreams, slips of the tongue, unnoticed errors, or symptoms.  [25]

10 It is interesting that Latin and Latin-derived languages ended up subsuming under the single word repraesentatio the symbolic representation involving the dialectic of the model and the image and juridical-political representation. This pairing, which Louis Marin dealt with explicitly, is rich in significations that go beyond the historical and linguistic context of Latin and post-Latin Europe. Indeed, any juridical-political representation involves the production of images of the community being represented at the same time as a performance of the people in power before those whom they are supposed to represent. There is no political representation without the constitution of “imagined communities”  [26] but also without the staging of this community and further of political representatives.  [27] Although it is interesting that the Baroque age saw the theory of the sign and a conscious increase in political staging of absolute monarchy coincide,  [28] anthropological work tends to present this symbolic production and this staging as structural facts of political power and thus to explain the persistent importance of political rituals.  [29] This thesis takes on great importance in a constructivist perspective that conceives of social groups and political communities not as natural facts but as socially constructed entities.  [30] Political representatives’ action can in fact be conceptualized as strongly contributing to the shaping of the social and therefore to the construction of the groups these are supposed to represent. Therefore, the meaning of political representation cannot be understood solely in the liberal sense of the mandate given by a group set up expressly for political purposes to people charged with defending their interests or speaking on their behalf, and even less so when societies stratified by statutory groups (such as castes, guilds, orders, or the “states” of the French Ancien Régime ) give way to “democratic” societies marked by the formal equality of statutory conditions.  [31] In these societies, the constitution of social groups takes a more dynamic form.  [32]

11 However, it must be emphasized that just like political performance, the production of images of social groups and political communities is not the prerogative of elected representatives or official spokespeople. In daily exchanges, for example in the public sphere, they are implemented by a multiplicity of actors, from artists to the media to the organizers of social movements and to ordinary citizens. These actors construct reality by drawing on “mediating systems” involving human networks, figurations, and material tools.  [33] Even the subaltern can speak.  [34] Languages that, like German, use different words to address symbolic representation and juridical-political representation make it easier to avoid semantic and analytic confusion.

12 In any event, the interplay between the symbolic representation and juridical-political representation pairs on the one hand and the making present of someone absent and the exhibition of a presence on the other cannot be fully grasped unless complemented by a third dichotomy internal to juridical-political representation and that differentiates mandate representation from embodiment representation.

Juridical-Political Representation: Mandate Representation and Embodiment Representation

13 It seems self-evident today that political representation in the sense of a juridical-political linkage rests on the idea of the mandate, and particularly the electoral mandate. Yet neither the ancient Greeks nor the Romans had a word that would allow them to designate in a unified way all of the activities related to juridical-political representation that we spontaneously associate to each other today, for example, in labeling ambassadors, elected officials, leaders of a political tendency, and spokespeople of a social group as “representatives.” In fact, the notion of mandate representation is relatively recent and dates back to the Middle Ages, particularly to the writings of Bartolus de Saxoferrato (1313-1356). With the Latin expression persona aliccuis repraesentare, the idea that it was possible – and necessary – to represent someone else by establishing fictitious juridical unity between the representative and the represented was developed in several domains, ranging from private law (especially inheritance law) to diplomacy to politics.  [35] Representation in this sense was not necessarily related to consent given by the represented (the absence of consent continues to characterize the status of an adult acting as the legal representative of a minor). Nonetheless, the idea of the explicit mandate of the represented soon became central to this juridical-political notion of representation, whether to represent an entity to the outside world or to designate one or more representatives with authority over all of the affected people  [36] in a given territory. In this view, representation makes it possible to fictitiously render present a physically absent person or group and thus to address a whole host of juridical situations in a regulated manner. Mandate representation then became politically hegemonic in the seventeenth and even more in the eighteenth century with the rise of theories of natural law and of republican ideas, involving as it did the idea of consent as a corollary. After the modern revolutions, the representation of the various status groups before the king that was typical of the Ancien Régime gave way to the idea of the people delegating power to a representative government. European readers will recognize this notion of mandate representation spontaneously when they think of juridical-political representation, and it is on this notion that the reflections of Anglo-Saxon political theory are focused.  [37]

14 However, mandate representation does not exhaust the juridical-political dimension of representation as another conceptual matrix had appeared a few decades earlier in the Middle Ages, that of identity representation ( repraesentatio identitatis ), a subject that has been extensively discussed by Hasso Hofmann.  [38] The concept was developed by Marsilius of Padua (1275-1342), then by John of Segovia (1395-1473). Although it may have been supported by an interpretation of the Eucharist that postulated the actual presence of Christ in the sacraments, its origins were essentially in the law of medieval guilds and communes, considered as guilds of guilds. The issue was of juridically stabilizing groups that needed to act over time and that were susceptible to being represented by someone from among them. In a second period, the notion extended to the Church. In this view, representation signifies less “to act in the name of” than “to act as.” It implies the juridical-political embodiment of a multiplicity within a single body rather than a transfer of juridical authority,  [39] and this is why in the paragraphs that follow, we will discuss embodiment representation and identity representation synonymously. In identity representation, one party is identified as the whole according to the pars pro toto theme we know from art, poetry, and daily language (to own 10 head of cattle means to own 10 whole animals). “In a sense, with regard to specific actions, the council ‘is’ the community and the religious council is the Church, even if this identification is insufficient on its own to determine what the Church or the urban political community are.”  [40]

15 From a modern viewpoint, the political phase that allows the people to transfer power to their representatives seems key, resting fundamentally on elections. The methods by which the collective bodies thus constituted designate commissions or derivative organs from within themselves as well as make decisions is a question of secondary importance for the Constitution. At the height of the communal era, the priorities were reversed, with sources providing abundant descriptions of how intermediary bodies designated electoral commissions or appointed magistrates from within and how these made decisions. On the other hand, they are typically silent – or very discreet – about defining the limits of the entire popolo as well as its transfer to the intermediary bodies given that the latter embodied the popolo in large part. If the general assembly of citizens was undoubtedly behind the creation of the medieval communes, the development of the communes was simultaneous with its gradual extinction in favor of a series of councils and organs that represented the people by embodying them. Nonetheless, there were debates about determining who could adequately “be” the whole.

16 Within the Church, the controversy was especially concerned with the maior and sanior pars : in the event of a disagreement, should the decision revert to the most numerous or the most wise?  [41] Again, it must be understood that in the context of identity representation, the potential for resorting to an election was of secondary importance, especially as the technique of rank-and-file voting was often combined with others such as co-option or sortition and was not necessarily related to the idea of consent. Although the development and refinement of electoral techniques and decision-making procedures made it possible to affirm a more dynamic version of the pars pro toto ,  [42] they did not change its structure. Rather, they produced mediations that made it easier to reach consensus, and the struggle between the factions was long considered a primary evil that had to be dealt with.  [43] At least in principle, the main thing was to represent both the group as a whole and the group’s own interests, and unanimity remained at the heart of the principle of legitimacy of the medieval community.

17 The difference between the identity representation that prevailed in the Middle Ages and the mandate representation typical of modernity is noteworthy. The assimilation of the parts to the whole is quite different from the idea of a mandate given by the whole to those who depend on it to the point of owing it their existence, who do not enjoy the same legal prerogatives as the whole, and who are likely to see these turn against them and then withdraw their mandate. German has kept a linguistic vestige of the mandate representation/identity representation pair. The first notion is generally rendered in everyday language as Vertretung (or Stellvertretung ). If we neglect the increasingly evident influence of English, the noun Repräsentation tends, especially in the theoretical tradition illustrated by Carl Schmitt, to refer to embodiment representation. For several centuries, it was embodiment representation that seemed decisive in the juridical-political sphere and mandate representation secondary. This was evident during several crucial controversies of the Middle Ages and the modern era. From the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, when quarreling between Holy Roman emperors and popes was at its height, the emperors did not aspire to primacy by drawing on a transfer of authority conceded to them by the people but in claiming that they were the embodiment of the political community and as such represented it.  [44] Moreover, the embodiment of a community in the person of the sovereign could rest on the idea of representation as display of an actual presence. Without this pairing, it would not be possible to understand the production of royal effigies in England (beginning in 1327) and France (beginning in 1422) that “represented” the King during the interregnum, nor that they were surrounded by a degree of ritual comparable to what a member of royalty required.  [45] The progressive slippage of the notion of corpus mysticum from the Eucharist to the Church then to the political realm was key in the creation of the theory of the King’s two bodies analyzed by Ernst Kantorowicz.  [46]

18 At the same time, when Conciliarism tried to resolve the Great Western Schism and the squabbles between rival popes in the fifteenth century and the primacy of the council over that of the pope was being bitterly debated, the followers of Conciliarism made their demands not in the name of mandate representation but rather in arguing that the council was the embodiment of the Church. To this extent, Conciliarism conceived the Church by transposing the schemas of the juridical-political thinking of the guilds. The attempt by Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), which was perhaps the first major attempt to articulate identity representation and mandate representation theoretically, aimed to give primacy to the former, considering the pope to be the authorized representative of the religious council and therefore the Church and placing his attempt at synthesis under the sign of consensus. Conversely, the followers of papal restoration stated that only the pope represented the universal Church because he embodied it as a whole, the religious council only representing the different parts of the Church before it. It was not until the Lutheran notion of ecclesia repraesentativa that the idea took hold that the members of the council and other collective decision-making authorities of the Church should be the authorized representatives of various ecclesiastical communities.  [47] Vigorously criticizing the “papists” who advanced the view that the official Church, because it is representative, is the “real” Church, because grammatically speaking, “to be representative” means “to show something as present and real,” Luther replied in 1536 in a dual critique of representation as the exhibition of a presence and embodiment representation. For him, the ecclesiastical authorities could not be the Church, or rather, they were not the Church “[except] in the way that a man in a painting is a man.” This “painted Church” being only an “image,” it should not usurp the rights of the “real Church” constituted by the community of believers.  [48]

19 By emphasizing the embodiment the designation of representatives entailed, identity representation fed into a host of structuring metaphors. One of the most common was the body and the head ( corpus-caput ), with the hierarchical dimension often pushed to a paroxysm in which the head absorbed the body.  [49] However, identity representation was not necessarily intended in this way. In fact, its original versions in guild law often placed emphasis on the collegiality of a body of equals. It was the Counter-Reformation and absolutism that theorized “absorptive” representation,  [50] which could be symbolized by the famous phrase attributed to Louis XIV, “I am the State.” In a more subtle way, in reconsidering the basic structure of identity representation, Emer de Vattel defended the representative character of the sovereign within a conceptual framework that was already influenced by the Enlightenment:

Such is the origin of the representative character attributed to the Sovereign. He represents his Nation in all the affairs he could have as Sovereign. The dignity of the greatest Monarch is not degraded if he is attributed this representative character; on the contrary, nothing elevates him more. In this way, the Monarch unites in his Person all the Majesty that belongs to the entire Body of the Nation.  [51]

21 Hobbesian theory undoubtedly constituted the most developed attempt to construct a theory of representation in the modern era. His defense of absolutism did not derive the legitimacy of the sovereign from the fact that he was a representative mandated by God, as Bossuet did in the same era when he described kings as being crowned by their office because they are “representatives of divine majesty, sent by his salvation for the execution of his designs.”  [52] Firmly grounding sovereignty in the world, Hobbes broke with the universe of medieval thinking by considering the social atomistically and no longer guild-oriented, and his theory of sovereignty proposed an original synthesis between mandate representation and embodiment representation:

A multitude of men are made ‘one’ person when they are by one man or one person represented, so that it be done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particular. For it is the ‘unity’ of the representer, not the ‘unity’ of the represented, that maketh the person ‘one.’ And it is the representer that beareth the person, and but one person; and ‘unity’ cannot otherwise be understood in multitude.  [53]

23 Hobbes thus twisted the lesson of guild law – with the body of the sovereign literally absorbing the whole group of individuals and only allowing the unit of the political body, the frontispiece of Leviathan being its clearest “representation.”  [54]

Three Metamorphoses of Embodiment Representation in Modern Democracies

24 It would be erroneous to think that embodiment representation was only relevant to the Ancien Régime and that it disappeared with the advent of representative government. In modern democracies, the structure of this ideal type is found beyond its numerous metamorphoses in at least three types of discourses and dynamics: when the charismatic representative claims to construct the group he represents, in the republican reversal of the theological-political, and in the radical-democratic reinterpretation of identity representation.

