Democratic Representation and the Nature of Political Parties

Abstract

The term “representation” is polysemic, meaning, among other things, reproduction, delegation or mandate. However, representation may also imply a betrayal of the reproduced or delegated reality. It seems to me that, today, political representation suggests distance and otherness, and not similarity, especially when transparency and public control of the citizens’ representatives and State institutions are constantly eroded. In this chapter, I would argue that there is a crisis of legitimacy of the means of political representation in Western democracies, resulting from the decline of parliamentarism and the political parties. These should ensure the democratic functioning of the State between elections. However, voters have now scarce control on their representatives, and candidates are more likely to be designated by the parties’ bureaucracies than by the citizens themselves. Political parties, in sum, look today like embedded in the State apparatus rather than in civil society, the latter being progressively supplanted by its institutional form, thus falling into a vicious circle of delegitimisation.

This work was carried out within the framework of the MICIU research project “Collective biography and prosographic analysis beyond Parliament” (PGC2018-095712-B-100) within the type A consolidated Basque Government Research Group, Biography & Parliament (IT-1263-19).