Democratic Incongruities

Representative Democracy in Britain

D. Judge

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780230314467
• eBook ISBN: 9781137317292
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Filosofía política

Clear disparities exist between notions of representative democracy and political practice in Britain. Alternative models of democracy, however, have their own incongruities in trying to marry representation and democracy. This book analyses the mismatches in democratic theories and between theory and practice in British representative democracy.

1

Democratic Incongruities: Old Models and New Perspectives

Representative democracy in the United Kingdom: the official version

Official descriptions of the United Kingdom’s (UK) system of government, to be found in official publications and on parliamentary and government websites, present a consistent and unambiguous ‘standard account’ of representative democracy. The key elements of this ‘standard account’ are: ‘the UK is a Parliamentary democracy’; ‘people vote in elections for MPs who will represent them in Parliament’; ‘every adult has the right to vote – known as “universal suffrage”’; ‘government is voted into power by the people, to act in the interests of the people’; there is ‘an Executive drawn from and accountable to Parliament’ and ‘a sovereign Parliament, which is supreme to all other government institutions’ (Cabinet Office 2011a; Home Office 2013; UK Parliament 2013).

This official ‘standard account’ is clearly premised upon parliamentary democracy as a variant of representative democracy, and so deems state decision-makers to be both representative of and responsible to ‘the people’ through the process of elections. More particularly, in this UK variant, parliament, as the state’s primary representative institution, is also deemed to exercise legal sovereignty. Out of this conjunction of electoral democracy, representative and responsible government, and parliamentary sovereignty emerged the shorthand descriptor ‘the Westminster model’. Although often conceived simply as an empirical description of governing practice (and an inaccurate one at that), the Westminster model is in fact infused with normative theories about representation and accountability, as well as legal theories about the sources of legislative supremacy and constitutional theories about the interactions of political institutions. In which case, if ‘clearly the Westminster model presupposes representative democracy’ (Bevir 2010: 124), then it is advisable to identify the defining characteristics of this representative form of democracy before examining the incongruities of theory and practice associated with contemporary UK representative democracy.

Representative democracy: ‘standard account’

Contemporary analyses of representative democracy often outline a ‘standard account’ (Urbinati and Warren 2008: 389), or a ‘conventional view’, or ‘an orthodox understanding’ (Hayward 2009: 111) in preface to subsequent theoretical and empirical dismantling of these accounts. As with any summary account, therefore, such general views and understandings sketch at best a delimiting analytical frame rather than nuanced conceptualisation of the variegations of representative democracy. Nonetheless, a ‘standard account’ provides a baseline model against which competing, often critical, democratic and representative claims can be assessed and the resilience of the original model tested.

The starting assumption of representative democracy is that the decision outputs of such a system are legitimate because the representatives taking those decisions are themselves deemed to be legitimate. A comprehensive account of democratic legitimacy has to explain, therefore, why some individuals (in the absence of all other individuals) have the right to make decisions on behalf of those who are not present. Under a ‘standard account’, what provides political representation with legitimacy is a set of procedural standards of authorisation and accountability associated with free and fair elections (Rehfeld 2006: 3).

Threaded through ‘standard accounts’ of representative democracy, therefore, are normative assumptions about legitimacy, authorisation, accountability, and control. These assumptions can be seen in two recent examples of a ‘standard account’, provided respectively by Urbinati and Warren (2008) and Alonso et al. (2011). Urbinati and Warren (2008: 389) ascribe four main features to their ‘standard account’. First, there is a principal–agent conception of representation, in which the elected representatives serve as the agents of their constituents, organised in territorial constituencies, and in which there is a separation of ‘the sources of legitimate power from those who exercise that power’. Second, electoral representation ‘identifies a space within which the sovereignty of the people is identified with state power’. Third, electoral processes ensure some degree of responsiveness to ‘the people’ by representatives and political parties who speak and act in the name of ‘the people’. Fourth, the notion of political equality is incorporated into electoral representation through the universal franchise.

