Democratic representation and democratic sanctions

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that citizens have an entitlement to sanction representatives, but representatives have tools to anticipate this sanction and reconstruct their views in order to anticipate the views of the people they are supposed to represent. I also argue that represented and representatives have an entitlement to sanction democratic representative institutions and practices, but, unless citizens across the spectrum of all representative relationships agree on many fronts, sanctions are likely to violate the democratic requirement that all subjected to a collective decision should not be mere objects of coercion.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For insightful comments, I wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for this journal, Stephen Elstub, and the rest of the Representation editorial team. Earlier drafts received excellent feedback at the 2017 ASPP Conference at the University of Sheffield and at the 2017 ECPR General Conference in Oslo.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Corrado Fumagalli http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5402-162X

Notes

1 For this reason, all members of the demos are de facto subjected to all laws, changes and legislation within the jurisdiction of the state.

2 This does not mean to say that represented are misrepresented. Like Severs (2010), I agree that there is a significant conceptual difference between being misrepresented and feeling misrepresented. However, in this case, this conceptual difference is particularly thin. Represented citizens establish new representative relationships. And there might be a number of different reasons for these new representative relationships, and many of these reasons might not be fully rational. For instance, manipulatory politics may convince represented citizens that their representatives are misrepresenting them, represented citizens may have new interests and needs because of a particularly short-sighted view, and moral sentiments such as friendship, anger, and love may affect political preferences of represented citizens.

3 Dovi puts this in the context of an ethics of democratic representation. In her view, an ethics of democratic representation should help democratic citizens to be in a better position to ‘differentiate between the faults of representative institutions (e.g. improper norms or procedures for determining policies) and bad performance of individual representatives’ (Dovi 2007: 49).

4 For a programme of reform that allows for resistance and a series of institutional means to overcome structures of domination, see Hamilton (2014).

5 When all citizens accept the justification for sanctioning democratic practices and institutions, it seems plausible to think that they not only feel that they are misrepresented, but they are misrepresented, regardless of what democratic institutions do.

6 I have derived the list of disagreement deductively from theoretical expectations about a standard situation of institutional change in plural liberal democracies. My list aims at offering the essential fronts of disagreements. It is by no means exhaustive. There might be many other sources of disagreement, but they would not change the nature of my argument. Actually, the more disagreements we have, the more difficult it becomes to change democratic representative institutions in ways that accommodate the all-subjected principle fully.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Corrado Fumagalli

Corrado Fumagalli is a postdoctoral researcher in political philosophy at the Political Science department of LUISS -Guido Carli University. Email: [email protected]