25 The persistence of elements of embodiment-representation is particularly evident in contemporary France. Given the significance of the figure of the President of the Republic as the embodiment of the Nation, we only need to look at official portraits of Presidents to become convinced. Moreover, it is with the figure of the supreme representative as embodiment of the nation that the “reflexive” dimension of symbolic representation is most evident and that the staging of power before the represented is conducted in the most ritualized way. From this point of view, presidents’ trips into the regions are in direct continuity with the travels of Napoleon III.  [55]

26 However, beyond this institutional charisma that could too hastily be considered a mere relic, most forms of identification with charismatic leaders borrow the logical structure and often the discourse of embodiment representation. One of the major theories of Weberian political sociology is that this type of domination is played out in a demiurge-like relationship between the representative and the represented. Weber strongly emphasizes that it is not the politically passive ‘masses’ that produce the leader from among themselves but the political leader who procures a group of partisans and conquers the masses through ‘demagogy.’  [56] In the Weberian tradition but from the perspective of critical sociology, Pierre Bourdieu too emphasized the fetishism of delegation that makes it possible for the representatives to bring about the existence of the group: “through speech or any other form of representation ,” they

have available to them an absolute power of creation because in a sense they make the group exist by giving it a body – theirs – a name – the acronym, an almost magical substitute for the group – (…), and words capable of making it manifest. To produce this effect, they must possess power over the group, which they obtained from the group, power to mobilize and power to make the group manifest as visible and efficient, and which they owe to the mobilized group over which they have power. (…) This little-known circular traffic (…) in principle comes from the capital and symbolic power the authorized representative (…) possesses over the group for which he is the substitute, the embodiment.  [57]

28 This sociological perspective constitutes one of the most ambitious attempts to articulate the conceptual logic we have presented as mandate representation and embodiment representation but also of Vorstellung and Darstellung .

29 The words “embodiment representation” are found explicitly in most of the Caesarian logic, be it populist or neo-populist. As a theoretician of the Second Empire wrote in 1853: “The Emperor is not a man, he is a people,”  [58] which seems to echo that proclamation of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez: “I demand absolute loyalty to my leadership because I am not myself (…) I am not an individual, I am the people,”  [59] a proclamation to which his partisans, gathered en masse on the occasion of his funeral two years later, responded by taking up a slogan of the regime: “We are all Chávez!”  [60] However, in the case of Latin American neo-populism, identification with a charismatic leader is also a factor in the mobilization of the masses, the leader admittedly keeping them in a subordinate position but calling on them and on their organizations to transform the existing order. In some cases, this identification can even be paired closely with the establishment of new participatory institutions that allow them real autonomy.

30 Nevertheless, the persistence of embodiment representation is not the prerogative of charismatic representatives, even if it marks the new parliamentary legitimacy. Although the American Revolution led decisively to a representative government where mandate representation was hegemonic, things were more complex in the French Revolution.  [61] The famous painting by David of The Tennis Court Oath makes it possible to assess the extent to which by this act, the mandate representation of states typical of the Ancien Régime changes dramatically into something else. Representative government triumphs with the figure of the monarch having left the scene. With the King gone, it is the representatives’ turn to embody the Nation. Although the parliamentary representatives are in the room “by the will of the people,” to quote Mirabeau’s phrase, they are also gathered in quasi-unanimity around the primus inter pares who is taking the oath. Together, they make up a collective body that is the new France, and all of the theories of parliamentary or national sovereignty are built upon this schema. It is one of the foundations of the triumph of the free mandate versus the imperative mandate, a triumph considered by Bernard Manin, following Schmitt, to be one of the characteristics of representative government and its “aristocratic” dimension.  [62] The idea that parliamentarians should be able to forge their decisions during parliamentary deliberations certainly has technical merits, referring as it does to the ideal of public deliberation typical of the Enlightenment.  [63] Yet it also rests on Burke’s theory, in which “the Parliament is not a simple congress of ambassadors of different and hostile interests [but] a deliberative assembly of one nation and one interest, that of the whole.”  [64] This whole not being reducible to the empirical sum of the parts that comprise it, it takes the form of embodiment in a body of representatives free of any imperative mandate, they alone being in a position to build a unified representation based on the political community and what is good for it.  [65] As noted by Marcel Gauchet in his analysis of the French Revolution,  [66] in the republican reversal of the political-theological, it is because the elected representatives have a monopoly over the definition of the general interest that they also have the monopoly over decision making, including against the will demonstrated by their electors. The question of the free mandate cannot be explained only within the conceptual framework of mandate representation.

31 The German theory of the State placed particular emphasis on this question. Thus the great Austrian jurist Friedrich Tezner was able to state in 1912 that:

Representation ( Repräsentation ) does not signify (…) a delegation ( Stellvertretung ) given in virtue of a revocable mandate but the embodiment in virtue of a historically acquired position of power (…) States do not represent ( vertreten ) the people as the whole of the population, they are , and they alone, the people or the Nation in the juridical sense of the term.  [67]

33 It is in this perspective that Repräsentation, namely, representation embodying the unity of the political community while referring to a superior existential reality (in particular, the People or the Nation insofar as they differ from the empirical people), was frequently opposed to Vertretung , the mandate representation of multiple social interests, which were accused of being incapable of ensuring the constitution of a real political community.  [68] This German tradition paired this particular form of embodiment representation with the two dimensions of symbolic representation: real representation in reference to a theological-political entity such as the Nation, involved in making the absent present, but as it accomplished this operation through embodiment in the representative, also taking the form of public “representation” ( Darstellung ) of the representative before the empirical people. As Carl Schmitt wrote, there is

no state without representation ( Repräsentation ) because there is no state without state form, and the representation ( Darstellung ) of the political unity is an intrinsic part of the form. In any State, there must exist men who can say: “We are the State. ”  [69]

35 We have already noted that absolutist interpretations did in no way exhaust the potential of embodiment representation that had been forged in the medieval guilds. From this point of view, it is interesting to note that a whole current of contemporary German political thought, fusing symbolic representation and embodiment representation, reinterpreted it in a liberal-democratic sense in advocating it alongside mandate representation, another type of representation (called “symbolic representation” by Gerhard Göhler) and made it possible to embody the unit of the political community around symbols and fundamental democratic values.  [70]

36 Even more interestingly perhaps, the conceptual matrix of identity representation found itself metamorphosed in a radical democratic perspective aiming to legitimize ordinary citizens, an evolution that scarcely seems conceivable within the framework of a critical sociology conferring a kind of monopoly of representation to the elected or other authorized spokespersons. During the Occupy movement, the demonstrators denied that they were acting as representatives and said that they were only speaking for themselves. However, one of their most popular slogans was “We are the 99%.” One has not to necessarily diagnose a performative contradiction. In refusing to be considered as representatives, the demonstrators rejected the logic of mandate representation, which was taken to be of the causes of the contested autonomization of the political class in relationship to the citizens. By claiming to be “the 99%,” indeed by stating, as seen in dozens of images on the Internet, “I am the 99%,” they asserted their ability to speak like the people rather than for them. Each one of the placard carriers could claim to embody the people. The number mentioned was itself significant; the exclusion of the 1% comprised of elites (elected representatives included) played on the double meaning the term “people” has taken on since its inception, namely the entirety of the citizens but also the common people as opposed to the dominant few.  [71] The difficulty these movements experienced in going from a phase of challenging the monopoly of the elected to the representation of the people, to a propositional phase, demonstrated the challenges that this kind of reliance upon identity representation must face within a radical-democratic perspective.

Distinction Representation and Descriptive Representation

37 Recourse to the logic of embodiment representation in the neo-populism of Hugo Chávez and more so still in its radical democratic turnaround with Occupy could not be fully explained without appealing to a final conceptual dichotomy: distinction representation vs. descriptive representation. This dichotomy has been widely discussed in contemporary political theory and sociology, and there is no need to dwell on it here. Several authors have demonstrated – albeit with regard to different issues – the logic of the distinction the founding fathers of the French and American republics explicitly defended as well as the “hidden poll tax” that spontaneously presides over the electoral mechanism and more generally over the dynamic of delegation.  [72] In the face of this logic, demands for similarities between representatives and the represented were elevated by various subaltern groups, including American anti-federalists’ proposition of small electoral districts at the end of the eighteenth century, the promotion of worker candidates and worker parties in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and widespread contemporary demands for male/female quotas, better representation of ethnic minorities, caste and schedule tribes quotas in India, etc.

38 The descriptive/distinction pair warrants specific attention for several reasons. Hasso Hofmann only proposes three main sets of semantic concepts of representation: the dialectic of the model and the image, mandate representation, and identity representation. However, his genealogical work was conducted mostly in the contexts of law, theology, and political philosophy. The historical reconstruction is different if real space is made for the visual and performing arts, literary representation, and aesthetics.  [73] At the foundation of the dialectic between the model and the image, the quite specific program copied from the Greeks in which representation is mimesis , or imitation of the real, becomes detached in Western art beginning in the Renaissance.  [74] This program frequently served as inspiration for thinking about political representation within perspectives that were foreign to the guild-like representation of the Middle Ages. A systematic history of the crossings and transfers of the notion of mimesis representation between the artistic and literary fields on the one hand and the scientific and political ones on the other remains to be written.  [75] However, it is clear that descriptive representation became a central problem as a result of the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the gradual hegemony of election-based representative government, and the gradual equalization of juridical statutes occurring throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  [76] With the application of probabilistic calculations in statistics and the invention of the representative sample at the end of the nineteenth century, the adjective “representative” was extended in Latin and Latin-influenced languages to take on a quite specific meaning, including in the political realm,  [77] and this was in turn exported throughout the world, leading to the creation of neologisms in numerous languages.

39 The distinction/descriptive dichotomy plays a role in symbolic representation but also in juridical-political representation through procedures such as quotas or separate representation of minority groups, procedures that are debated well beyond Europe or North America. Through these procedures, descriptive representation involves not only a profound transformation of the concept of mandate representation, understood in the narrow sense of the word. It also relates to embodiment representation in emphasizing the characteristics of the persons who represent and not just the ideas that are being represented. A Venezuelan taxi driver’s remarks about Chávez at the beginning of the 2010s bear witness to this: “It’s possible that this guy is lying; it’s possible that he is not solving the problems of the country; it’s possible that these people are stealing money … but he’s like me.”  [78] Based on this demand for similarity, Chávez could claim with a degree of credibility that he embodied the people, a demand completely foreign to the political epistemology of a Louis XIV claiming to embody the State. In any case, the distinction/descriptive dichotomy helps to explain the strong symbolic effects of embodiment the classic visions of mandate representation struggle to take into account. Based on whether, for example, there is gender parity in parliamentary assemblies, the focus will be on another vision of the political community being represented, and the corporal hexis of representatives will also have significant effects on the public engagement of women and beyond that on gendered roles in society.  [79] The notion of the “politics of presence” proposed by Anne Philips as distinct from the “politics of ideas” aptly expresses this overlap.  [80]

40 Beyond elections, this demand for similarity also underlies radical-democratic aims. If it is often explicitly stated that the words of any of Occupy XWall Street activist count for everyone and that anyone can be the pars pro toto because these participants are ordinary citizens and thus resemble all the others. This logic also can also hold true in part for contemporary voting systems that use sortition. The participants of these mini-publics regularly reject the fact that they can be considered to be representatives, while just as regularly, others state quite the opposite, that “we are the people.” Here again, it is possible to reconstruct the logic of apparently contradictory reasoning because of the explicit differentiation from mandate representation and the implicit reference to embodiment representation and descriptive representation. Moreover, it is notable that the demand for consensus, strongly present since the inception of identity representation, is usually found being reaffirmed within the Occupy movements and in the majority of mini-publics. This imperative for consensus is only in part diffused when another type of similarity – namely statistical similarity – is highlighted. Within the logic of the representative sample or the trend toward a representativeness that most often supports the randomly drawn mini-publics, the idea is no longer that ordinary citizens all resemble each other and everyone else but that their differences reflect the diversity of social experiences present in the political community. The mini-public constitutes a microcosm of this. Precisely because it is “representative” in this very particular sense, it can embody and therefore “represent” it. In any case, in its various forms, descriptive representation is far from being reduced to the simple function of “standing for” to which Hanna Pitkin limited it by opposing it to the “acting for” of mandate representation: it implies a logic of “speaking like” and “acting like.” The sociological representativeness of the deliberating mini-publics does not keep the opinions they broadcast from following a counterfactual logic, expressing what the people would do if they were in ideal conditions for discussions about the polity. More broadly, the mini-publics participate in the construction of social groups through their symbolic dimension.  [81]

41 The different logics of representation are heterogeneous even if it can occur in many combinations and articulations proposed in theories and practices. The difference between symbolic representation and political-juridical representation is made more complex by dichotomies internal to each of the two terms, the making the absent present again as opposed to the exhibition of a presence, as well as mandate representation vs. embodiment representation, with the dichotomy of distinction representation/descriptive representation cutting across the three preceding ones. These logics can be extricated by starting with the words used by the actors (in the past as well as in the present) and subjecting them to a process of analytic typification. They should not therefore be confused with the explicit normative frameworks to which the actors make reference in their actions, which are always specific and should be interpreted in context, nor with the conceptual formulations particular to each theoretician. In a sense, they provide the cardinal points of the semantic domain of representation in Latin languages. Attempts to increase the level of abstraction with the intention of proposing an all-encompassing concept of representation are doomed either to result in a notion so generic that it would be “sociologically amorphous,” to use Weber’s expression, or to unilaterally destroy the diversity of the semantic domain.

