Transformations, Continuities, and Disfigurements of Representative Democracy

The model of representative democracy has since its inception undergone significant changes. The introduction of universal suffrage, the rise and subsequent demise of mass parties, the mediatisation and personalisation of politics, and, more recently, the introduction of social media and online filter bubbles, have altered the fabric and nature of representative relationships in significant ways. In his influential and much praised book, The Principles of Representative Government, Bernard Manin (1997) elaborated on two fundamental transformations that, he argues, representative democracy underwent through the twentieth century. The first transformation, following the introduction of universal suffrage, marked the shift from parliamentary democracy (in which representative relationships were based on personal trust) to party democracy (in which a sense of belonging to and identification with mass parties began to define representative relationships). The second, rooted in the rise of mass media (radio and television), lead to the change from party to audience democracy. The growing personalisation of politics and rising influence of media-savvy politicians caused Manin (ibid. 223) to conclude that “the reactive character of voting is eclipsed by its expressive dimension (…) Thus, the electorate appears, above all, as an audience which responds to the terms that have been presented on the political stage”. Since the publication of Manin’s book, scholars have become increasingly aware of and worried over the changing feature of contemporary representative systems and the extent to which these may shape, alter, or undermine its democratic functioning. In Democracy Disfigured (2014), Nadia Urbinati, for instance, discusses recent transformations of democracy and argues that they have dangerously altered the balance between “will” and “opinion” (i.e. between voting and majority rule, on one side, and direct participation in the public sphere, on the other) that, according to her, characterise well-functioning representative systems. Urbinati analyses the plebiscitarian transformation characterizing Manin’s audience democracy (which she sees as changing participation into spectatorship) alongside two further “disfigurements” that contemporary democracies are at risk of undergoing. First, the epistemic disfigurement that, with its emphasis on knowledge and expertise in democratic decision-making and the accompanying myth of technical government, threatens to change the opinion-based nature of democracy into a truth-seeking enterprise. And, second, the populist disfigurement, which uses opinion as “a strategy of hegemonic unification of the people that claims to be identical with the will of the sovereign” (Ibid.8). Over the past decade, a series of fast-paced changes in our societies have further raised the stakes. Improvements in communication technology, and particularly the introduction of social media, have contributed to the acceleration and individualisation of politics. The hyper-connectivity and immediacy of social media have contributed to and strengthened a sense of hyper-realism, characterised by a constant sense of urgency and instantaneity which risks confining us to the present (Chesneaux, 2000; Aubert, 2010). This hyper-realism is judged both to undermine the quality of decision-making (myopia) and to impair our capacity for utopian thinking (Giroux, 2004) and re-designing representative democracies (cf. Saward 2021). Meanwhile, the sudden proliferation of AI technology has further complicated the status of knowledge and expertise in our democracies, whilst the growing spectacularisation of politics (cf. Debord 1967; Green 2009) has contributed to the development of forms of hyper-partisanship as a result of which political adversaries are increasingly conceived as enemies. Especially radical right populist actors have thrived on widespread perceptions of insecurity, crisis, anxiety, abandonment, and alienation (Wodak 2015; Kübler and Schäfer 2022). Yet despite these transformations and disfigurements of representative democracy there are also important continuities. For example, while political parties evolve, they remain the dominant vehicle of collective representation in the electoral arena. This signals the need for continuing research on the role of political parties in contemporary representative democracy and how they respond to the accrued transformations. In addition, institutions, both informal (such as conventions and norms) as well as more formal institutions continue to play an important role in contemporary political representation, even if in many ways under challenge. These continuities speak to the need to be sensitive both to the transformations in representative democracy, as well as those features of representative democracy that provide continuities. Against this backdrop, questions of democratic resilience arise. Exactly how are current transformations affecting and redefining representative relationships, and what are the normative implications thereof? What features of representative democracy and political representation more generally demonstrate continuities despite the challenges and changes we see? What opportunities for, and threats to, representative democracy arise or might arise as the result of these transformations, disfigurements, and continuities? How are political elites and voters responding to these changes, and how do they understand them? What substantive and/or methodological challenges do the current transformations pose to the study of representation? How can we rethink and redesign representative processes and institutions to make them more democratic? This section welcomes theoretical, conceptual, and empirical papers that consider contemporary transformations, disfigurements, and/or continuities of representative democracy, that discuss key concepts, theories, and practices of representation in historical and comparative perspective (and in relation to ongoing transformations of representative democracy), that present empirical findings on the ways in which the fabric of representative relationships has been altered and/or persisted despite the challenges facing representative democracies, and/or that tackle normative concerns in the face of current transformations and disfigurements of representative democracies across the globe. Potential panel themes include (not exclusive or exhaustive list): 1. Transformations and disfigurements of representative democracies 2. Populist performances of political representation 3. Political parties: necessary evil or quintessential to representative democracy? 4. The place of institutions in contemporary political representation 5. Bridging the research gap: bringing studies of political representatives and studies of citizens into dialogue 6. The constructivist turn in representation studies: Innovations and limitations 7. Challenging logo-centric approaches to representation: political affects, visuals and the words unspoken 8. Pitkin’s paradox of representation re-thought: political absences and silences 9. Democratic design: making representation processes and practices more democratic 10. Rethinking the standards and virtues of representation in times of flux