Participation as Representation: Democratic Policymaking in Brazil

Abstract

That political representation faces a crisis has become an old and wornout claim. It is a claim as old as political representation itself, the essential principles of which have been translated into a set of institutional devices that have remained in place almost intact since the eighteenth century (Manin, 1996; Urbinati, 2006). If the structure of representative government has not been significantly modified since its inception, one can perhaps assume that some of the symptoms of crisis (low electoral turnout, rising political apathy, distrust in political institutions and actors, decrease of party membership and mobilization, proportionality deficits of electoral systems, etc.) may simply be indications of a transformation in how political representation expresses itself.