The System of Democratic Representation: A View from the Representative Standpoint

Recent debates within democratic theory have seen increasing calls for a “systemic” approach to democratic representation. Picking up this challenge, this paper outlines one possible such approach to representation by theorizing it from “the representative standpoint” (Fusillo 2023), as a system of relationships and related spaces in which the democratic representative engages in the fulfilment of their role. Questioning the under-examined common sense within the literature that the relationship between the representative and the represented is the primary or only analytically-relevant relationship involved, the paper puts forward the following argument. What the representative standpoint makes legible is that there is a core set of relationships that are logically necessary for democratic representation to be said to be taking place. Beside the 1) relationship between the representative and the represented, this also includes two further, equally necessary relationships, that 2) of the representative with other representatives and that 3) of the representative with themselves. This three-fold minimal conceptual structure, however, does not exhaust the actual complexity of contemporary representation. In fact, historical developments within modern parliamentary democracy and within society and technology more broadly have increasingly involved representatives in other relations that have become integral to today’s practices of democratic representation. A further, historically emergent, set of relationships adds itself therefore to the logically necessary one, and this includes, at least, the relationship of the representative: 4) to the state bureaucracy; 5) to intermediary bodies; 6) to the media. The system of democratic representation, then, is presented here as structured by an increasingly complex set of relationships, a view that has the potential to offer new insights into descriptions of current representative practices and the normative standards to which these should be held.