42 The illustration of these ideal types, whose purpose is to break free from the “deceptive familiarity” of facts obvious to us, can have several virtues. The first is the relativization of mandate representation as a specific case in the dynamics of representation and a broadening of historical and sociological investigation. The second is the understanding that mandate representation does not generally hold together on its own and that the legitimacy of the elected politicians depends largely on how they embody the group they are supposed to represent, participate in its symbolic construction, and make a performance of their own person, and how they resemble – or are distinguished from – the represented. The third virtue concerns a diagnosis of the future of political representation. Such an approach will make it possible to better test the hypothesis according to which mandate representation related to elections tends to lose part of the centrality it managed to gain over two or three centuries, especially if we adopt the point of view of a transnational approach, while other forms of political representation are in the process of emerging or reemerging. Lastly, this cognitive approach seeks to contribute to the construction of normative perspectives. It makes it easier the highlighting of some dynamics of representation over others, or concrete programs to democratize democracy. It only requires giving up the attempt to reduce the variety of representative claims under one ideal concept of representation that could capture its essence.

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Theories of Representation

Democracy  

Democracy and Participation  

Representative democracy  

Is Digital Democracy the answer?  

Delegate Model . A representative may be a delegate, in the sense that they act as a conduit conveying the views of others, without expressing their own views or opinions. Examples of delegation include sales representatives and ambassadors, but the notion of delegation has rarely been applied to MPs. 

For example, in a delegate model, if the delegate's constituents want to implement a policy that mandates all houses in their town be painted brown, the delegate must honour this position, regardless of whether the delegate thinks this is a bad idea and would make a formerly picturesque town unsightly and risk lose its appeal to tourists .  

• Trustee Model. A representative may be a trustee, in the sense that they act on behalf of others, using their supposedly superior knowledge, better education or greater experience. This form of representation is sometimes called ‘Burkean representation’, as its classic expression is found in the speech that the Conservative philosopher and historian Edmund Burke (1729–97) gave to the electors of Bristol in 1774. He declared that ‘Your representative owes you, not his industry alone, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.’ Until the 1950s, it was widely held that MPs should think for themselves, using their own judgement, because ordinary voters did not know their own best interests. 

For example in a trustee model of representation, if the constituents wanted to paint all the houses in their picturesque town brown, then the trustee would then be entrusted to weigh the merit of this proposal and has the autonomy to deny the proposal if they felt it would negatively impact the town's tourism potential.

Damage to the town's tourism industry may hurt the economy of the town the trustee has been elected to represent, so the trustee believes it is in the best interest of the townspeople to deny their request.

Politico model

The politico model came about when theorists recognized that representatives rarely consistently act as just delegates or just trustees when representing their constituents. It is a hybrid of the two models discussed above and involves representatives acting as delegates and trustees, depending on the issue and the level of public support.

•The Mandate Model. This is the most influential theory of representation in modern politics. It is based on the idea that, in winning an election, a party gains a mandate to carry out the policies on which it fought the election, the policies contained in its manifesto. This doctrine implies that political parties, rather than individual MPs, discharge Parliament’s representative function. Such thinking provides a clear justification for party unity and party discipline. However, the idea that people vote according to the contents of party manifestos is difficult to sustain in practice, and the doctrine provides no clear guidance with policies that are dissolved between elections. 

For example, within a mandate model, if you support the Liberal Democrats and their ideals, you may vote a liberal democrat as your constituent representative despite not having looked into this individual at all.  

•  The resemblance Model   or Descriptive representation. Sometimes called ‘characteristic representation’, this theory emphasises the importance to representation of people’s social characteristics and the groups to which they belong. It is primarily concerned to improve the representation of groups of people who have been historically under-represented in positions of power and influence in society – women, ethnic minorities, the working class, young people, and so on. It does this both in the belief that the views and interests of such groups will be more effectively represented and on the grounds that having a greater diversity of viewpoints will result in political bodies making better decisions for the common good

There were 220 female MPs elected at the 2019 General Election (34% of all MPs). This was the highest ever number and proportion. In 1979 there were 19 women MPs, 3% of the total.

Since 1979, the average age of MPs has remained around 50 years.  49% of MPs elected in 2019 were aged over 50. Members aged 18-29 and those over 70 each represented 3% of the total. As of March 2020, comprehensive information about age was not available most of the MPs who were newly elected in 2019, see section 3 for details.

In 2019, 65 MPs were from non-white backgrounds, 10% of the total. This was an increase of 25% compared to 52 in 2017. In contrast, there were 4 ethnic minority MPs elected in 1987. Currently, around 15% of the UK population is from a non-white background.

Conservative MPs elected at the 2019 General Election were the most likely to have attended a fee-paying school: 41% compared to 30% Liberal Democrat, 14% Labour and 7% SNP, according to data published by the Sutton Trust.

The Modernity of Political Representation

Its innovative thrust and transnational semantic transfers during the sattelzeit (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries).

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Representation is a major and multifaceted concept of modern politics. Through open and regular elections, it shields the democratic character of representative governments, compelling politicians to pursue the interests of their constituencies and become responsive to their demands. 1 But since the concept of representation is so embedded in the day-to-day workings of democratic regimes, it has largely lost significant traces of its history that shed light on its political dawn. The instrumentalization of the concept by representative governments in order to assess their democratic legitimacy obfuscates its seminal ambiguities and the history of conflicts about its meaning and institutional functions.

• Representation before/beyond Representative Democracy

Dismissing its origins and institutional complexity, representation is often considered synonymous with elections and elections with democracy. Although this pattern of equivalences makes sense as a legitimizing principle for representative government, it overshadows the plurality of meanings the concept of representation gained over time and its manifold institutional adjustments in democratic regimes. 2 In this regard—though Hanna Pitkin's masterpiece on representation remains a landmark in political theory 3 — little attention has been paid to Hasso Hofmann's conceptual history of the term, 4 a study in line with the research program of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe . On the other hand, in recent years, the pattern of equivalences between representation, elections, and democracy has become the target of populist and anti-liberal criticisms claiming that representation distorts true democracy. While this opposition between representation and democracy is far from new and may be linked with the inherent complexity of the term representation , 5 the rise of right-wing populism in Europe makes such rhetoric even more prevalent and disturbing.

This challenge has been addressed by political theorists who show that political representation goes together with citizens’ participation and should thus constitute the basis for any thick conception of democracy. 6 This “democratic turn,” produced since the late 1990s in the theory of political representation, was soon followed, and sometimes rivaled, by a “constructivist turn” that focused on “representative claims,” irrespective of the presence of electoral authorization, which challenged the parallel between representation, elections, and democracy. 7 Indeed, advocates of this constructivist turn emphasized the performative aspects and the potentially democratic role of representative claims not based on elections. While not incompatible with democratic values, constructivist accounts of political representation pose a new challenge for political theory by undermining the normative foundations of representative governments. 8

Both consecutive turns, along with the criticisms of representative government, have put the concept of representation at the top of the agenda of current democracies. Yet to address the political and theoretical challenges of reassessing, and somehow reinventing, democratic representation in a time of crisis is seriously hindered by the vagueness of the knowledge at hand about the historical roots and functional aims of representative democracy. The naturalization of the representative system based on elections as the sole possible democratic institutional arrangement makes it, ironically, an easy target for political adversaries of liberalism and proponents of constructivism alike. Its assumed ahistorical character may have been a strength as a legitimizing principle; it is now a serious flaw that weakens democratic rule itself.

Accordingly, the purpose of this special section is to document with the help of two case studies the semantic and institutional changes of the concept of representation throughout the crucial period of the entrance of Europe into political democratic modernity, Reinhart Koselleck's Sattelzeit , 9 the era from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. The history of representation from its rise as a political concept in the fourteenth- century debates about the relations between temporal and spiritual power to Thomas Hobbes's reformulation against defenders of parliament during and after the English Civil War is well known. 10 Likewise, its uses by the founding fathers of modern representative governments (in France, Great Britain, and the United States) are even better known. 11 However, the more underground and long-term changes of representation through the Sattelzeit are not as often studied. This is especially eloquent when moving from the representation debates in Great Britain or France to other European countries such as the Netherlands or Poland, not to mention the non-European uses of representation that have only recently been explored 12 and whose chronologies provide clues to revise and update the comparative knowledge of political concepts.

The great variety in the semantics of representation 13 may well explain the stimulus to transnational comparative studies, framed within the Sattelzeit , in other European countries and elsewhere since the 1980s, as documented by Contributions to the History of Concepts ; yet it also outlines the linguistic and historiographic challenges a global conceptual history of representation should face. Whereas in English or in French a single signifier, representation or représentation , can refer to several signifieds (incarnation, delegation, mental image, pictorial or theatrical reproduction, and so on), Italian distinguishes between rappresentazione and rappresentanza , German between Repräsentation , Vertretung , Darstellung , and Vorstellung , for example. The picture becomes more complex when we try to assess the cases of non-European languages: sometimes the Western concept of representation was exported and conflicted with previous words, such as daibiao in Chinese in tension with the traditional tianming (mandate of heaven).

• Representation and Political Legitimacy

Yet these purely linguistic limits are not the only reasons why such a conceptual history of representation is a scholarly challenge. Our contention is that it also has to do, paradoxically, with the very success of the vocabulary of representation in modern Europe. Indeed, this flexible concept offered a unique means to legimitimize very diverse governments and institutional arrangements when traditional forms of legitimacy started to lose momentum, initially in Europe 14 and later on in other parts of the world. No wonder central authors of the Aufklärung , Enlightenment, or Lumières movements during the Sattelzeit , such as Montesquieu or Kant, gave political representation a crucial role in their rational redefinition of political legitimacy. Representation effectively placed popular consent at the core of the political system, thus making any other source of legitimacy redundant, without necessarily questioning the existing institutional arrangements, including those of authoritarian regimes.

Through the development of popular unrest in several parts of Europe from the seventeenth century onward, deep political struggles occurred regarding represenation's meaning, with different actors claiming to be the real representatives of the people or the nation. Such uses of the vocabulary of representation to justify or invalidate political actors and institutions became a central feature of revolutionary events, especially in the United States and in France where the question of representation was at the core of both the onset and the later developments of the revolution. 15 Yet the inaugural revolutionary controversy about representation may well have been the English Civil War (1642–1651), during which the concept of representation was called upon to uphold legitimacy claims for both the parliamentarians and their opponents loyal to the king, first of all Hobbes. 16 In turn, Hobbes's Leviathan contributed to giving citizens’ representation a prominent role in legitimating the sovereign, in place of religious, charismatic, or traditional forms of legitimacy—thus reinforcing the importance of controversies about political representation.

The multiple political crises and revolutions that took place during the Sattelzeit —not just in Europe, but also in the United States, the Caribbean, or Latin America—radicalized the antagonisms between different understandings of political representation. On the one hand, defenders of authoritarian rule developed a conception of representation mostly based on incarnation, according to which only a single person could represent the unity of the country and thus rule it. 17 On the other hand, those who contested established institutions wanted to make governments accountable to citizens, relying on regular elections to select the wisest, and often richest, members of society—a system soon to be called representative government. In many countries, this conceptual polarity both influenced and was a result of class conflicts and rivalries between elites, making representation a strongly contested concept.

• Historicizing Representative Democracies

In Europe, conflicts about the meaning of political representation had distinct consequences after the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars. 18 Even if monarchies eventually prevailed, leading to the strengthening of European conservatism at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, it became impossible for any government to neglect middle class citizens’ demands for representation and to restore absolute autocracies. The individual rational bourgeois citizen, already at the center of the public sphere since the eighteenth century, 19 became the ubiquitous legitimizing figure on which any modern government, even a conservative one, should base its power. This move resulted in a partial Europeanization of the struggles about representation and foreshadowed a relative convergence among claims, mottos, and eventually institutions in most European countries. The revolution of 1848, at the very end of the Sattelzeit , thus gave rise to controversies around representation that reached a truly continental scale. 20 In almost every European country, the concepts of citizenship, liberty, representation, and sometimes democracy or even socialism formed a new common intellectual framework for political struggles and debates.

The end of the Sattelzeit saw the advocates of representative government successfully impose their idea of representation. However, their apparent victory in monopolizing the vocabulary of representation was by no means a definitive one. The pattern of equivalences it established between representation, elections, and later on, democracy was continuously resisted by both radical democrats and reactionaries. Moreover, it was questioned by members of the numerous groups that were originally excluded from politics in many countries, such as women, workers, indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans. Those resistances to representative government became an integral part of the concurrent dynamics of both democratization and authoritarian personalization of contemporary politics, leading over time to a much richer and complex form of representation than the one initially tested in the early representative regimes of the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States. The Europeanization of representative controversies gave way to a spread of local, national, and regional political arrangements. Both the centrality and complexity of the concept of representation in contemporary European politics result from the intertwining of these levels and the conceptual circulation that characterized the Sattelzeit .

