Dispersed Representation and its Discontents

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel will explore the question of whether and how the representative system needs to disperse and multiply the sites of representation.

Political theorists have, over the last decade or two, started radically rethinking political representation. Contesting the view that representation is the job of formal, authoritative legislative and executive institutions, they see it instead as a broadly distributed process of acting and claim-making that stretches beyond the electoral arena and across state boundaries. Representative systems are dynamic and complex. And, in a globalizing world of network governance, they are becoming more so. These ontological and empirical claims are often joined to normative ones. Deliberative democrats argue that multiplying minipublics occupied by randomly-selected citizen representatives will increase the legitimacy of law. Constructivist theorists of representation argue that processes of identity and interest formation can often be improved by inducing competition in the market for representative claims. Madisonian republicans argue that domination can be reduced by increasing the number of non-electoral representatives operating in independent governmental agencies or transnational minidemoi. In short, theorists of representation have come to celebrate the complexity of representative systems. And yet the dispersal of representation may have costs as well as benefits. The Movement for Black Lives learned from the failures of Occupy that hierarchy and organization are crucial means for building counterhegemonic power. Habermas reflects a broader sentiment among the European social democrats when he argues that the best response to the rise of the far right in Europe would be a ‘democratic re-polarization’. And recent literature on partisanship has argued that strong, accountable parties can break clientelism and improve public discourse by giving it structure.

This panel will evaluate the multiplication of claims, actors and institutions in the representative system. Questions to be explored could include: How does recent work in the theory of representation help us evaluate the fragmentation and centralization of representative systems? What has been gained as the number of representative claims and actors have increased, in most rich liberal democracies, over the last half-century or so? What, if anything, has been lost? And how might we interpret the success of recent attempts in Europe and the U.S. to mobilize constituencies around visions of a representative system that is recentered at the national level and perhaps also on the central executive?

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 3: Normative Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Constituency-Making: A Democratic Realist Critique - Lisa J. Disch, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• The Fragmentation of the Representative System - Daniel Hutton Ferris, University of Toronto

• Electoral Incentives and Electoral Systems: Five Advantages of Two Party Systems - Ian Shapiro, Yale University; Frances McCall Rosenbluth, Yale University

• Populism and the Decline of Party Democracy - Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University

Chair

• Jane Mansbridge Harvard Kennedy School

Discussants

• Samuel Hayat CNRS

• Melissa S. Williams University of Toronto