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

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Part of Mini-Conference

• Political Parties and American Democracy Mini-Conference III

Session Description

There is a long-ingrained conception of political representation that understands it as a binary relation between the represented (as the principal) and the representative (as the agent). The political institutions of modern representative democracy – parliaments and parliamentarians, democratic government, and political parties – have contributed to the predominance of this binary conception. They often present themselves, or are presented by commentators, as the mouthpiece of their constituencies, of the citizens, of the people at large, and regularly invoke the mechanism of electoral authorization and accountability to justify their right to speak on behalf of the represented. For a long time, empirical political science and normative political theory have built their instruments and concepts around this way of understanding democratic representation. They have done so in the face of some obvious difficulties: the multiplicity of wills characterizing the “principal” as well as the multiplicity of roles characterizing the “agents,” and the opacity of processes of authorization, accountability, and responsiveness. Despite the limits of such an approach, a great deal of good scholarly work has come from studies done within this framework of analysis. Moreover, there is something important in the idea that the legitimacy of modern democratic government must rest on a meaningful connection between the governed and those who govern.
During the last twenty years or so, however, there has been a fundamental turn in the study of political and democratic representation, questioning both the simple binary structure of the process, and its very nature. Representation is no longer considered as a kind of transmission-belt that links prior constituent preferences to political decision-making. Instead, representation is conceived as a process of constructing and mobilizing political interests, opinions, and identities of the represented as they are represented. This process takes place across formal and informal institutions, cuts across various levels (e.g., local, national, international), and involves a multitude of actors in changing roles.
The claim-making paradigm (Saward 2010; 2020) helpfully pushes the boundaries of the principal-agent binary conception of political representation. It casts representation in triadic relations: implying that representation is not only about those represented but is performed before relevant audiences (who do not necessarily overlap with the represented). As a complex, multifaced, and variegated process, the effectiveness and legitimacy become contextual; dependent on audiences’ engagement with the claims presented to them. This opens to novel ways of understanding political representation. Instead of thinking of political representation as a transmission-belt, one can think of it as a ‘system’ (Rey, 2020; Castiglione 2020) or an ‘ecology’ (Warren and Castiglione 2020); instead of thinking of relations of representation in synchronic terms, one can look at them diachronically: ‘recursively’ (Mansbridge 2018) or ‘reflexively’ (Saward 2021); instead of thinking of representation as always inclusive and empowering, one can also think of its asymmetric consequences on different groups in society (Dovi 2020).
The task of this panel is to explore the analytical and normative implications of these alternative approaches to political representation and consider their potential for fostering our understanding of democracy’s retrenchment and renovation, or its reimagining. Specific questions the papers in the panel address include the role of the ‘audience’ in the process of representation; in what sense the ecology of representation can also be toxic, alienating, and democratically illegitimate; the nature of the relationships between representation and deliberation in modern democracy; and how a more holistic understanding of representation relates to debates about ‘deliberative systems’ (Mansbridge et al. 2012, Bohman 2012).

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Individual Presentations

• Toxic Representation: An Ecological Approach? - Suzanne Dovi, University of Arizona

• Audience Power and the Configuration of Political Representation - Eline M. Severs, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

• The Representation: Deliberation Nexus - John Erik Fossum, University of Oslo

• What Does “Representative Ecology” Do That “Deliberative Systems” Don’t? - Dario Castiglione, University of Exeter

Chair

• Mark E. Warren University of British Columbia

Discussant

• Michael Saward University of Warwick