The Value(s) of Territorial Representation: Towards a Critique of an Exclusionary Mode of Democratic Representation

Contemporary democracies commonly divide their territory into geographically defined electoral districts which return representatives to parliament, and voters are typically obliged to electorally enrol and have their votes counted in their district of permanent residence. One important consequence of this territorial mode of representation is that nomadic citizens, e.g. Roma and Travellers, are potentially unable to participate in the electoral process and are practically excluded from the democratically acting demos. The territorial mode of representation also carries an exclusionary social ontology, as it implies that citizens’ distribution across the national territory is normally static, that citizens’ settlement in a location is relatively permanent, and that highly mobile, nomadic citizens are an abnormality. These observations suggest a need for a critical reflection on how representative democracies with nomadic populations organise elections, especially parliamentary elections. This reflection must, however, take serious the potential benefits of the territorial mode of representation, and these remain undertheorised. Despite a recent upsurge in political theorists’ engagement with democratic institutions and practices (e.g. felony disenfranchisement, expatriate voting, resident alien voting, etc.) there is no systematic, theoretical work on the virtues and justifications of territorial representation. This is why my proposed paper puts on hold the development of a definitive critique of territorial representation, aiming instead to identify the benefits that are particular to the territorial mode of representation and distinguish it from others, notably a national-proportional mode of representation where all votes are summed up together and parliamentary seats are distributed on a national-proportional basis and a further, hypothetical mode in which electoral districts are non-spatial and composed on the basis of randomly assigned personal numbers so that each electoral constituency is simply composed of a suitable number of randomly selected citizens. By contrasting the territorial mode of representation with these two rivals, I demonstrate that it has three distinctive (but not unique) virtues. First, it puts co-constituents into spatial proximity, thus enabling relatively cost-effective communication between political elites and voters (section I). Second, it makes it relatively easy to correct for irregularities in the scrutiny (section II). And territorial representation has, finally, a particular propensity to promote liberal legitimacy understood as the idea that individuals are only legitimately subject to state authority insofar as their subjection is justified with reasonably acceptable reasons (section III). I also consider the idea that territorial representation is particularly expressive of citizens’ moral equality. This view is shown to be prima facie plausible since territorial representation, in contrast to other modes of representation, enables locally concentrated, minoritarian interest groups to gain parliamentary representation and so appears to particularly forcefully express the idea that all citizens’ interests – also those of minorities – deserve equal concern. But I ultimately argue that the view is fallacious since territorial representation enables the representation of local minorities at the expense of dispersed minorities’ representation while non-territorial forms of representation do the reverse.