Similarly, Alonso et al. (2011: 2) identify the characteristics of representative democracy as ‘a type of government in which people, in their role as voters faced with a genuine choice between at least two alternatives, are free to elect others who then … represent them by deciding matters on their behalf’. Democratic representation is thus a process of making present the interests and views of citizens who are not physically present at the point of decision. It is a dialectic process of authorisation and accountability: ‘it is an ongoing tussle between representatives who make political judgements and the represented, who themselves also make political judgements’ (Alonso et al. 2011: 5). In this sense it is not merely a process of delegating decision-making to representatives, but also of holding the elected responsible for their actions. Every election, therefore, is ‘as much a beginning as it is an ending’ (Alonso et al. 2011: 6). Elections enable electors to make prospective estimations of the potential performance of their representatives as well as retrospective assessments of actual performance. The election of representatives in this account is ‘a dynamic process subject to what can be called the disappointment principle’ (Alonso et al. 2011: 6). The ‘disappointment principle’, as enunciated by Keane (2008: 32), is simple and powerful:

‘the people’ make their periodic appearance in elections in order to judge, sometimes harshly, the performance of their representatives. That is the whole point of elections, which are a means of disciplining representatives who have disappointed their electors, who are then entitled to throw harsh words and paper rocks at them … [to] throw scoundrels out from office.

Representative democracy in this view allows for – indeed encourages – the rotation of leadership. It embeds at the core of the democratic system a contingency and temporality of decision-making authority. As Kateb (1981: 358) argued: ‘representative democracy signifies a radical chastening of political authority … political authority is, at every moment, a temporary and conditional grant, regularly revocable’. Through this periodic chastening, a standard account of representative democracy identifies a ‘distinctive form of government that simultaneously distinguishes and links together the source of political power – the people or demos – and the use made of political power by representatives’ (Alonso et al. 2011: 5). The process of representation thus serves both to include ‘the people’ in decision-making – indirectly and periodically through elections – yet at the same time to exclude them from direct and continuous participation in the decision-making process. Hence embedded in a ‘standard account’ of representative democracy is a fundamental inclusion–exclusion paradox (see Judge 1999: 9–12; Urbinati 2011: 24). Yet out of this elemental paradox the standard model offers, in terms of democratic legitimacy, a ‘holistic framework’ within which to analyse processes of democratic authorisation, accountability and control.

The notion of a ‘holistic framework’ is of some significance in a standard model because there is ‘a presumption of generality’ (Urbinati 2010: 83) built into representative democracy. This presumption is essential to the processes of legitimation in this form of democracy. In essence, representative democracy presupposes that decisions – public policies – will be collective in the manner of their formulation and implementation. This does not mean that decisions will be made unanimously or accepted uniformly, but rather that decisions are framed as collective decisions and received as such by winners and losers (as defined in relation to the consequences of those decisions). In this view the systemic nature of political representation is of some importance. Political representation is not confined to a micro-level interaction between individual constituent and individual representative, but encompasses systemic level democratic representation, which Saward (2010: 163) characterises as a ‘complex, mixed bag of election, acceptance, acclamation and proposition’. In this sense, as Pitkin (1967: 221) argues, ‘[w]hat makes it representation is not any single action by any one participant, but the over-all structure and functioning of the system’ (1967: 221). This is a view to which Mansbridge (2011: 628) and Rehfeld (2011: 640) also subscribe, as they both agree that ‘representation at its broadest is systematic, in the sense of involving many different parts interacting with one another in interesting and complex ways’ (Rehfeld 2011: 640). As a process of adjudicating amongst, and reconciling, conflicting claims, representative democracy assumes the articulation of some common interest and provides, through electoral processes and representative institutions, a capacity for communal judgement of that articulation (Manin 1997: 192). In fact, as Rehfeld (2005: 149; emphasis in original) notes: ‘There is simply no plausible justification for establishing a national representative legislature without some reference to the resulting good of all, whatever the good may turn out to be’.

