The Fourfold Recursion of Representation: Rethinking Absence in Representative Practice

Accompanying the so-called democratic rediscovery of representation and the constructivist turn in democratic theory, has been a shift from dualistic to systemic understanding of democratic representation – that is, a shift away from a narrow focus on the relation between the representative and the represented and towards an understanding of its practice as in fact a complex system of multiple and overlapping relationships among a “myriad” of actors (Saward 2014). In fact, the literature has recently pointed towards the necessity to acknowledge democratic representation as at least involving a recursive movement between two “levels of deliberation” (Williams 2000; Mansbridge 2019) or sets of relationships (Salkin 2021; Fusillo 2023): the relationship between the representative and their constituents and that between the representative and representatives of other constituencies. This paper intervenes in this debate by advancing two claims. First, it claims that a more adequate description of the recursive movement of democratic representation needs to account for more than two relationships: these are in fact at least four and include the relations of the representative to constituents and to other representative, but also, and as importantly, their relations to parties and to media. Secondly, looking at these from the representative standpoint (Fusillo 2023), the paper puts forwards an analysis of the presence/absence dynamics within each of these relationship, bringing to the foreground the presence/absence of the representative (rather than of the represented) and the temporary absence from some relationships that their engagement in others necessarily involves. Finally, it gestures towards the implications of this fourfold recursive model of democratic representation for the normative status of absence.