Beyond Elites and Masses: Civic Power as the Power to Represent

Representative democracy is widely held to be in crisis, and much democratic theory now seeks the remedy in a conception of civic power understood as the organized power of the many, marshalled to check the influence of elites and close the gap between a political class and the citizenry. We want to question that framing. However critical its intent, this “counterbalance” model shares a premise with the elite theory it opposes: that a fundamental feature of democracy is a division between those who represent and decide and those who are merely represented. This is, in truth, the very structure of populist thought: a unified people set against a fused establishment. Reproducing it, civic power, thus conceived, misfires, training suspicion on the most visible and yet often least powerful actors in the system whilst the actual concentrations of power go untouched – or even installing, under anti-elite rhetoric, an elite of its own. Drawing on our systemic account of democratic representation, we approach civic power instead from the "representative standpoint" – the perspective not of those represented but of those who undertake to represent others. Seen from here, the strict elite/mass division on which both the counterbalance model and elite theory rest begins to dissolve. The elected representative is, more often than not, less a wielder of power than its frustrated agent, a giver and taker of reasons enmeshed in structures of party, media, and economic interest; what passes for their own personal power is largely the structural power with which they are symbolically fused. To disentangle the two is not to exonerate elite influence but to seek to locate it more precisely: the economic elites that increasingly shape political decision-making are powerful precisely because they set the terms of representation without ever bearing its burdens or answering to its constraints. The sharp division between an elite who represent and a mass who are represented is, we argue, an artefact of representation grown scarce, concentrated, and unsupported. Its remedy is not to counterbalance that division but to dissolve the conditions that produce it: to valorize, multiply, and support the experience of representing others throughout society – not only in formal politics, but in workplaces, associations, and civil society. Civic power, so understood, denotes a reversal in our very idea of representation – from the institution through which we are represented by others to the institution through which we practice representing others – and, with it, a democracy made resilient not by opposing power with power but by dissolving power differentials through distributing ever more widely the demanding work of representation.