From this systemic ‘generality’ emerges the paradox that ‘although a representative is supposed to deliberate about things that affect all members of the polity, she is also supposed to have a sympathetic relation to a part (the part that votes for her)’ (Urbinati 2006: 44; original emphasis). More fundamentally, ‘partial or partisan aggregations such as political groups or parties … are not optional or accidental in a representative democracy … political representation breaks with the logic of homogeneity and identification although it is a process of unity, not fragmentation’ (Urbinati 2006: 134). Representative democracy does not assume a homogeneous demos or a pre-given ‘general will’; instead it assumes permanent contestation and the representation of diverse social interests and opinions (Alonso et al. 2011: 5). Ultimately what the ‘democratic bargain’ at the heart of representative democracy seeks to fashion, out of this diversity and contestation, are ‘winners who are willing to ensure that losers are not too unhappy and for losers, in exchange, to extend their consent to the winners’ right to rule’ (Anderson et al. 2005: 190).

Problems of the standard account

Having presented a standard account of representative democracy, Urbinati and Warren (2008: 390) are quick to point out that ‘the standard account has been stretched to the breaking point’. Equally, Hayward’s (2009: 111) purpose in sketching ‘the conventional view’, is to ‘make trouble’ for this view by rethinking the orthodox understanding of the democratic value of representation. And Alonso et al. (2011: 8) recognise that there ‘has always been a gap between the bold ideals of representative democracy and its complex, multi-layered and defective real world forms’. Their purpose, therefore, is not only to reconsider the standard account, or what they prefer to call the ‘core founding principles’, of representative democracy, but also to use those principles to assess current forms of democratic representation which ‘defy textbook accounts of representative democracy’ (Alonso et al. 2011: 9).

While it would be easy to dismiss the specification of a standard account as simply the creation of an analytical straw man, such an account serves three related purposes for the present study. First, a standard account provides a distillation of the essential characteristics of representative democracy from which theoretical complexities can be unpicked and analytical ambiguities and incongruities identified. Second, a standard account provides a checklist against which the ‘rethinking’ of representative democracy can be set and the distance of travel from the core principles to ‘representation in practice’ can be measured. Third, it reflects almost exactly the official description of representative democracy in the UK, as noted in the opening paragraph of this chapter. As such, both its inherent conceptual problems and its contemporary practical dysfunctions are also those of UK representative democracy.

Inherent conceptual problems

Elections and participation

Elections are the key institutions of representative democracy, as they serve as a tensile link between representatives and represented. Indeed, as Bühlmann and Kriesi (2013: 46) point out, elections ‘establish a double linkage between the political input (the citizens’ preferences) and the political output (public policies adopted by the elected representatives) by allowing for a combination of responsiveness and accountability’. Some ‘thin’ accounts of representative democracy focus almost exclusively upon elections as the essence of democratic participation in decision-making, with popular participation being limited to periodic selection or deselection of decision makers (Alonso et al. 2011: 5–6; Bellamy and Castiglione 2013: 211). Indeed, as Coppedge et al. (2011: 256) contend, ‘If one were interested in a thin concept of electoral democracy … then elective government, free elections, and regular elections would probably suffice’. But few theorists beyond Schumpeterians (who conceived of democracy in terms of the electoral competition of elites (see Schumpeter [1943] 1976: 269)) would maintain that a mere electoral account of representative democracy is sufficient to capture either the democratic or representative dimensions of this form of ‘rule by the people’.

Before examining thicker conceptions of representative democracy, however, the genetic problem of elections as a core element of representative democracy needs to be addressed. Stated starkly ‘elections simultaneously separate and link citizens and government’ (Urbinati 2011: 24). In terms of participation:

The [aim of the] electoral procedure … is actually to make people’s direct participation inessential to the performance of deliberative institutions. The deterrent power of elections lies in their ability to stimulate decisional activism in those who can be held accountable: the representatives, not the people. Elections make apathy, not agency, the main quality of popular sovereignty … they make citizens’ participation during the period between elections superfluous. (Urbinati 2006: 14)

Representative democracy thus institutionalises the self-exclusion of the bulk of the population from systematic involvement in decision-making through their punctuated participation in the electoral process (Judge 1999: 9). The ‘central paradox of modern democratic government’ is that political representation is ‘necessarily about exclusion’ (Rehfeld 2005: 6). From this meta-conceptual problem stems the further empirical incongruity that, even when given the periodic opportunity to participate in elections, significant segments of ‘the people’ do not avail themselves of the opportunity to do so. As a result, they doubly self-exclude themselves from participation: both directly in the act of voting and indirectly in their dyadic relationship of authorisation/accountability with elected decision makers.