This makes transnational and global history engaging challenges, as they require dealing with the apparently opposed homogenizing and differentiating forces that took root, making every national situation singular and yet linked with regional and global changes. This section's aim is to provide some preliminary landmarks, focused on European cases, to that account. First, Bert Drejer deals with the critical conflict between local and national forms of representation in the Netherlands, when representative government started to gain momentum in the eighteenth century. Through a careful analysis of the vocabulary used (representation versus depiction), Drejer shows the conceptual scope of this dispute. Then Piotr Kuligowski chronicles the end of the Sattelzeit , on the eve of the 1848 revolution that brutally ended many of the controversies around political concepts. Kuligowski spells out how opposing liberal, democratic, and socialist Polish political organizations conceptualized representation through this momentous period. Both examples shed new light on the transnational understanding of the fascinating conceptual history of representation.

The original idea for this special section was inspired by a CONCEPTA research seminar, Comparing the Concepts of Representation . Convened by both editors, the seminar took place in November 2016 in Paris. Samuel Hayat acknowledges the support of the project (New) Political Representative Claims: A Global View (France, Germany, Brazil, China, India) (ANR-15-FRAL-0010). José María Rosales acknowledges the support of the project Civic Constellation III: Democracy, Constitutionalism, and Anti- Liberalism (Spain's National Research Fund, PGC2018-093573-B-I00). Both editors gratefully acknowledge Jan Ifversen's thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this introduction.

Heinz Eulau and John C. Wahlke, The Politics of Representation: Continuities in Theory and Research (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1978); Bernard Manin, Adam Przeworski, and Susan C. Stokes, “Elections and Representation,” in Democracy, Accountability, and Representation , ed. Adam Przeworski, Susan C. Stokes, and Bernard Manin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29–54; Jane Mansbridge, “Rethinking Representation,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 4 (2003): 515–528.

Nadia Urbinati and Mark E. Warren, “The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008): 387–412; The Economist Intelligence Unit, Democracy Index 2018: Me Too? Political Participation, Protest and Democracy , http://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index (accessed 7 February 2020).

Hanna F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1967).

Hasso Hofmann, Repräsentation: Studien zur Wort- und Begriffsgeschichte von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert [Representation: Studies on the history of words and concepts from antiquity to the nineteenth century] (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974).

Didier Mineur, Archéologie de la représentation politique: structure et fondement d'une crise [Archeology of political representation: Structure and foundation of a crisis] (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2010).

David Plotke, “Representation Is Democracy,” Constellations 4, no. 1 (1997): 19–34; Nadia Urbinati, “Continuity and Rupture: The Power of Judgment in Democratic Representation,” Constellations 12, no. 2 (2005): 194–222; Sofia Näsström, “Representative Democracy as Tautology: Ankersmit and Lefort on Representation,” European Journal of Political Theory 5, no. 3 (2006): 321–342.

Michael Saward, The Representative Claim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Lisa Disch, Mathijs van de Sande, and Nadia Urbinati, eds., The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

Reinhart Koselleck, “Basic Concepts in History: A Historical Dictionary of Political and Social Language in Germany,” trans. Michaela Richter, Contributions to the History of Concepts 6, no. 1 (2011): 1–37.

Adalbert Podlech, “Repräsentation,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe , vol. 5, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), 509–547.

Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Pierre Rosanvallon, Le peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France [The unfindable people: History of democratic representation in France] (Paris: Gallimard, 1998); Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).

See, e.g., Juan P. Luna and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, “Representation in Latin America: A Study of Elite-Mass Congruence in Nine Countries,” Comparative Political Studies 38, no. 4 (2005): 388–416; Omano Edigheji, “Political Representation in Africa: Towards a Conceptual Framework,” Africa Development 31, no. 3 (2006): 93–119; and Garry Rodan, “Compelling Ideologies of Political Representation in Southeast Asia,” Third World Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2012): 311–332.

Yves Sintomer, “The Meanings of Political Representation: Uses and Misuses of a Notion,” Raisons politiques 50 (2013): 13–34.

Wim Weymans, “Freedom through Political Representation: Lefort, Gauchet and Rosanvallon on the Relationship between State and Society,” European Journal of Political Theory 4, no. 3 (2005): 263–282.

Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962); Keith Michael Baker, Colin Lucas, François Furet, and Mona Ozouf, eds., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture , 4 vols. (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987); John Phillip Reid, The Concept of Representation in the Age of the American Revolution (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).

Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” European Journal of Philosophy 13, no. 2 (2005): 155–184.

Yves Sintomer, “La représentation-incarnation: idéaltype et configurations historiques” [Representation as embodiment: Ideal type and historical configurations], Raisons politiques 72 (2018): 21–52.

Baker et al., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture .

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society , trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989).

Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions: 1848–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Douglas Moggach and Gareth Stedman Jones, The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Contributor Notes

Samuel Hayat is a researcher in political science at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Lille. Email: [email protected]

José María Rosales is a professor of moral and political philosophy at the University of Málaga. Email: [email protected]

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Political Representation

The concept of political representation is misleadingly simple: everyone seems to know what it is, yet few can agree on any particular definition. In fact, there is an extensive literature that offers many different definitions of this elusive concept. [Classic treatments of the concept of political representations within this literature include Pennock and Chapman 1968; Pitkin, 1967 and Schwartz, 1988.] Hanna Pitkin (1967) provides, perhaps, one of the most straightforward definitions: to represent is simply to “make present again.” On this definition, political representation is the activity of making citizens' voices, opinions, and perspectives “present” in the public policy making processes. Political representation occurs when political actors speak, advocate, symbolize, and act on the behalf of others in the political arena. In short, political representation is a kind of political assistance. This seemingly straightforward definition, however, is not adequate as it stands. For it leaves the concept of political representation underspecified. Indeed, as we will see, the concept of political representation has multiple and competing dimensions: our common understanding of political representation is one that contains different, and conflicting, conceptions of how political representatives should represent and so holds representatives to standards that are mutually incompatible. In leaving these dimensions underspecified, this definition fails to capture this paradoxical character of the concept.

This encyclopedia entry has three main goals. The first is to provide a general overview of the meaning of political representation, identifying the key components of this concept. The second is to highlight several important advances that have been made by the contemporary literature on political representation. These advances point to new forms of political representation, ones that are not limited to the relationship between formal representatives and their constituents. The third goal is to reveal several persistent problems with theories of political representation and thereby to propose some future areas of research.

1.1 Delegate vs. Trustee

1.2 pitkin's four views of representation, 2. changing political realities and changing concepts of political representation, 3. contemporary advances, 4. future areas of study, a. general discussions of representation, b. arguments against representation, c. non-electoral forms of representation, d. representation and electoral design, e. representation and accountability, f. descriptive representation, other internet resources, related entries, 1. key components of political representation.

Political representation, on any account, will exhibit the following four components:

• some party that is representing (the representative, an organization, movement, state agency, etc.);
• some party that is being represented (the constituents, the clients, etc.);
• something that is being represented (opinions, perspectives, interests etc.); and
• a setting within which the activity of representation is taking place (the political context).

Theories of political representation often begin by specifying the terms for each of these four components. For instance, democratic theorists often limit the types of representatives being discussed to formal representatives — that is, to representatives who hold elected offices. One reason that the concept of representation remains elusive is that theories of representation often apply only to particular kinds of political actors within a particular context. How individuals represent an electoral district is treated as distinct from how social movements or informal organizations represent. Consequently, it is unclear how different forms of representation relate to each other.

This general agreement about the necessary components exhibited by political representation is somewhat misleading. For what exactly representatives do has been a hotly contested issue. In particular, a controversy has raged over whether representatives should act as delegates or trustees .

Historically, the theoretical literature on political representation has focused on whether representatives should act as delegates or as trustees . Representatives who are delegates simply follow the expressed preferences of their constituents. James Madison (1987) is one of the leading historical figures who articulated a delegate conception of representation. Trustees are representatives who follow their own understanding of the best action to pursue. Edmund Burke (1967) is famous for arguing that

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interest each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole… You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament (115).

Both the delegate and the trustee conception of political representation place competing and contradictory demands on the behavior of representatives. Delegate conceptions of representation require representatives to follow their constituent's preferences, while trustee conceptions require representatives to follow their own judgment about the proper course of action. Any adequate theory of representation must grapple with these contradictory demands.

Famously, Hanna Pitkin argues that theorists should not try to reconcile the paradoxical nature of the concept of representation. Rather, they should aim to preserve this paradox by recommending that citizens safeguard the autonomy of both the representative and of those being represented. Representatives must act in ways that safeguard the capacity of the represented to authorize and to hold their representatives accountable and uphold the capacity of the representative to act independently of the wishes of the represented. Objective interests are the key for determining whether the autonomy of representative and the autonomy of the represented have been breached. However, Pitkin never adequately specifies how we are to identify constituent's objective interests. At points, she implies that constituents should have some say in what are their objective interests, but ultimately she merely shifts her focus away from this paradox to the recommendation that representatives should be evaluated on the basis of the reasons they give for disobeying the preferences of their constituents. For Pitkin, assessments about representatives will depend on the issue at hand and the political environment in which a representative acts. To understand the multiple and conflicting standards within the concept of representation is to reveal the futility of holding all representatives to some fixed set of guidelines. In this way, Pitkin concludes that standards for evaluating representatives defy generalizations. Moreover, individuals, especially democratic citizens, are likely to disagree deeply about what representatives should be doing.

Pitkin offers one of the most comprehensive discussions of the concept of political representation, attending to its contradictory character in her The Concept of Representation . This classic discussion of the concept of representation is one of the most influential and oft-cited works in the literature on political representation. Adopting a Wittgensteinian approach to language, Pitkin maintains that in order to understand the concept of political representation, one must consider the different ways in which the term is used. Each of these different uses of the term provides a different view of the concept. Pitkin compares the concept of representation to “ a rather complicated, convoluted, three–dimensional structure in the middle of a dark enclosure.” Political theorists provide “flash-bulb photographs of the structure taken from different angles” [1967, 10]. More specifically, political theorists have provided four main views of the concept of representation. Unfortunately, Pitkin never explains how these different views of political representation fit together. At times, she implies that the concept of representation is unified. At other times, she emphasizes the conflicts between these different views, e.g. how descriptive representation is opposed to accountability. Drawing on her flash-bulb metaphor, Pitkin argues that one must know the context in which the concept of representation is placed in order to determine its meaning. Apparently, the views of representation can expand or unduly constrain our understanding of representation depending on how the ways in which the term is used in contemporary politics.

For Pitkin, disagreements about representation can be partially reconciled by clarifying which view of representation is being invoked. Pitkin identifies at least four different views of representation: formalistic representation, descriptive representation, symbolic representation, and substantive representation. (For a brief description of each of these views, see chart below.) Each view provides a different approach for examining representation. The different views of representation can also provide different standards for assessing representatives. So disagreements about what representatives ought to be doing are aggravated by the fact that people adopt the wrong view of representation or misapply the standards of representation. Pitkin has in many ways set the terms of contemporary discussions about representation by providing this schematic overview of the concept of political representation.

One cannot overestimate the extent to which Pitkin has shaped contemporary understandings of political representation, especially among political scientists. For example, her claim that descriptive representation opposes accountability is often the starting point for contemporary discussions about whether marginalized groups need representatives from their groups.

Similarly, Pitkin's conclusions about the paradoxical nature of political representation support the tendency among contemporary theorists and political scientists to focus on formal procedures of authorization and accountability (formalistic representation). In particular, there has been a lot of theoretical attention paid to the proper design of representative institutions (e.g. Amy 1996; Barber, 2001; Christiano 1996; Guinier 1994). This focus is certainly understandable, since one way to resolve the disputes about what representatives should be doing is to “let the people decide.” In other words, establishing fair procedures for reconciling conflicts provides democratic citizens one way to settle conflicts about the proper behavior of representatives. In this way, theoretical discussions of political representation tend to depict political representation as primarily a principal-agent relationship. The emphasis on elections also explains why discussions about the concept of political representation frequently collapse into discussions of democracy. Political representation is understood as a way of 1) establishing the legitimacy of democratic institutions and 2) creating institutional incentives for governments to be responsive to citizens.

David Plotke (1997) has noted that this emphasis on mechanisms of authorization and accountability was especially useful in the context of the Cold War. For this understanding of political representation (specifically, its demarcation from participatory democracy) was useful for distinguishing Western democracies from Communist countries. Those political systems that held elections were considered to be democratic. Plotke questions whether such a distinction continues to be useful. Plotke recommends that we broaden the scope of our understanding of political representation to encompass interest representation and thereby return to debating what is the proper activity of representatives. Plotke's insight into why traditional understandings of political representation resonated prior to the end of the Cold War suggests that modern understandings of political representation are to some extent contingent on political realities. For this reason, those who attempt to define political representation should recognize how changing political realities can affect contemporary understandings of political representation. Again, following Pitkin, it would appear that our ideas about political representation are contingent on existing political practices of representation. Our understandings of representation are inextricably shaped by the manner in which people are currently being represented.

