The Representation: Deliberation Nexus

• In Event: Political Parties and American Democracy Mini-Conference III: Beyond the Principal-Agent Binary: New Approaches to Democratic Representation

Abstract

Representation and deliberation are democratic practices that take on distinct shapes and are made to operate together (in a sense they require each other) in modern democracy (Warren 2017). That they need each other has been made clearer by the deliberative turn in representation (Mansbridge 2003). At the same time, we need to keep in mind that much of the literature on deliberation comes with a certain epistemic bias. We should therefore be wary of positing an overly close representation – deliberation nexus, because such a notion might skew representation’s ability to somehow balance epistemic with symbolic and descriptive aspects. In that sense there will be both cross-fertilization and tension between deliberation and representation.
The paper starts by clarifying the conceptual core, or centre of gravity of representation and deliberation respectively to get a clearer sense of the representation – deliberation nexus. Thereafter the paper argues that the representation – deliberation nexus will be affected by the broader political, institutional and constitutional context, and whether this is stable or dynamic (constitutive/de-constitutive). Accordingly, the paper introduces a distinction between deliberation over representation and deliberation in representation. The former is inspired by the constructivist turn to representation that sees representation as constitutive and takes this literally by probing the deliberation-representation nexus in processes of polity formation and constitution making. This pertains to claims-making and deliberation over such questions as: who should be represented; how should they be represented; by whom should they be represented; and how should the representative relationship be structured in processes of polity formation?
The latter form of the nexus, as deliberation in representation, is about deliberation’s role in already-existing political systems, in other words where the broader systemic terms of representation are set. How similar and different these deliberation-representation dynamics are will depend on whether political systems can draw clear bounds between deliberation over representation versus deliberation in representation.
What do these examinations tell us about the overall representation – deliberation nexus? In discussing this, the paper will draw on, and compare and contrast, democratic experiments: small-scale ones such as mini-publics and a large-scale one, namely the European Union, which has been undergoing a long and protracted process of polity formation.

Author

• John Erik Fossum, University of Oslo