Somewhat surprisingly in view of the worldwide process of democratization (Haerpfer et al. 2009; particularly Berg-Schlosser 2009), the quality of political representation and, first and foremost, the quality of the linkages between the representatives and the represented have been a highly disputed issue in political science for several decades. The report of the Trilateral Commission on the Crisis of Democracy (Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki 1975) raised the question of whether the alleged alienation of citizens from democratic institutions originated in a growing distance between citizens and their representatives. This is an ongoing debate in modern democracies such as France and Germany, among other, and pertains to theory as well as to empirical research.
In spite of the involvement of French and German political scientists in the international debates and research activities on the future of representation and representative democracy, there has been very little comparative French-German research on how the concept of political representation is implemented in these two political systems, what ideas the citizens of both nations hold regarding representation, and how they assess the quality of representation in their countries. This applies particularly to analyses of the practice of representation as being manifest in the activities of French and German Members of Parliament (MPs) in the national arena as well as in their local districts. Although research on representation in the two national political systems has been conducted for several years, this research was done in a state of splendid isolation from the neighbor country.
Roughly the same can be said about the investigation of civic attitudes towards the process of representation. Admittedly, France and Germany have been included in existing cross-national survey programs such as Eurobarometer, World/European Values Survey, the International Social Survey Program, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the European Social Survey. These surveys have yielded a large number of publications, some of them addressing the issue of representation more or less broadly (particularly Thomassen 2014). However, neither can it be said that attitudes towards representation are at the core of these survey programs, nor do they give specific attention to France and Germany in the respective publications. Moreover, French and German scholars have not been eager so far to use the existing data sources for exploring what the two countries have in common with respect to the practice and culture of representation, how and why they differ, and what this implies about the prospects for democratic government in the two countries.
Thus, a comparison of political representation in France and Germany seems to be necessary and overdue for several reasons. First and foremost, representation is a key issue in the practice of democratic government, and both actual and perceived weaknesses of the process of representation create challenges for the French and German democratic regimes. Second, although a first impression of how representation works and is perceived in France and Germany is conveyed by national research and some cross-national programs, a systematic comparison between representation in France and Germany starting from a common scientific program is still missing. And third, the institutional arrangements and the cultural traditions of the two countries show some variation that could account for differences in the ideas and practices of the two nations. Although the relevance of these systemic variables cannot be examined systematically in a two-nation comparison, they may be helpful in the interpretation of the empirical findings.
A Crisis of Representative Democracy?
The concept of political representation is among the most important topics in the analysis of the idea and practice of modern democracy. Representation has been adopted alongside the principle of sovereignty of the people as the key mechanism of political decision-making in the wake of the French revolution and became even more indispensable with growing democratization, in particular with the introduction of equal voting rights in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In this process, countries developed quite diversified doctrines and practices of representative government.
During the last few years, the idea as well as the practice of representative democracy have been called into question by the demand for democratic innovations (e.g., Cain, Dalton, and Scarrow 2008; Smith 2009; Geissel and Newton 2012). Doubts about the legitimacy of the logic of representation are due to several factors: erroneous notions of democracy often offered by the media and opinion polls, the craving for the mechanisms of “direct” democracy, the idea of power being confiscated by a caste of politicians; each of these factors is further enhanced by processes of European integration and globalization. This is not new, since the concept and institutions of democratic representation have been criticized ever since they came into being. Thus, the “decline of parliament” and the “crisis of parliamentary representation” have been commonplace in studies on the subject for nearly a century (e.g., Bryce 1921; Schmitt 1923; Laski 1928; Mosca 1928; Speyer 1935; Perin 1960; Chandernagor 1967; Loewenberg 1971). The objections to representative democracy were and are manifold; some are directed at its principles and some at aspects of its practice at a given period in time.