As mentioned earlier, theoretical discussions of political representation have focused mainly on the formal procedures of authorization and accountability within nation states, that is, on what Pitkin called formalistic representation. However, such a focus is no longer satisfactory due to international and domestic political transformations. [For an extensive discussion of international and domestic transformations, see Mark Warren and Dario Castioglione (2004).] Increasingly international, transnational and non-governmental actors play an important role in advancing public policies on behalf of democratic citizens—that is, acting as representatives for those citizens. Such actors “speak for,” “act for” and can even “stand for” individuals within a nation-state. It is no longer desirable to limit one's understanding of political representation to elected officials within the nation-state. After all, such officials do not necessarily possess “the capacity to act,” the capacity that is most often used to identify who is acting as a representative. In other words, as the powers of nation-state have been diffused by international and transnational actors, elected representatives are no longer responsible for deciding or implementing the public policies that directly impact the citizens who authorized them. Given the role that International Non-Governmental Organizations play in the international arena, the representatives of dispossessed groups are no longer located in the formal political arena of the nation-state. Given these changes, the traditional focus of political representation, that is, on elections within nation-states, is insufficient for understanding how public policies are being made and implemented. The complexity of modern issues and the multiple locations of political power suggest that contemporary notions of accountability are inadequate. Grant and Keohane (2005) have recently updated notions of accountability, suggesting that the scope of political representation needs to be expanded in order to reflect contemporary realities in the international arena.

Domestic transformations also reveal the need to update contemporary understandings of political representation. Associational life — social movements, interest groups, and civic associations—is increasingly recognized as important for the survival of representative democracies. The extent to which interest groups write public policies or play a central role in implementing and regulating policies is the extent to which the division between formal and informal representation has been blurred. The fluid relationship between the career paths of formal and informal representatives also suggests that contemporary realities do not justify focusing mainly on formal representatives.

Given these changes, it is necessary to revisit our conceptual understanding of political representation, specifically of democratic representation. For as Jane Mansbridge has recently noted, normative understandings of representation have not kept up with recent empirical research and contemporary democratic practices. In her important article “Rethinking Representation” Mansbridge identifies four forms of representation in modern democracies: promissory, anticipatory, gyroscopic and surrogacy. Promissory representation is a form of representation in which representatives are to be evaluated by the promises they make to constituents during campaigns. Promissory representation strongly resembles Pitkin's discussion of formalistic representation. For both are primarily concerned with the ways that constituents give their consent to the authority of a representative. Drawing on recent empirical work, Mansbridge argues for the existence of three additional forms of representation. In anticipatory representation, representatives focus on what they think their constituents will reward in the next election and not on what they promised during the campaign of the previous election. Thus, anticipatory representation challenges those who understand accountability as primarily a retrospective activity. In gyroscopic representation, representatives “look within” to derive from their own experience conceptions of interest and principles to serve as a basis for their action. Finally, surrogate representation occurs when a legislator represents constituents outside of their districts. For Mansbridge, each of these different forms of representation generates a different normative criterion by which representatives should be assessed. All four forms of representation, then, are ways that democratic citizens can be legitimately represented within a democratic regime. Yet none of the latter three forms representation operates through the formal mechanisms of authorization and accountability.

Mansbridge's work holds an important insight for contemporary discussions of democratic representation. By specifying the different forms of representation within a democratic polity, Mansbridge teaches us that we should refer to the multiple forms of democratic representation. Democratic representation should not be conceived as a monolithic concept. Moreover, what is abundantly clear is that democratic representation should no longer be treated as consisting simply in a relationship between elected officials and constituents within her voting district. Political representation should no longer be understood as a simple principal-agent relationship. Andrew Rehfeld has gone farther, maintaining that political representation should no longer be territorially based. In other words, Rehfeld (2005) argues that constituencies, e.g. electoral districts, should not be constructed based on where citizens live.

There have been a number of important advances to the concept of political representation. In particular, these advances call to question the traditional way of thinking of political representation as a principal-agent relationship. Most notably, Melissa Williams' recent work has recommended reenvisioning the activity of representation in light of the experiences of historically disadvantaged groups. In particular, she recommends understanding representation as “mediation.” In particular, Williams (1998, 8) identifies three different dimensions of political life that representatives must “mediate:” the dynamics of legislative decision-making, the nature of legislator-constituent relations, and the basis for aggregating citizens into representable constituencies. She explains each aspect by using a corresponding theme (voice, trust, and memory) and by drawing on the experiences of marginalized groups in the United States. For example, drawing on the experiences of American women trying to gain equal citizenship, Williams argues that historically disadvantaged groups need a “voice” in legislative decision-making. The “heavily deliberative” quality of legislative institutions requires the presence of individuals who have direct access to historically excluded perspectives.

In addition, Williams explains how representatives need to mediate the representative-constituent relationship in order to build “trust.” For Williams, trust is the cornerstone for democratic accountability. Relying on the experiences of African-Americans, Williams shows the consistent patterns of betrayal of African-Americans by privileged white citizens that give them good reason for distrusting white representatives and the institutions themselves. For Williams, relationships of distrust can be “at least partially mended if the disadvantaged group is represented by its own members”(1998, 14). Finally, representation involves mediating how groups are defined. The boundaries of groups according to Williams are partially established by past experiences — what Williams calls “memory.” Having certain shared patterns of marginalization justifies certain institutional mechanisms to guarantee presence.

Williams offers her understanding of representation as mediation as a supplement to what she regards as the traditional conception of liberal representation. Williams identifies two strands in liberal representation. The first strand she describes as the “ideal of fair representation as an outcome of free and open elections in which every citizen has an equally weighted vote” (1998, 57). The second strand is interest-group pluralism, which Williams describes as the “theory of the organization of shared social interests with the purpose of securing the equitable representation … of those groups in public policies” ( ibid .). Together, the two strands provide a coherent approach for achieving fair representation, but the traditional conception of liberal representation as made up of simply these two strands is inadequate. In particular, Williams criticizes the traditional conception of liberal representation for failing to take into account the injustices experienced by marginalized groups in the United States. Thus, Williams expands accounts of political representation beyond the question of institutional design and thus, in effect, challenges those who understand representation as simply a matter of formal procedures of authorization and accountability.

Another recent way of reenvisioning representation was offered by Nadia Urbinati (2000, 2002). Urbinati argues for understanding representation as advocacy. For Urbinati, the point of representation should not be the aggregation of interests, but the preservation of disagreements necessary for preserving liberty. Urbinati identifies two main features of advocacy: 1) the representative's passionate link to the electors cause and 2) the representative's relative autonomy of judgment. Urbinati emphasizes the importance of the former for motivating representatives to deliberate with each other and their constituents. For Urbinati the benefit of conceptualizing representation as advocacy is that it improves our understanding of deliberative democracy. In particular, it avoids a common mistake made by many contemporary deliberative democrats: focusing on the formal procedures of deliberation at the expense of examining the sources of inequality within civil society, e.g. the family. The benefit of Urbinati's understanding of representation is that it emphasizes the importance of the domain of opinion and consent formation. In particular, this contemporary addition to the theoretical literature poses an agonistic conception of representation, one that emphasizes the importance of disagreements and rhetoric to the procedures, practices, and ethos of democracy. Her account expands the scope of theoretical discussions of representation away from formal procedures of authorization to the deliberative and expressive dimensions of representative institutions. In this way, those who recommend adopting an understanding of representation as advocacy provide a theoretical tool to those who wish to explain how non-state actors “represent.”

Other political theorists have asked us to rethink our understanding of democratic representation. In Inclusion and Democracy Iris Marion Young asks us to rethink the importance of descriptive representation. Young warns that attempts to include more voices in the political arena can suppress other voices. She illustrates this point using the example of a Latino representative who might inadvertently represent straight Latinos at the expense of gay and lesbian Latinos (1986, 350). For Young, the suppression of differences is a problem for all representation (1986, 351). Representatives of large districts or of small communities must negotiate the difficulty of one person representing many. Because such a difficulty is constitutive of representation, it is unreasonable to assume that representation should be characterized by a “relationship of identity.” The legitimacy of a representative is not primarily a function of his or her similarities to the represented. For Young, the representative should not be treated as a substitute for the represented. Consequently, Young recommends reconceptualizing representation as a differentiated relationship (2000, 125-127; 1986, 357). There are two main benefits of Young's understanding of representation. First, her understanding of representation encourages us to recognize the diversity of those being represented. Second, her analysis of representation emphasizes the importance of recognizing how representative institutions include as well as they exclude. Democratic citizens need to remain vigilant about the ways in which providing representation for some groups comes at the expense of excluding others.

Moreover, based on this way of understanding political representation, Young provides an alterative account of democratic representation. Specifically, she envisions democratic representation as a dynamic process, one that moves between moments of authorization and moments of accountability (2000, 129). It is the movement between these moments that makes the process “democratic.” This fluidity allows citizens to authorize their representatives and for traces of that authorization to be evident in what the representatives do and how representatives are held accountable. The appropriateness of any given representative is therefore partially dependent on future behavior as well as on his or her past relationships. For this reason, Young maintains that evaluation of this process must be continuously “deferred.” We must assess representation dynamically, that is, assess the whole ongoing processes of authorization and accountability of representatives. Young's discussion of the dynamic of representation emphasizes the ways in which evaluations of representatives are incomplete, needing to incorporate extent to which democratic citizens need to suspend their evaluations of representatives and the extent to which representatives can face unanticipated issues.

Another insight about democratic representation that comes from the literature on descriptive representation is the importance of contingencies. Here the work of Jane Mansbridge on descriptive representation has been particularly influential. Mansbridge recommends that we evaluate descriptive representatives by contexts and certain functions. More specifically, Mansbridge (1999, 628) focuses on four functions and their related contexts in which disadvantaged groups would want to be represented by someone who belongs to their group. Those four functions are “(1) adequate communication in contexts of mistrust, (2) innovative thinking in contexts of uncrystallized, not fully articulated, interests, … (3) creating a social meaning of ‘ability to rule’ for members of a group in historical contexts where the ability has been seriously questioned and (4) increasing the polity's de facto legitimacy in contexts of past discrimination.” For Mansbridge, descriptive representatives are needed when marginalized groups distrust members of relatively more privileged citizens and when marginalized groups possess political preferences that have not been fully formed. The need for descriptive representation is contingent on certain functions.

Mansbridge's insight about the contingency of descriptive representation suggests that at some point descriptive representatives might not be necessary. However, she doesn't specify how we are to know if interests have become crystallized or trust has formed to the point that the need for descriptive representation would be obsolete. Thus, Mansbridge's discussion of descriptive representation suggests that standards for evaluating representatives are fluid and flexible.

Mansbridge's discussion of descriptive representation points to another trend within the literature on political representation — namely, the trend to derive normative accounts of representation from their function. Russell Hardin (2004) captured this trend most clearly in his position that “if we wish to assess the morality of elected officials, we must understand their function as our representatives and then infer how they can fulfill this function.” For Hardin, only an empirical explanation of the role of a representative is necessary for determining what a representative should be doing. In Ruling Passions , Andrew Sabl (2002) links the proper behavior of representatives to their particular office. In particular, Sabl focuses on three offices: senator, organizer and activist. He argues that the same standards should not be used to evaluate these different offices. Rather, each office is responsible for promoting democratic constancy, what Sabl understands as “the effective pursuit of interest.” Sabl (2002) and Hardin (2004) exemplify the trend to tie the standards for evaluating political representatives to the activity and office of those representatives.

There are three persistent problems associated with political representation. Each of these problems identifies a future area of investigation. The first problem is the proper institutional design for representative institutions within democratic polities. The theoretical literature on political representation has paid a lot of attention to the institutional design of democracies. More specifically, political theorists have recommended everything from proportional representation (e.g. Guinier, 1994 and Christiano, 1996) to citizen juries (Fishkin, 1995). However, with the growing number of democratic states, we are likely to witness more variation among the different forms of political representation. There is likely to be much debate about the advantages and disadvantages of these different ways of representing democratic citizens.

This leads to a second future line of inquiry — ways in which democratic citizens can be marginalized by representative institutions. This problem is articulated most clearly by Young's discussion of the difficulties arising from one person representing many. Young suggests that representative institutions can include the opinions, perspectives and interests of some citizens at the expense of marginalizing the opinions, perspectives and interests of others. Hence, a problem with institutional reforms aimed at increasing the representation of historically disadvantaged groups is that such reforms can and often do decrease the responsiveness of representatives. For instance, the creation of black districts has created safe zones for black elected officials so that they are less accountable to their constituents. Any decrease in accountability is especially worrisome given the ways citizens are vulnerable to their representatives. Thus, one future line of research is examining the ways that representative institutions marginalize the interests, opinions and perspectives of democratic citizens.

