Abstract
The term “representation” is polysemic, meaning, among other things, reproduction, delegation or mandate. However, representation may also imply a betrayal of the reproduced or delegated reality. It seems to me that, today, political representation suggests distance and otherness, and not similarity, especially when transparency and public control of the citizens’ representatives and State institutions are constantly eroded. In this chapter, I would argue that there is a crisis of legitimacy of the means of political representation in Western democracies, resulting from the decline of parliamentarism and the political parties. These should ensure the democratic functioning of the State between elections. However, voters have now scarce control on their representatives, and candidates are more likely to be designated by the parties’ bureaucracies than by the citizens themselves. Political parties, in sum, look today like embedded in the State apparatus rather than in civil society, the latter being progressively supplanted by its institutional form, thus falling into a vicious circle of delegitimisation.
This work was carried out within the framework of the MICIU research project “Collective biography and prosographic analysis beyond Parliament” (PGC2018-095712-B-100) within the type A consolidated Basque Government Research Group, Biography & Parliament (IT-1263-19).
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Notes
- 1.
Some exceptions were permitted, related to the size of the delegation or to specific conditions. Hence, the last election of Representatives by general ticket (each voter holds as many votes as there are seats to elect, whether on one or multiple ballots) took place in the State of Hawaii in 1968.
- 2.
For the reader’s interest, I would like to reproduce an observation made by the translators and editors of the 1994 Spanish version (pp. 170–171) of What is the Third Estate?, where they highlight one of Sieyès clearest contradictions in this work: “If the nation has been defined as a metaphysical entity prior to the election of its representations, here he identifies the deputies of the Third Estate with the nation, despite the fact that a few lines below he will once again attempt to distinguish both realities. Once more, the tension between the Rousseauian influence — popular sovereignty — and the construction of the attributes of national sovereignty is made evident by the Abbé’s text, in which the overall priority is always the political end: to argue in favour of the Third Estate so as to transform the society of estates.”
- 3.
Pitkin, H. F. (1967). The concept of representation. The University of California Press.
- 4.
Manin, B. (1997). The principles of representative government. Cambridge University Press.
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Anchústegui Igartua, E. (2022). Democratic Representation and the Nature of Political Parties. In: Gómez Gutiérrez, J.J., Abdelnour-Nocera, J., Anchústegui Igartua, E. (eds) Democratic Institutions and Practices. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10808-2_5
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