Making interest: on representation and democratic legitimacy

Abstract

Political representation has no necessary link to democratic legitimacy. As Hanna Pitkin (among others) has argued, there are ways of “making present” in a political sense people who are not literally present that stand at odds with basic democratic principles, such as political equality and inclusiveness in collective norm-making (Pitkin 1967: ch. 2). Representation is often considered a means to promoting legitimacy, however, when those who are subject to the norms representatives make first authorize those who represent them, and then hold them accountable for their choices and their actions. Such specifically democratic forms of representation often are understood to promote legitimacy in government under conditions in which all cannot participate directly in norm-making, if and to the extent that they enable and motivate representatives to track the interests of the represented (Przeworski, Stokes, and Manin 1999: 2). Call this understanding of the democratic value of representation “the conventional view.” Although the conventional view does not provide the only way to understand the link between representation and democratic legitimacy, it provides one important way. In this chapter, I make trouble for the conventional view. In so doing, I join other theorists who have begun the project of rethinking this orthodox understanding of the nature and the value of political representation. David Plotke, for instance, has argued it is not the case that representation is a second-best alternative to direct, participatory democracy: an unfortunate necessity that follows from the complexities of modern political life (Plotke 1997).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 54 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.