Since the debate on the crisis of late capitalism reached its height in the 1970s, scholars emphasizing Marxist, liberal and conservative ideological premises have raised the issue of the “democratic malaise” in a countless number of publications (see as good summaries of the debate: Kaase and Newton 1995; Rosanvallon 2006; Thomassen 2015). Keywords in this debate are the decline of trust in the core institutions of representative democracy, a growing distance between the governing and the governed, and even a legitimacy crisis for representative democracy in general. In view of a mixed picture conveyed by the available data on regime support, attachment to the political community, and trust in political institutions (Dalton 2004, 21–48), Dalton presented a thoroughly critical summary on the state and prospects of contemporary representative democracies:
There is a contemporary malaise in the political spirit involving the three key elements of representative democracy (what I will refer as the three Ps): politicians, political parties, and parliament. Moreover, this is not a contemporary disenchantment with the present government or the present sets of political candidates. In many instances, these patterns have persisted over several decades and across changes in government administrations. (Dalton 2004, 38).
The supposed spread of negative feelings towards politicians, political institutions and the political system as a whole cannot be traced back to one single reason. Poor systemic performance, socioeconomic modernization and the shift from traditional to self-actualization values, the decline of social capital, and the negativist reporting of mass media are among the reasons often mentioned as promoters of changing political support (Dalton 2004, 62–74; Norris 1999, 21–26). Others point to a growth in education and political competence plus rising aspirations as having led to increasing political discontent (Norris 2011, 119–215). Finally, the social and political consequences of globalization, such as the weakening of national identity and the declining capacity of national political institutions to cope with global political challenges, might also have promoted citizens’ disenchantment with representative democracies. In an analysis of the loss of democratic responsiveness in the United States, Jacobs and Shapiro (2000, 5) identified unresponsive behavior of political representatives as a key to the currently felt democratic deficit:
The general decline in responsiveness of politicians since the 1970s is connected … to two of the most widely debated and worrisome trends in American politics: the mass media preoccupation with political conflict and strategy, and the record proportion of Americans who distrust politicians convinced that they no longer listen to them.
Along with a critical view of the present state of representative democracy, the hope of “curing the democratic malaise with democratic innovations” (Newton 2012) appeared as a viable alternative. Ironically, this optimism has been fostered by roughly the same processes of social and cultural change which were named as sources of the crisis of representative democracy: the spread of mass education, the rise of participatory values, the growth of “critical democrats”, and, finally, technical innovations as the increasing use of digital media open the possibility of a direct exchange between the governing and the governed. These together are the most important aspects of this development (see for more details: Norris 2002, 19–31).
In the normative debates on the doctrine of representation, the populist interpretation of the principle of sovereignty of the people has always stipulated a critical look at any kind of representative agencies. The populist view of democracy explicitly rejects an intermediary between the will of the people and the political decisions that bind all citizens. Thomas Jefferson can be taken as testimonial when it comes to proving that the representative form of democracy is per se inferior to direct democracy: he spoke of representative democracy as “popular government of the second degree of purity.” At more or less the same time, the founders of the American constitution “associated direct democracy with mob rule and with unwise policies” (Mezey 2008, 9). They did not argue defensively by citing practical obstacles to implement “true” (that is, direct) democracy but rather emphasized systematic and theory-based disadvantages to this form of government. In this they moved partly in line with Emmanuel Sieyes’ view that representation was a genuine principle of state organization. Indeed, for him it was the only form adequate for the emerging civil society with its specific feature of division of labor and its abandonment of the Aristotelian understanding of zoon politikon. The founding fathers were, however, also driven by a deep-rooted fear of the uneducated masses, their passions and their self-interest; thus, they favored the republic, and not direct democracy.
Although all these arguments were on the table, two hundred years later Robert Dahl declared representative democracy to be a “sorry substitute for the real thing” (Dahl 1982, 13), a makeshift system used because of the large size of populations and territories, and the scope and complexity of existing large-scale political communities. With emphatic tenacity, generations of democratic reformers as well as populist theorists have disregarded the logic of representation and have striven for the allegedly genuine form—direct democracy. In their eyes, it would overcome all the deficits of representative government and might even lead to true self-government by the people. Under these conditions, the civic community de...