Representative Democracy and Civil Disobedience

This paper examines the democratic legitimacy of civil disobedience from the standpoint of representative democracy. I argue that civil disobedience is democratically justifiable, from this perspective, as a response to a breakdown of representation. I develop a conception of political representation as a practice of interpreting interests, and defend responsiveness—reinterpreted as a mode of comportment, to avoid pitfalls in the constructivist and empirical literatures—as the cardinal virtue of representation. I then explain the notion of a breakdown of representation as a systemic lack of responsiveness. Responsiveness, thus reinterpreted, also offers the key to the evaluation of informal representative claims—including disobedient ones.