In particular, it is necessary for to acknowledge the biases of representative institutions. While Schumpeter (1976) has long noted the class bias of representative institutions, there is little discussion of how to improve the political representation of the disaffected — that is, the political representation of those citizens who do not have the will, the time, or political resources to participate in politics. The absence of such a discussion is particularly apparent in the literature on descriptive representation, the area that is most concerned with disadvantaged citizens. Anne Phillips (1995) raises the problems with the representation of the poor, e.g. the inability to define class, however, she argues for issues of class to be integrated into a politics of presence. Few theorists have taken up Phillip's gauntlet and articulated how this integration of class and a politics of presence is to be done. Of course, some have recognized the ways in which interest groups, associations, and individual representatives can betray the least well off (e.g. Strolovitch, 2004). And some (Dovi, 2003) have argued that descriptive representatives need to be selected based on their relationship to citizens who have been unjustly excluded and marginalized by democratic politics. However, it is unclear how to counteract the class bias that pervades domestic and international representative institutions. It is necessary to specify the conditions under which certain groups within a democratic polity require enhanced representation. Recent empirical literature has suggested that the benefits of having descriptive representatives is by no means straightforward (Gay, 2002).

A third and final area of research involves the relationship between representation and democracy. Historically, representation was considered to be in opposition with democracy [See Dahl (1989) for a historical overview of the concept of representation]. When compared to the direct forms of democracy found in the ancient city-states, notably Athens, representative institutions appear to be poor substitutes for the ways that citizens actively ruled themselves. Barber (1984) has famously argued that representative institutions were opposed to strong democracy. In contrast, almost everyone now agrees that democratic political institutions are representative ones.

Bernard Manin (1997)reminds us that the Athenian Assembly, which often exemplifies direct forms of democracy, had only limited powers. According to Manin, the practice of selecting magistrates by lottery is what separates representative democracies from so-called direct democracies. Consequently, Manin argues that the methods of selecting public officials are crucial to understanding what makes representative governments democratic. He identifies four principles distinctive of representative government: 1) Those who govern are appointed by election at regular intervals; 2) The decision-making of those who govern retains a degree of independence from the wishes of the electorate; 3) Those who are governed may give expression to their opinions and political wishes without these being subject of the control of those who govern; and 4) Public decisions undergo the trial of debate (6). For Manin, historical democratic practices hold important lessons for determining whether representative institutions are democratic.

While it is clear that representative institutions are vital institutional components of democratic institutions, much more needs to be said about the meaning of democratic representation. In particular, it is important not to presume that all acts of representation are equally democratic. After all, not all acts of representation within a representative democracy are necessarily instances of democratic representation. Henry Richardson (2002) has recently explored the undemocratic ways that members of the bureaucracy can represent citizens. [For a more detailed discussion of non-democratic forms of representation, see Apter (1968).] Similarly, it is unclear whether a representative who actively seeks to dismantle democratic institutions is representing democratically. Does democratic representation require representatives to advance the preferences of democratic citizens or does it require a commitment to democratic institutions? At this point, answers to such questions are unclear. What is certain is that democratic citizens are likely to disagree about what constitutes democratic representation.

One popular approach to addressing the different and conflicting standards used to evaluate representatives within democratic polities, is to simply equate multiple standards with democratic ones. More specifically, it is argued that democratic standards are pluralistic, accommodating the different standards possessed and used by democratic citizens. Theorists who adopt this approach fail to specify the proper relationship among these standards. For instance, it is unclear how the standards that Mansbridge identifies in the four different forms of representation should relate to each other. Does it matter if promissory forms of representation are replaced by surrogate forms of representation? A similar omission can be found in Pitkin: although Pitkin specifies there is a unified relationship among the different views of representation, she never describes how the different views interact. This omission reflects the lacunae in the literature about how formalistic representation relates to descriptive and substantive representation. Without such a specification, it is not apparent how citizens can determine if they have adequate powers of authorization and accountability.

Currently, it is not clear exactly what makes any given form of representation consistent, let alone consonant, with democratic representation. Is it the synergy among different forms or should we examine descriptive representation in isolation to determine the ways that it can undermine or enhance democratic representation? One tendency is to equate democratic representation simply with the existence of fluid and multiple standards. While it is true that the fact of pluralism provides justification for democratic institutions as Christiano (1996) has argued, it should no longer presumed that all forms of representation are democratic since the actions of representatives can be used to dissolve or weaken democratic institutions. The final research area is to articulate the relationship between different forms of representation and ways that these forms can undermine democratic representation.

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Burke, Edmund | democracy

What Does Political Representation Mean?

Apr 13, 2023 | 2023 , election laws , elections , Voting | 0 comments

Representation Under Different Electoral Systems: What does representation mean? 

Billy McKeon, ’23 International Affairs Major with a concentration in Global Human Development, Madison Center Campus Vote Project Fellow

Many intersectional forces play into an individual’s decision to vote or sit out an election. For example, Flavia Roscini argues that the news media landscape discourages voters from participating in politics altogether. Other factors include barriers to voting (which vary state to state and can take many forms)such as the issues on the ballot, political socialization, and sociopolitical status – to name only a few. So how can the U.S. increase participation in its elections? Amy suggests that different electoral systems produce different forms of representation, some of which can expand representation in several different ways.

What Voting System Does America Use? 

America uses single member plurality (SMP) voting in a majority of its elections. In this system candidates are selected one at a time in separate districts, and the candidate with the majority (or plurality ) of votes wins. This system is used often at local, state, and federal elections. For example, Virginia’s governor Glenn Younking was elected by winning the plurality of the votes in Virginia. In gubernatorial elections, Virginia is considered one large winner-take-all district, and the candidate with the plurality (or highest percentage) of votes wins.

Representation is the process of an elected official bringing the needs of their constituents to the legislature they are a part of and presenting them to their colleagues. For example, Glenn Younkin signing and helping pass laws through the Virginia State Legislature is how he chooses to represent his constituency.

What Does Proportional Representation Look Like? 

One form of proportional representation is the party-list system. In this, voters cast a vote for a political party rather than an individual candidate. Seats are then allocated to parties in proportion to the number of votes they receive. There are two forms: closed-list and open-list party systems In a closed-list, parties create lists of candidates, and the order of the list determines who will take the seats if the party wins. In an open-list, voters can pick which candidate they vote for an individual candidate from a list offered by political parties. This system allows third-parties to compete with Democratic and Republican candidates. For example, if one district is electing five representatives and there are five parties, then a candidate only needs 20% of the vote to win. This is a much smaller hurdle to overcome.

Another form is the mixed-member  proportional representation system. This system combines elements of both single-member districts and proportional representation. Voters cast two ballots – one for a local representative and another for a political party. The local representatives are elected through a single member plurality system, while the number of seats allocated to each party at the state and federal level are adjusted to ensure that the overall outcome is proportional. States in this system would be composed of large, multi-member districts and voters would have many options to choose from. Advocates of  proportional representation like Amy suggest that this would be a good system to help in the process of transitioning from single member plurality to proportional representation, since it incorporates elements of our current electoral system.

The last form is Single Transferable Vote (STV) system. This system allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. If a candidate does not receive enough first-preference votes to win a seat, their votes are transferred to their voters’ second-preference choices. This process continues until all the seats are filled. All of these forms allow the presence of third-parties by eliminating the threshold of gaining a plurality of votes in order to gain representation. In other words, all of these systems would expand representation in America as we know it today.

Benefits of Proportional Representation 

Proportional representation also drastically decreases the amount of “wasted” votes in a democracy. “Wasted” votes refer to ballots cast that do not result in any representation in government and vote for the losing candidate, for example, with third party candidates. With Democrats and Republicans always consuming such a large majority of the vote, it’s nearly impossible for a third party to be competitive in these elections. In proportional representation however, parties can gain representation with smaller vote percentages. This can allow marginalized communities who feel excluded from the two major parties to gain representation by casting only (typically) 10-20% of the total vote.

Voters who cast votes for third party candidates in consecutive elections are less likely to vote in future elections, assuming their candidate will lose. For example, a voter in Nancy Pelosi’s district explained, “Vote? Why Vote? I know who’s going to win” (Amy, p. 62). Some districts can become so one-sided that the opposing major-party stops running candidates altogether and surrenders the seat – leaving the voters with literally no choice. For example , either Democrats or Republicans refused to nominate a candidate in over 40% of contests for state legislature, which was lower than that of the 1998 state elections – 41.1%.

Voting habits also significantly increased as a result of proportional representation. For example, an analysis found that Cambridge Massachusetts held elections where over 95% of the electorate’s votes went towards the election of a candidate. Cambridge uses a single transferable vote election system.

Proportional representation additionally helps voters avoid what Amy calls the lesser of two evils ideology. This thinking describes voters who choose to vote for a candidate they don’t align with, but they do so to avoid the election of the alternative major-party candidate. For example, a poll found that over half of the voters who supported Biden in the 2020 Presidential Election, only did so because he “wasn’t Trump.” Pew Research found that nearly two in every five Americans express a desire for additional parties due to lack of affiliation with the two major parties, and the percentage of independents to be on the rise as well. Americans shouldn’t be forced to settle for candidates they elect.

Gerrymandering has been a long standing bruise on American democracy, with more Americans disapproving than approving our redistricting system. Gerrymandering involves incumbents purposely redrawing district lines to ensure their political survival. Sometimes we even see a sweetheart gerrymander , where parties agree to allow each other an equal number of “safe seats” through the redistricting process. However,  proportional representation can help quell these competition-destroying “safe seats” because if more of one party is packed tightly into a district – they will simply win a higher percentage of the seats in that district. For example, in two 5-seat districts, a party could win 20% of the vote in one district, 80% in the other and gain 5 seats. They can also achieve this same outcome by winning 50% of the vote in each district. Additionally, larger districts would be allotted more seats in this system.

Lastly, campaigns in  proportional representation systems are more issue-focused. When elections are between two candidates, we often see more mud-slinging, personal attacks, and conversations unrelated to socio-political topics on the ballot. In the first Presidential Debate of 2020, for example, was highlighted by Biden telling his opponent to “shut up,” and Donald Trump attacking his son in front of the nation. Amy describes that, “a multiparty legislature would encourage a truly pluralistic debate” and give voters more choices (104).

America can improve its system of democracy and expand representation through the adoption of proportional representation election systems. As Amy proves, replacing our single member party system with a mixed-member, single transferable vote, or party-list proportional representation system will give Americans a wider variety of political parties to choose from, encourage issue-focused campaigning, raise voter turnout, and practically eliminate gerrymandering.

But what does electoral reform look like in the U.S.? Amending our system of federal elections would require a constitutional amendment – a lengthy and difficult process. However, states and local towns have much fewer obstacles to overcome when amending their constitutions. In fact, dozens of states have reformed their constitution since 1970. Proportional representation will be implemented most easily at this level. We also must remember that there are powerful people and groups who benefit from plurality voting, and will fight hard to keep it in place. Amy suggests that individuals who are on the fence about  proportional representation voting can look at its track record, saying “ Proportional representation has worked where it has been used ” (172).

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CREDIT: DAVIDE BONAZZI / THEISPOT

Researchers are studying why hostility has become so high between groups with different political leanings.

Divided we stand: The rise of political animosity

Scientists peered into the partisan abyss. Here’s what they found.

By Carl-Johan Karlsson 08.19.2024

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America, it is often said, has never been more divided. Gone are the days when politicians routinely brokered deals across the aisle, and Republican and Democratic voters could disagree on policy yet still get along over the dinner table. Instead, polarization has transformed the democratic process, which once thrived on compromise and respectful dialogue, into a winner-takes-all battleground of dysfunction and animosity.

Congress, mired in perpetual gridlock, struggles to pass even the most essential legislation, undermining the principles of democracy. This legislative stalemate reflects a broader societal trend where Americans increasingly see those with opposing views not merely as adversaries, but as enemies.

This revelation has caused scholars to reevaluate the historical assumptions about what divides us as citizens: Is it anti-immigrant nationalism that pushes us towards the poles, or is it the widening chasm of inequality? Could the culprit be unchecked online vitriol and the diminished gatekeeping role of traditional media? Or perhaps it’s the allure of strongman leadership in uncertain times?

These deep divisions, which have intensified since the 1980s, were once deemed a largely American saga, with many experts blaming the country’s unusual two-party system. But in the past decade, political scientists have uncovered a similar trend across the globe — not just in countries with two invariably dominating political parties but in nations with diverse societal compositions, governing structures and levels of economic development. Such divisions have been reported in well-established multiparty democracies like Switzerland, Denmark and New Zealand, and in emerging economies such as Bulgaria, Turkey, the Czech Republic and Poland.

While there is no one explanation for why countries worldwide are fraying into extremes, recent findings suggest a common denominator: namely, that the key driver of polarization is more about emotion and identity than policy positions — a phenomenon known as “affective polarization.” Researchers are increasingly focusing on how people’s emotional and identity-based attachments to their political groups fuel hostility toward the opposition.

This shift in understanding emphasizes that the divide isn’t merely about differing opinions on issues. It is deeply rooted in the perception of political opponents as threats to one’s way of life and core values.

