Moral and Epistemic Implications of a Problem-Driven Approach to Democratic Representation

Drawing on recent reconstructions of pragmatist thought in political theory, this article offers a conceptualization of a problem-driven account of representation and assesses its moral and epistemic implications using the case of direct-democratic institutions in Switzerland. First, we defend an understanding of democratic representation that steers away from the classical idea of it being instrumental to some fixated higher end or ideal, say, consensus, aggregative equilibria, or to some definition of the common good. Rather, we conceive representation – and the evaluative standards required to assess its quality – in direct relation to citizens’ experience of social problems. Thus understood, representation is no longer primarily a matter of aggregation, utility, or justice, but a contextually differentiated, ever-evolving regulative ideal guiding our collective decisions about social problems. Second, we weigh the moral and epistemic implications of a problem-driven conception against the implications of an ideal-abstract conception of democratic representation. We argue that on both accounts the former is superior to the latter. Epistemically, a conception of representation that is responsive to a wider range of problems is better – because it is more complete – than one that addresses fewer problems. Morally, assessing the quality of representation according to its problem-solving capacity implies an ethical perspective that better encompasses the experiences of the weakest within the society than in non-pragmatic, “a-priori” accounts of representation. Finally, we assess to what extent claims-based participatory instruments like the Swiss optional referendum are sufficient institutional approximations of a problem-driven account of representation thus specified.