The Fragmentation of the Representative System

• In Event: Dispersed Representation and its Discontents

Abstract

The last few years has seen much anxiety about populism and (in the US) about polarization, whose simplifying and centralizing tendencies have been greeted with suspicion. And yet the longer-term trend in the rich industrial world has not been towards simplification but towards massively increasing political complexity and a pluralization of the representative system. There are reasons to celebrate the multiplication of claims, actors and institutions performing political representation. It can reduce domination by inducing horizontal accountability. It can improve the reasonableness of political outcomes by bringing more perspectives to bear in deliberation about policy. And it can break up monopolistic control over the public sphere in which would-be representatives compete to construct visions of constituencies with distinctive identities and interests and to mobilize citizens behind those visions. And yet the fragmentation of the representative system can also threaten democratic inclusion, democratic legitimacy and even more fundamental political values, such as the rule of law. The multiplication of veto points (and less formal ‘voice points’) may reduce the vertical accountability of political elites to actors with limited resources, while also generating advantage for well-resourced actors capable of navigating an increasingly complex institutional environment. And as empowered processes of public reasoning become more dispersed and institutionally differentiated, they can come to appear opaque, irrelevant and unprincipled to greater proportions of the population. The pluralization of the representative system can become a kind of fragmentation that undermines its capacity to perform representation for society, to be turned towards democratic ends, and even to generate very basic sociopolitical goods such as legitimate law, governmental capacity, and social solidarity. Recent work by deliberative, republican and constructivist theorists of the representative system has significantly enriched our understanding of the variety of forms of representation – by citizens in minipublics, by officials in processes of networked governance, by activists making claims in the public sphere – that together comprise the representative system. But they have generally been too quick to celebrate the pluralization of the representative system and to overlook the importance of political integration on democratic terms as a crucial project for would-be representatives and a crucial function to be performed by the representative system as a whole.

Author

• Daniel Hutton Ferris, University of Toronto