Elections, representation and equality

In ‘the standard account’ representative democracy is endowed with a basic formal political equality in the universal franchise (see Urbinati and Warren 2008: 389). The norm of political equality is incorporated in the principle of one person, one vote, one value. Robert Dahl (2005: 195) insisted, for instance, that if the desirability of political equality is accepted:

then every citizen must have an equal and effective opportunity to vote, and all votes must be counted as equal. If equality in voting is to be implemented, then clearly, elections must be free and fair. To be free means that citizens can go to the polls without fear of reprisal; and if they are to be fair, then all votes must be counted as equal.

A standard account also assumes that individuals, for the purposes of elections, are grouped in territorial constituencies. Historically, as Urbinati and Warren (2008: 389) point out, territorial representation has had an important relationship to political equality in so far as ‘the bare fact of residence [became] a sufficient condition for equal power sharing’. Yet, increasingly, modern theorists have broadened the political equality requirement to factor other notions of equality (for instance, socio-economic, ethnic, gender) into the representational relationship. Saward (2003: 164), for example, while not dismissing the reasonableness of efforts to identify a ‘single, superior meaning’ for political equality, such as equality of voting power, maintains that political equality has as its corollary ‘inclusion’, because ‘it is difficult to see how anything other than an inclusive, involving form of institutionalising political equality can be acceptable democratically’ (2003: 162).

Closely linked to this contention is the view that political equality is dependent for its realisation not simply on the legal status of voting but also in relation to social and economic resource distribution. Once resource distribution is factored into the democratic equation, then ‘structural inequalities’ – defined as ‘asymmetries in access to resources and opportunities and in the social capacity to act’ and which are institutionalised in ‘deep and enduring social hierarchies’ (Hayward 2009: 112–13) – pose a problem for the standard account of representative democracy. This is because the structurally disadvantaged ‘often cannot, by virtue of their positions in the hierarchies structural inequalities define, authorize representatives and/or hold them to account’ (Hayward 2009: 113). This inability is tantamount to exclusion from the representative process:

If the disadvantaged cannot constrain such representatives to ‘act for’ them, or if such representatives do not understand the needs, experiences, and/or perspectives of the disadvantaged (the worry is) representative institutions will fail the test of democratic legitimacy. (Hayward 2009: 113)

By this view a principal–agent conception of representation, where the votes of formally equal individuals in territorial constituencies are aggregated, simply serves to justify and perpetuate existing patterns of exclusion. To mitigate this variant problem of representational exclusion, strategies of inclusion have been constructed around notions of ‘descriptive representation’ (Pitkin 1967: 60–91) or the ‘politics of presence’ (Phillips 1995: 5–26). However, these strategies are not founded on political equality per se, but are rooted more specifically in the ideas of ‘equality of presence’ and ‘equality of recognition’ (Phillips 1995: 34, 40). In privileging these equalities, the focus of attention is redirected away from territorial constituencies as the constituted group for the purposes of political representation to social constituencies and rules of selection for representatives. In so doing, the incongruity emerges: to secure these specific representational equalities requires political strategies – of equality promotion and equality guarantees – that infringe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Democratic Incongruities: Old Models and New Perspectives
• 2 The ‘Problem’ of the People
• 3 The ‘Problem’ of Representational Transmission of Power
• 4 The ‘Problem’ of Elected Representatives
• 5 The ‘Problem’ of Representative Government
• 6 The ‘Problem’ of Citizen Participation
• 7 The ‘Problem’ of ‘Post-’: Post-Representative, Post-Parliamentary, Post-Democracy
• References
• Index