Once upon a friendlier time

The US wasn’t always so polarized. In fact, there was a time when some experts argued that American politics wasn’t polarized enough. In the 1950s, the American Political Science Association published a study concluding that the parties needed to become more distinct and coherent . “What the political scientists were saying in the 1950s was, ‘Nobody can tell the difference between our parties, nobody knows who to vote for, because we’re not making it clear, and so we need to be more different,’” says political psychologist Lilliana Mason of Johns Hopkins University, coauthor of the 2022 book Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy .

That ’50s report was widely criticized by the political science community at the time, but the decades that followed would set in motion sociopolitical changes that, eventually, more than fulfilled its vision.

The 1960s were the starting point of a sharper alignment in American politics, as civil rights legislation prompted many Southern Democrats to switch to the Republican Party, initiating a sorting that eventually grouped economic and racial conservatives together. Today, the increasing party distinctiveness is unmistakable in Congress. Between the 1950s and 1970s, typical members of Congress voted with their party on divisive questions just more than 60 percent of the time; in the 1990s, this figure rose past 80 percent, and since 2000, it has exceeded 87 percent.

In 2023, the average Democratic senator voted with President Biden 99 percent of the time on issues where Biden had a clear stance, according to the ABC News-owned polling website 538 . In the House, that figure was 93 percent, while the average Republican voted with the president only 5 percent of the time.

However, that doesn’t mean politicians are farther apart on policy issues than in the past, says Frances Lee, a political scientist now at Princeton University who wrote about the effect of party polarization on governance in the 2015 issue of the Annual Review of Political Science . What is often missed, Lee explains, are changes in the scope of policy issues over time. For example, even though measurements show increasing party division over what are categorized as civil rights issues, many of today’s votes are narrower in their effects than the 1960s civil rights legislation. This makes historical comparisons difficult.

In fact, Lee adds, while some measurements suggest more division , what they actually show is simply that the voting behavior of politicians has become more predictable. Unlike the bipartisan support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, today’s politicians tend to vote strictly with their party on divisive topics. Voting with one’s team may have become more important than policy.

A common ground ignored

Citizens may also not be as far apart on policy as commonly believed.

For example, a 2022 study published in The Journal of Politics shows that Americans severely misestimate the extent of ideological extremism of the opposing party’s voters. The authors surveyed over 13,000 Americans selected to reflect the demographics of the US population. Forty-nine percent of respondents said that voters belonging to the opposite party are extreme in their policy positions and frequently discuss politics; in reality, only 14 percent of voters behave that way.

“One thing we know is that it’s a very small slice of the public that has genuine, deep, ideological roots,” says Matthew Levendusky, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who coauthored the study. “If you could give an essay quiz and ask people to explain liberalism and conservatism, that’s the domain of a small set of political activists and political hobbyists.”

Americans regularly misperceive people with different political loyalties. Participants in this survey reported their perceptions of the “typical” member of the rival party — how ideologically extreme their positions were as well as how frequently they engaged in political discussions. These ratings were then compared with actual behaviors among survey respondents.

The rest of us couldn’t explain the underlying philosophy of our policy positions. Rather, Levendusky says, people look to their party for guidance on what positions they should take, such as being in favor of more stringent gun control and climate policy if you’re a Democrat and being pro-gun rights and anti-tax if you’re a Republican.

In other words, as politicians increasingly prioritized party loyalty over policy deliberation, the electorate followed suit. By the 1990s and early 2000s, the Republican Party had become the camp of white Christian America, while the Democratic Party became a mix of everyone else, Mason says. Geographically, the divide grew: While members of different parties used to meet at church or the grocery store, Democrats increasingly became identified with urban and coastal areas, and Republicans with rural and heartland regions.

As a result, party affiliation evolved beyond political preference and became linked to racial, religious, cultural and geographical identities , Mason and coauthor Julie Wronski wrote in a 2018 paper. This alignment, they noted, intensified loyalty to one’s own party and diminished tolerance for opposing partisans. The growing focus on identity in American politics has been evident in the past decade, reflected in policy priorities, campaign strategies, media coverage and the actions of social movements.

Interestingly, Mason and Wronski’s research suggests — despite what some commentators posit — that Republicans are more susceptible to identity-based politics than those on the left, due to their party’s social homogeneity.

Mason also notes that even when Republicans and Democrats agree on policy, these identities can still foster animosity . To her, rather than carefully weighing the policies of a given party, supporters are becoming just that — supporters. In essence, we’re acting more like fans of a football team going to a game than a banker carefully choosing investments, she says.

The Democratic and Republican parties have become increasingly distinct in their demographic and ideological compositions. The Democratic Party has seen a growing representation of Blacks, Hispanics, seculars and liberals, shifting from a predominantly white coalition to one characterized by diversity and inclusion of nontraditional groups. In contrast, the Republican Party has solidified its base among whites, Christians and conservatives, reinforcing a homogeneous profile. This clear demographic sorting has led to a widely accepted view of Democrats as champions of racial diversity, religious secularism and liberalism, while Republicans are generally identified as white Christian conservatives.

Taking the political temperature

Other researchers have also concluded that mass polarization in the United States is less about policy-based division and more about people liking their own political camp and disliking the opposing one . A 2019 article in the Annual Review of Political Science , coauthored by Levendusky, shows that such affective polarization has increased drastically in the last four decades. Using survey data from the American National Election Study (ANES), the review measured feelings of warmth or coldness toward one’s own party and the opposing party on a “feeling thermometer” scale from 0 to 100.

Affective polarization, calculated as the difference between these ratings, rose from 22.64 degrees in 1978 to 40.87 degrees in 2016. While warm feelings toward one’s own party remained stable at around 70, sentiment toward the opposing party worsened significantly, dropping from the high 40s to just above 25.

More recent ANES data show that between 2016 and 2020, both warm feelings toward one’s own party and cold feelings toward the opposition increased even further, with affective polarization jumping from 41 to 52.2 degrees.

Negative feelings toward the rival party have worsened significantly, while positive feelings toward one’s own party have remained relatively stable. The trend illustrates rising affective polarization, with partisan sentiments becoming increasingly negative toward the opposition.

Researchers have found evidence of a similar dynamic playing out in other countries. For instance, one 2019 study — using the same feelings-thermometer score system — assessed supporters’ feelings toward their preferred and opposing parties in 22 European democracies and the United States between 2005 and 2016. It found that affective polarization was acutely present in European party systems — especially in Central Eastern Europe and Southern Europe.

As in the United States, hatred between voters in Europe isn’t necessarily connected to policy-based division, the study showed. But the link between the two appears to be stronger in structured, Western democracies with clear left-right spectrums, such as Germany and Sweden, notes political scientist Andres Reiljan of the European University Institute near Florence, who authored the study. Conversely, in poorer and less stable countries like Bulgaria and Montenegro, issues such as corruption and perceived incompetence might be more likely to drive hatred than policy divisions, the study suggests.

A 2021 study across 51 countries reported similar results, with countries like Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic among the most polarized nations, while Iceland, Finland and the Netherlands appeared significantly less divided. Interestingly, these two studies showed the US as only moderately polarized when compared with other countries, but Reiljan, for one, notes that in his study, the categorization was based on figures from 2016. “Now, with our more recent data, I will say that, yes, it is comparatively also very highly polarized,” he says. “And it’s increasing faster, I would say, than most other countries.”

Reiljan’s suspicion received support from a study measuring trends in 12 OECD countries over the last 40 years. Of the countries included, the US experienced the largest increase in polarization . A 2023 study using the latest available data showed similar results, with the Unites States leading the pack in polarization if measuring the whole electorate, while affective polarization increased most noticeably in the United States and Germany among those who report a partisan identity.

Identity and emotion lead the way

One potential explanation for the intensity of partisan hatred in the US comes from a 2022 study published in the British Journal of Political Science . Examining data from 20 Western democracies since the mid-1990s, it found that people’s anger over political disagreements on issues like migration, religion and LGBTQ+ rights has intensified more than disagreement over economic issues.

These findings hint at what other scholars have proposed in the US context: that polarization today has much to do with identity and emotion. The most central topics in politics, such as abortion rights or racial policy, are essentially identity-based issues, Mason says. “And when the issue is about a group, about their very existence or status, or whether they are respected equally as Americans, or whether they have the same rights as other Americans, it doesn’t feel like an issue for that person. It feels like an existential threat.”

“That change, from debates about the economy to debates about cultural issues, based on our research, has been most dramatic in the United States,” says James Adams, a political scientist at the University of California, Davis, and a coauthor of the British Journal of Political Science study. “That may be one of the reasons why affective polarization has intensified dramatically in the United States over the last 25 years or so.”

Parties across Europe have also homed in on cultural issues, especially populist leaders who leverage explosive topics to rally voter blocs. But while most experts see the rise of extremist parties as a key driver of polarization, studies may fail to fully capture this. Measuring affective polarization in the multiparty context seen in many European countries is challenging because traditional metrics, such as the feeling thermometer, are designed for two-party systems. In multiparty systems, voters may intensely hate one party but feel neutral toward others, diluting the final score.

The US has experienced the most rapid growth in affective polarization among the general electorate since 1980 among the 12 OECD countries considered in this 2024 study, with five other countries experiencing smaller increases in polarization, and six experiencing declines in polarization.

Despite this, there’s a clear polarizing trend to be seen, with these intensely disliked populist parties growing stronger and disliking the mainstream in return, says political scientist Markus Wagner of the University of Vienna, who specializes in research on party competition and political behavior.

Negative campaigns deepen the divide

Research suggests that affective polarization is also fueled by the negative campaigning that has become a staple of modern electoral communication. A 2024 paper analyzing surveys and 17 elections between 2016 and 2020 found that political leaders’ attacks — on opponents’ policies, records or character — exacerbate affective polarization. This effect is more pronounced among those with strong partisan leanings.

Study coauthor Alessandro Nai, who specializes in political communication at the University of Amsterdam, explains that the whole system is part of a toxic spiral, with increased aggressiveness between politicians radicalizing the public, and the public — which is now more radicalized — demanding more aggressiveness from politicians. Nai also has evidence that more extreme, populist followers are more likely to appreciate negative campaign messages , finding them more amusing and fair than moderate citizens do, and are more apt to respond to such messaging with increased affective polarization. People on the populist extremes score higher in traits such as aggressiveness, narcissism and callousness in studies, Nai notes, adding that a “cold” person is therefore more likely to buy the aggressive playbook from politicians.

Importantly, some of Nai’s preliminary research also suggests that negative messaging from one’s own camp stokes more dislike than do attacks from adversaries. In other words, if one’s own preferred politician attacks an adversary, this boosts affective polarization much more than if an adversary attacks your preferred politician.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing National Rally (Rassemblement National), addresses supporters during the 2022 French presidential campaign.

CREDIT: MAXPPP / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

That might be especially true in today’s siloed, targeted and viral media environment. In their 2022 Journal of Politics paper on how Americans overestimate each other’s political extremeness , Levendusky and coauthors suggest that the caricatured image of “the other side” as extreme ideologues is fueled by social media, where much of the political content is created by people who are disproportionately committed to politics.

As a result, what comes to mind when people think of those from the other party, the study argues, are “fervent partisans pleading their cases,” rather than neighbors or colleagues who rarely discuss politics. The mass media’s focus on political conflict has further enforced this partisan stereotyping.

Simple but effective interventions

The negative impacts of severe polarization are clear. When democratic institutions are viewed as battlegrounds for existential issues rather than arenas for reasoned policymaking, it leaves legislators in gridlocks , judiciaries stacked with loyalists and erodes democratic norms. A crisis of interpersonal trust is added to one of institutional trust: Fellow citizens are reduced to loathed enemies with malicious aims; civility is replaced by hostility as public discourse deteriorates — all while the doorway widens for populist leaders who exploit our emotions by peddling divisive rhetoric and extremist ideologies.

Experts worldwide are now thinking hard behind the scenes about how to pull our societies back from the brink. It’s a mammoth task, especially if considering broader underlying issues. For example, Adams’ research highlights that inequality and unemployment drive affective polarization, and that winner-takes-all electoral systems — such as those in Canada, Britain and the United States — also tend to exacerbate the animosity. These are systemic, structural issues that can’t be solved by focusing on polarization alone. However, researchers have found that some — surprisingly simple — interventions can nonetheless be very effective.

An analysis by a research consortium studying anti-democratic sentiment identified 25 ways to reduce partisan animosity ; out of those, three stood out as particularly promising.

One successful intervention involved participants watching a commercial where pairs of individuals with opposing political views formed bonds despite their differences. The video highlighted disagreements on topics like climate change , feminism and transgender identity, yet showed the two people collaborating and ultimately choosing to socialize together. This intervention yielded a 10.47 percent decrease in animosity, based on survey questions conducted before and after the intervention.

