What Is the Relationship Between Participation and Representation?

Abstract

This essay attempts to address some of the rather significant issues raised by Törnquist in the introductory chapter to this volume. He suggests that the best way to study and evaluate democracy is to disaggregate the concept and the set of practices associated with the concept. Such disarticulation is a necessary precondition for any reasoned and meaningful analysis of the essential dimensions and processes at work. Conventional understandings of democracy that tend to take democracy as more or less a given concentrate on either institutional designs for the successful functioning of democracy or on the external preconditions for democracy.² Törnquist, on the other hand, suggests that democracy is best comprehended through an analysis of public control over democratic institutions and practices or the lack thereof. Correspondingly, because the issue of public control over democratic practices is intrinsically related to that of representation, any discussion of democracy should focus on practices of representation. The argument seems to suggest that the degree and the extent of democracy in a given society depend largely on the establishment of institutions through which citizens can monitor processes of government. This conception of democracy, I think, represents a distinct advance over other such conceptions, simply because it foregrounds the significance of the popular will as the prime determinant of democracy.

The question of representation, one of the crucial and most troublesome issues of modern politics ever since the [eighteenth century] revolutions, actually implies no less than a decision on the very dignity, of the political realm itself¹