The Mobilization Role of Representative Institutions under Autocratization

• In Event: Democracy in Peril?

Abstract

What, if any, democratic role can representative institutions such as assemblies and parliaments play in contexts of autocratization? In the extensive sophisticated literature on representative democracy, this question has rarely been addressed. Yet this has become an URGENT question in our era of democratic erosion and regression. The rise of authoritarian regimes in most of the world has been accompanied and fuelled by popular disenchantment with representative institutions globally as elitist and corrupt (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018).

On the relationship of representative assemblies to democracy, simplifying greatly, two kinds of approaches have been influential in political theory. Liberal democrats have argued that representative institutions are democratic and/or further democracy, focussing on their deliberative role. That the growing powers of the executive would threaten and undermine free deliberation, the independence of representative assemblies, and the free expression of opinions more generally, has rarely been addressed by liberal theorists. By contrast, radical democrats have tended to dismiss and reject representative institutions as elitist and exclusionary. However, the participatory and direct democracy alternatives proposed by radical thinkers do not offer a democratic alternative to large-scale representative bodies.

This paper proposes a new approach to role of representative assemblies under conditions of autocratization. Drawing upon examples from ethnographic research on Indian Parliament over a decade, I argue that representative institutions can play a democratic role in contexts of autocratization. To discern this role, however, we need to go beyond deliberation, the dominant framework in theories of representation (eg Urbinati 2006, Saward 2010).
My fieldwork evidence suggests that the mobilization and organizational role that assemblies and parliaments can play, neglected by both liberal and radical theorists, merits greater attention. These include raising consciousness, mobilizing associational activity in the form of petitions and protests, as well as enabling coordination and coalition building among non-governmental organizations and opposition parties.

My argument brings together and takes further two recent approaches in democratic theory, realist democracy (eg Bagg 2018, Abizadeh 2021, Klein 2022) and constructivist theories of representation as mobilization (Disch 2011, 2021). Realist democrats emphasize the role of democratic institutions as not just procedures but also mechanisms for organizing power (Klein 2022). However, realist democrats have not focussed on the role of representative institutions, nor on how collectivities that further democracy can be organised under conditions of autocratization.

My account of the mobilizing role of representative institutions builds on and seeks to take further the constructivist notion of representation as mobilization elaborated by Disch (2011) and the defence of representative government as fostering challenges to government claims to popular sovereignty suggested by Garsten (2008). My paper develops further constructivist theories that highlight how representation shapes constituencies. It focuses on how representative institutions can help organize collective power—the “power-with” neglected in liberal theory (Klein 2022 Abizadeh 2021) – in resistance to autocratization. Whereas
realist democrats have thus far focussed on the role of electoral institutions in mobilizing the collective power of the people against elites, under autocratization, populists have usurped power in the name of the people. Combatting authoritarian rule today thus requires multiplying and challenging the claims of populist authoritarians to represent the people. Representative institutions have a role to play here (Garsten 2008).

My paper seeks to advance the theoretical agenda on representation as mobilization by fleshing out how assemblies can play a democratic role in contexts of autocratization. It contributes to emerging realist democratic theory by focussing on the role of representative institutions in the mobilization of multiple constituencies - the ‘people’, but also groups, associations, civil society organizations, opposition parties and coalitions - for the contestation of the concentration of power that poses the principal threat to democracy globally today.

In terms of method, I seek to show how ethnographic studies of parliaments can advance theories of democracy.

Author

• Rochana Bajpai, University of London, SOAS