In another intervention, participants read book quotes arguing that the news media creates polarization to maximize its audience and that most Democrats and Republicans are part of an “exhausted majority” that rejects polarization. Participants also saw data suggesting that increased consumption of news media correlates with more distorted perceptions of opposing views. Participants were then guided on retaking control from media influence and asked to advise others on achieving this. It resulted in a 10.22 percent decrease in animosity.

A third intervention had participants read about the pivotal role of democracy in America’s leadership in technology and culture, and how extreme partisanship threatens this. They learned that research shows that the vast majority of Americans support democracy and that, contrary to popular belief, most members of both parties support democratic rules, disapprove of violence, and like one another. Participants were then asked to write about their two favorite things about being American. The intervention resulted in a 9.20 percent decrease in animosity.

By appealing to people’s sense of camaraderie, common nationality and resistance to exploitative media, these simple methods proved capable of reducing partisan animosity, at least in study settings. In her 2022 book on American partisanship , Mason similarly notes how minimal interventions can have significant impacts. “We found that just reading a quote from either Joe Biden or Donald Trump that says violence is not OK makes people less approving of violence,” she says.

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Adams emphasizes the need to dial down the aggressive rhetoric among leaders, where Democrats and Republicans publicly demonize the other side. He references a working paper on the 2022 US elections that found a reduction in Twitter toxicity with this unusual method: Researchers informed politicians that they were monitoring their accounts and that their tweet toxicity scores would be sent to a non-governmental organization for possible publication just before the election.

Another effective method, Adams says, might be demonstrating to politicians that toxic rhetoric doesn’t necessarily benefit them. An additional working paper found that although politicians who frequently use insults gain more media attention, they generally perform worse than politicians who focus on policy: They’re assigned to less powerful committees, don’t perform better in elections and don’t raise more campaign funds.

Researchers are only starting to understand the prevalence and drivers of polarization around the world. And while there is no silver bullet to close the yawning social and political gaps dividing our societies, it’s a hopeful sign that the issue has now entered the public consciousness. Only five years ago, Adams says, few academic journals paid any mind to research about affective polarization. “I think a lot of political scientists just thought, ‘Well, it’s only about people’s feelings,’” he says. Then came January 6 and the storming of the US Capitol. “Suddenly, now, everyone is interested in affective polarization.”

Reiljan tells a similar story — that when he started his research as a PhD student in 2015, there was barely any cross-country scholarship on the topic available. Some months back, he hosted a conference on polarization where scholars from across Europe and North America gathered to brainstorm strategies to reduce it.

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TAKE A DEEPER DIVE | Explore Related Scholarly Articles

How Party Polarization Affects Governance

This article demonstrates how the two major parties in the US have grown more sharply differentiated, which has undermined the functioning of governing institutions such as Congress.

The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States

The article traces the origins of animosity between the US parties (affective polarization) to the power of partisanship as a social identity.

Who Dislikes Whom? Affective Polarization between Pairs of Parties in Western Democracies

An examination of affective polarization in 20 Western democracies since the mid-1990s finds that dislike of opposing parties is increasingly driven by disagreements around cultural issues.

Deepening the rift: Negative campaigning fosters affective polarization in multiparty elections

Negative campaigning during elections significantly increases affective polarization, especially among strong partisans and those whose parties engage in, or are targeted by, attacks. The findings are based on data from 16 countries and 86 parties.

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Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics

9. how well the major parties represent americans, the public’s feelings about more political parties, table of contents.

• The impact of partisan polarization
• Persistent concerns over money in politics
• Views of the parties and possible changes to the two-party system
• Other important findings
• Explore chapters of this report
• In their own words: Americans on the political system’s biggest problems
• In their own words: Americans on the political system’s biggest strengths
• Are there clear solutions to the nation’s problems?
• Evaluations of the political system
• Trust in the federal government
• Feelings toward the federal government
• The relationship between the federal and state governments
• Americans’ ratings of their House member, governor and local officials
• Party favorability ratings
• Most characterize their party positively
• Quality of the parties’ ideas
• Influence in congressional decision-making
• Views on limiting the role of money in politics
• Views on what kinds of activities can change the country for the better
• How much can voting affect the future direction of the country?
• Views of members of Congress
• In their own words: Americans’ views of the major problems with today’s elected officials
• How much do elected officials care about people like me?
• What motivates people to run for office?
• Quality of recent political candidates
• In elections, is there usually at least one candidate who shares your views?
• What the public sees as most important in political candidates
• Impressions of the people who will be running for president in 2024
• Views about presidential campaigns
• How much of an impact does who is president have on your life?
• Whose priorities should the president focus on?
• How different are the Republican and Democratic parties?
• Views of how well the parties represent people’s interests
• What if there were more political parties?
• Would more parties make solving problems easier or harder?
• How likely is it that an independent candidate will become president?
• Americans who feel unrepresented by the parties have highly negative views of the political system
• Views of the Electoral College
• Should the size of the U.S. House of Representatives change?
• Senate seats and population size
• Younger adults more supportive of structural changes
• Politics in a single word or phrase: An outpouring of negative sentiments
• Negative emotions prevail when Americans think about politics
• Americans say the tone of political debate in the country has worsened
• Which political topics get too much – and too little – attention?
• Majority of Americans find it stressful to talk politics with people they disagree with
• Acknowledgments

The Democratic and Republican parties are both viewed unfavorably by majorities of Americans . And while most adults say they feel at least somewhat well-represented by at least one of the two parties, a quarter (25%) say neither party represents the interests of people like them even somewhat well.

Reflecting dissatisfaction with the major parties, even among some loyal partisans, many Americans continue to be open to the possibility of having more political parties. Younger adults and those with loose partisan attachments are particularly likely to express a desire for more parties.

Among all U.S. adults, 37% say “I wish there were more political parties to choose from” describes their views extremely or very well; another 31% say it describes their feelings somewhat well.

Additional parties, however, are not seen as a promising fix for the country’s gridlock. Only about a quarter of Americans (26%) say having more than two major parties would make it easier to solve the country’s problems. A nearly identical share (24%) say it would make this harder.

And just a third think it is likely an independent candidate will win the White House in the next 25 years; 66% view this possibility as very or somewhat unlikely.

A narrow majority of Americans (54%) say there is a great deal of difference between what the Republican and Democratic parties stand for. Another 35% say there is a fair amount of difference in their values, while just 10% say there is hardly any difference between the two parties.

The share seeing a great deal of difference between the parties hasn’t changed much in recent years, but Americans remain more likely to see major differences between the parties than they were a few decades ago .

These views continue to vary by age, political engagement and the strength of a person’s ties to a party.

Among adults ages 18 to 29, fewer than half (41%) say there is a great deal of difference in what the parties stand for. Older age groups are more likely to see big differences between the parties, with those 65 and older most likely to say this.

Level of political engagement

Two-thirds of the most politically engaged Americans think there is a great deal of difference between the parties. Slightly more than half of those with medium engagement (54%) and 42% of those with low engagement say the same. Political engagement is based on people’s interest in politics, as well as how often they follow government and public affairs and discuss politics.

Strength of partisanship

Nearly three-quarters of strong Republicans (73%) and 72% of strong Democrats say there is a great deal of difference between the parties, compared with smaller shares of those who affiliate with a party, but not strongly, and those who lean to a party.

Large shares of Americans who identify with the Republican or Democratic Party say they feel well-represented – though relatively few feel very well-represented.

Those who only lean toward a party, by contrast, tend to be more skeptical of how well their party represents them.

• 71% of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say their party represents their interests very or somewhat well. Those who affiliate with the Republican Party are more likely to express this view (82%) than those who lean toward the GOP (55%).
• There are similar differences between Democrats and Democratic leaners. More than eight-in-ten Democrats (85%) say they feel well-represented, compared with 58% of Democratic-leaning independents.

Most Americans feel represented by at least one of the parties

Among all U.S. adults, roughly a third say they feel well-represented by the Democratic Party, but not the Republican Party; about as many (30%) feel represented by the Republican Party but not the Democratic Party.

A quarter (25%) say neither party represents them well, while 9% feel well-represented by both parties.

About four-in-ten independents and those who identify with other parties (41%) say neither major party represents people like them well. Identical shares of independents who lean toward the GOP and the Democratic Party (38% each) say neither party represents them well.

Demographic differences in people’s views of which party, if any, represents them well

Americans’ views of how well the Republican and Democratic parties represent the interests of people like them vary across race, ethnicity, age, education and community type. These patterns largely mirror groups’ party identification and voting patterns .

More Republican-oriented demographic groups, such as older people, White adults and rural residents, are more likely to say the Republican Party, rather than Democratic Party, represents them well.

The reverse is true for Democratic-oriented groups, such as Black, Hispanic and Asian adults, as well as people with a postgraduate degree.

While three-in-ten adults under age 50 say neither party represents them well, a smaller share of people 50 and older (20%) say this.

Independents and those who identify with other parties are more supportive of the idea of having more parties to choose from.

Nearly half of all independents (47%) say they wish for more parties. However, a larger share of independents who lean toward the Democratic Party say this than among those who lean toward the Republican Party (56% vs. 43%, respectively).

People who identify as Democrats also are more interested than Republican identifiers in having additional parties. Democratic identifiers are 10 percentage points more likely than GOP identifiers to say that wishing for more parties describes their views extremely or very well (35% vs. 25%).

Republicans and Democrats (including leaners) ages 18 to 49 are about 20 points more likely than older members of their parties to say they wish there were more political parties to choose from in this country. About half of Democrats under age 50 (51%) say this, as do 42% of their Republican peers. By comparison, 31% of Democrats and 23% of Republicans 50 and older say the same.

Despite the interest in having more parties to choose from, only 26% of the public says it would make the country’s problems easier to solve.

A similar share of Americans say having more major parties would make solving problems harder (24%). Another quarter say more parties wouldn’t have an impact on the nation’s ability to solve its problems, while 24% are unsure what impact it would have.

Younger adults are more likely than older Americans to say that more major parties would make it easier to address the country’s problems. About four-in-ten adults ages 18 to 29 say this, compared with 12% of those 65 and older.

Partisan leaners also are more likely than partisans to say that more political parties would make it easier to address the country’s problems. More than four-in-ten Democratic leaners (44%) and about three-in-ten Republican leaners (29%) say it would make solving problems easier. This compares with a quarter of those who identify as Democrats and 15% of Republican identifiers.

Few Americans think a candidate independent of the Republican and Democratic parties will win a presidential election in the next 25 years. About two-thirds of adults (66%) say it is very (36%) or somewhat unlikely (30%) this will happen. 

There are no partisan differences in these expectations, and independents are only slightly more likely than partisan identifiers to say this is likely.

Two-thirds in both partisan coalitions say this is unlikely, as do 62% of independents and those who identify with other parties (including 66% of Republican-leaning independents and 64% of Democratic-leaning independents).

Compared with those who say they feel represented by the Republican or Democratic parties, the quarter of Americans who say neither party represents them well stand out for their negative views of much of the U.S. political system.

• Those who feel unrepresented by the parties are less optimistic about the future of the political system. Just 21% of Americans who feel unrepresented by both parties say they have a lot of or some confidence in the future of the system. This compares with 32% of those who feel represented well by the Republican Party, 49% of those who feel represented by the Democratic Party and 59% of those who say both parties represent them well.
• Adults who feel unrepresented doubt voting “by people like them” can impact the direction of the country. At least half of those who feel represented by the GOP (56%) or the Democrats (72%) say that their votes can affect the direction of the country at least some. By contrast, a far smaller share (35%) of those who feel unrepresented say this.
• Americans who say they are unrepresented by the parties also say political candidates do not share their views. About a quarter of those who say neither party represents them well (26%) say there is usually at least one candidate who shares their views. But clear majorities of those who feel represented by at least one of the two major parties say there is usually a candidate with their views.

• Negative evaluations of members of Congress are higher among those who feel neither party represents them. About four-in-ten of those who are represented well by one party but not the other (39% of those represented by the GOP and 43% of those represented by the Democrats) say members of Congress care about the people they represent at least some of the time. The share saying this falls to 22% among those who say neither party represents them well.
• Americans who feel unrepresented by the parties pay less attention to government and public affairs. About three-in-ten Americans who feel unrepresented by a major party (31%) say they follow government most of the time, compared with about half of those who say one of the two parties but not the other represents them well. (The 9% of Americans who feel well-represented by both parties are the least likely to be politically attentive.)
• The desire for more political parties is higher among those who feel unrepresented by both parties. Half of those unrepresented by the parties say they “wish there were more political parties,” compared with four-in-ten or fewer in the other groups.

The Americans who say neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party represent people like them well give consistently lower job ratings to their district’s House representative, state governor and local elected officials:

• 28% in this group say their U.S. representative is doing a good job. Nearly half of those who feel well-represented by at least one of the two major parties view their representative’s performance positively.
• 40% who feel unrepresented say their governor does a good job. At least half of those in other groups approve of their governor’s performance.
• While about six-in-ten of those who feel well-represented by at least one party view their local elected officials’ job performance positively, a far smaller share (41%) of those who don’t feel well-represented say this.

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