Author Meets Critics: Salkin's "Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Jane Mansbridge and Desmond Jagmohan critically examine "Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024) by Wendy Salkin.

In "Speaking for Others", Salkin provides a systematic conceptual and normative theory of informal political representatives (IPRs), who speak or act for others despite having been neither elected nor selected by means of a systematized election or selection procedure. IPRs are everywhere. Some are internationally recognized leaders of social movements. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. informally represented Black Americans throughout the Civil Rights Movement. Me Too Movement leader Tarana Burke informally represents sexual assault and abuse survivors. Greta Thunberg informally represents Gen Z or, as she has put it, “we who have to live with the consequences” of climate change. Others are just our neighbors and friends. But when they go to the city council meeting to give voice to our neighborhood’s shared interests, they become our representatives too. Despite IPRs’ ubiquity and significance to our political lives, their role is conceptually puzzling, morally troubling, and markedly undertheorized. The central ethical challenge faced by informal political representation is this: IPRs can provide valuable political goods to those they represent. However, IPRs are neither institutionally nor procedurally constrained in ways formal political representatives like legislators are. Moreover, IPRs are often the only political actors working to advance the interests of oppressed and marginalized groups, meaning these groups rely on their IPRs. As a result, relationships between represented groups and their IPRs can be inegalitarian and oppressive. How may IPRs permissibly undertake activities central to their roles without thereby wronging those they represent? This question drives the book.

To answer this question, we first need a theory of informal political representation (Part I): In Ch. 1, “Audience Conferral,” Salkin provides a general analytical framework for understanding how IPRs come about: a party emerges as an IPR when and because they are treated by an audience to speak or act for another party in a context. In Ch. 2, “Conscription and the Power to Influence,” Salkin considers the power IPRs have to influence audiences and pro tanto duties that arise from this power. In Ch. 3, “Group Authorization,” drawing on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Salkin examines how IPRs are informally authorized by and thereby gain discretionary and normative powers with respect to the represented.

Salkin then examines moral questions that arise for IPRs (Part II): In Ch. 4, “The Duties of Informal Political Representatives,” she examines skeptical arguments against the informal political representation of oppressed and marginalized groups. Skeptics caution: that IPRs imperil the represented by being unauthorized, unaccountable, inaccurate, elitist, homogenizing, overpowering, concessive, overcommitting, occlusive, inegalitarian, oppressive. Many conclude that the informal political representation of oppressed and marginalized groups is morally irremediable. Salkin argues that, to represent permissibly, IPRs of oppressed or marginalized groups must satisfy two sets of duties: democracy within duties, which concern how representatives treat and relate to the represented, and justice without duties, which concern how representatives’ actions advance the represented’s aims. In Ch. 5, “The Legitimate Complaints of the Represented,” Salkin provides a schema for thinking about a central feature of the ongoing deliberative relationship between IPRs and the represented. In Ch. 6, “Descriptive and Nondescriptive Informal Political Representation,” Salkin examines historical and contemporary arguments for representation by people who share characteristics, experiences, or backgrounds in common with the represented (descriptive representation) and representation by people who are members of the represented group (member representation). She argues there are sometimes compelling reasons to permit or prefer IPRs neither descriptively similar to nor themselves members of the represented group. In Ch. 7, “Expertise and Representative Deference,” Salkin considers whether, when, and why IPRs should defer to the represented concerning matters about which the IPRs are themselves expert.

Points of convergence between the book’s arguments and critics’ expertise facilitate fruitful discussion, including: Salkin’s examination of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington’s dispute concerning informal political representation enables panelists to discuss Jagmohan’s forthcoming _Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism_. Salkin’s engagement with Mansbridge’s corpus provides panelists opportunity to examine roles for informal representative mechanisms to play in renovating and reimagining democracy.

Sub Unit

• Division 3: Normative Theory

Chair

• Jane Mansbridge Harvard Kennedy School

Presenters

• Wendy Salkin Stanford University

• Jane Mansbridge Harvard Kennedy School

• Desmond Jagmohan University of California, Berkeley

• Eduardo J. Martinez University of Cincinnati