Representative Democracy As Mediated Politics: Rethinking The Links Between Representation And Participation
Enrique Peruzzotti
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This paper is divided into three sections. The first two sections critically review the literature on representation and participation respectively to propose, in the last section, an alternative theoretical framing of the links between those two concepts. Section one critically analyses democratic minimalism's election-centred understanding of political representation: in this model, elections are the quintessential institution of representative government. Under democratic minimalism, representation is fundamentally reduced to the act of electoral authorization; its function being to select a government. In this understanding, democratic representation is an activity that largely rests on the initiatives and actions of political leaders. Civic participation (other than electoral mobilisation) is not considered a significant input to democratic governance.
Section two engages in a critical review of participation theory. Critics of minimal democracy advocate a sustained increase in participation, arguing that participation plays a positive role under democracy. They disagree however, on their understanding of what participation means or in what particular ways does participation contribute to democratic life. Proponents of participatory democracy view participation as an alternative rather than a complement to representation, searching to expand direct forms of civic involvement within civil society. But even within those authors that do not oppose participation to representation, there is no agreement regarding the role that civic engagement plays in a representative democracy. Their consensus around a need for a more participatory type of democracy usually hides significant disagreements on the way to think about the functions of participation and of its specific contribution to representative government. Calls for greater civic activism frequently reveals contrasting notions about what participatory formats are desirable. The competing understandings about what participation means are sometimes bridged by placing all of them under the wing of a more encompassing concept: civil society. Such a theoretical move, however, is a rather unfruitful exercise that simply sweeps competing notions of participation under the carpet of a more abstract term without really articulating them into a new theoretical synthesis. As a result, the quarrel of interpretations resurfaces as a conflict between opposing meanings of civil society. The way out of such a theoretical deadlock is to elaborate a comprehensive theory of civic participation that could hold and make sense of the actual diversity of meanings and forms of civic engagement that are found in contemporary societies. This is the task set for section three.
In the last section, I introduce a theoretical framework to integrate both sets of literature into a model of representative democracy that breaks with the dominant electoral understanding of the concept. The distinctive feature of representative democracy, I will argue, is not elections but the establishment of an institutional setting that gives citizens the opportunity to influence the dynamics of representative institutions not only on Election Day but on a continuous and regular basis. In this rendering of the concept of representative democracy, the quality of a regime will not be solely measured against the standard of free and competitive elections but fundamentally by the scope and influence that the informal space of mediated politics has over formal representative arrangements. The arena of mediated politics includes a variety of actors and practices that need to be analytically distinguished to allow a proper understanding of how different forms of civic actors interact with each other and how they each feed and reproduce the representative bond in contemporary democracies. Civic participation and political representation are no longer presented as alternative ways to organise the polity but as the two sides of the Janus-faced institution of democratic representation. The idea of representative government as mediated politics requires the elaboration of a more sophisticated and differentiated theory of participation that could give account of the diverse set of actors and of the multiple forms of collective action that contribute to the practice of democratic representation in contemporary societies.