Political Representation - Classical Consent, Medieval Corporatism And The Origin Of Political Representation, Representing The Rights And Interests Of Individuals
representative democracy concept
Although in the early twenty-first century representative government is synonymous with democracy, the concept of political representation arose separately from the idea of the rule of the people. Broadly political representation refers to an arrangement whereby one is enabled to speak and act with authority in the behalf of some other.
There are two issues that must be addressed in any theory of representation: who or what is to be represented, and who or what is to be the representative. The first question revolves around the description of constituencies. The second concerns the method of selection by which the representative is determined. There are specific answers to these questions that make representation compatible with and complementary to democracy. Once such a constellation of ideas is in place, however, the drama with which the conjunction of representation and democracy is received—in 1820 James Mill (1773–1836) wrote that "in the grand discovery of modern times, the system of representation, the solution to all difficulties, both speculative and practical, will perhaps be found" (p. 21)—eclipses somewhat the predemocratic origins of the concept of representation.
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Election is an ancient custom, and early statements of electoral principle, such as that by Pliny the Younger (62–111), seem to imply a representative relation, "The emperor of all the people should be chosen by all the people" (imperator omnibus eligi debet ex omnibus). The practice of obtaining the consent of the "better part" of the people is referred to by Po…
The idea of a corporation, and the collectivist conception of the relation between representative and constituency, was soon challenged by William of Ockham with his conception of a constituency as the aggregation of real individuals. Ockham's nominalism, applied to the corporate theory of representation, rejects the attribution of rights to abstract fictions such as the collective entities…
Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) contains a theory of authorization and consent that produces a conception of representation that straddles the corporatist-individualist divide. Individuals, in becoming party to the social contract, authorize the sovereign, who then becomes their representative. It is only after they enter into the contract that individuals are merged into the body politic.…
In practice, however, these views failed to prevent those in the American colonies without actual representation in parliament to formulate the revolutionary slogan "taxation without representation is tyranny." The constitutions of these colonies and the new American republic affirmed that only election by individuals produces real accountability, and guarantees that representatives …
Aquinas, Thomas. Political Writings: Thomas Aquinas. Edited and translated by R. W. Dyson. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Burke, Edmund. "Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, 1792." In The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Vol. IX, I: The Revolutionary War 1794–1797 II: Ireland, edited by Paul Langford, 594–638. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. —&#x…
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