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The term representative democracy was coined in France and America in the age of constitutional revolutions; its implementation as a form of government began at the local level—township government in New England and, after 1789, municipal government in Paris.

Eighteenth Century Beginning

Since the beginning, representative democracy was perceived as peculiarly modern and either prized as an alternative to democracy or criticized as mockery of the government by the people. Although we do not know for sure who first spoke of representative democracy, the Marquis d’Argenson, a foreign minister under Louis XV, was among the first who described the characteristics of this form of government and judged them favorably. As he wrote in his Considérations sur le government ancient et present de la France (1765):

——False democracy soon collapses into anarchy. It is government of the multitude; such is a people in revolt, insolently scorning law and reason. Its tyrannical despotism is obvious from the violence of its movements and the uncertainty of its deliberations. In true democracy, one acts through deputies, who are authorized by election; the mission of those elected by the people and the authority that such officials carry constitute the public power.

Like d’Argenson, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and Alexander Hamilton used the term representative democracy (in 1766 and 1777 respectively) as a corrective of “pure” or “absolute” or “monstrous” democracy. A very different perspective can be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762). Indeed, although Rousseau did not deem democracy a good form of government, he excluded categorically that representative government was legitimate: this made him the inspirer of a theory of participatory democracy as opposite to representative democracy.

Rousseau derived this view from a juristic conception of sovereignty that had in Jean Bodin its most authoritative interpreter in modern Europe.According to Bodin, whose goal was to conceptualize the absolute power of the monarch, because the will is the source of sovereignty and cannot be represented, for the sovereign to preserve supreme power, delegates or procurators must not have an autonomous will or become “representatives.” Drawing on this conception, Rousseau concluded that either the elected are delegates with imperative mandate or they are representatives with no mandate at all: but the former only entailed a legitimate form of indirect political autonomy because it did not deprive the people of their sovereign will. Rousseau reached surprisingly similar conclusions as le Baron de Montesquieu, the mentor of liberal representative government, who merged self-government (sovereignty) and direct government (democracy) and created a firm opposition between representation and democracy. Montesquieu’s formulation has became paradigmatic of those theorists who deemed representative democracy an oxymoron: a government is democratic if “the people as a body have sovereign power” and if “the people alone . . . make laws” (10, 1989). England was a model of good (i.e., moderate) government because it was constitutional and electoral; that is to say, neither absolute nor direct or pure (wherein it was clear that democracy was both).

Representative Government And Representative Democracy

Yet another important distinction emerged in the eighteenth century between representative government and representative democracy. Although both terms were sometimes used synonymously, the more perceptive political leaders were aware of the semantic difference between the two. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès and the authors of The Federalist Papers used the term representative government instead of representative democracy because they perceived representation as a welcome strategy to disentangle the principle of legitimacy by popular consent from people’s direct participation. Sieyès brought Rousseau’s perspective into the representative context and perfected the metamorphosis of the citizen into the elector and the sovereign-people into the sovereign-nation, which was given unity and voice by the elected assembly. Federalist No. 63 argued that representation made possible “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity” from any share in the power of making laws and concluded that this contributed in making modern republic more secure than the ancient ones.

Both the axioms held by the Federalists and Sieyès and those held by Montesquieu became canonical, and the adoption of universal suffrage in the twentieth century did not alter the perception of the undemocratic nature of a system whose basic arrangements have remained the same since its inception, when it was a government of notables elected by few privileged voters. Along this line, contemporary political theorists have defined modern democracy a government by discussion in which voting for representatives (rarely on issues) is the only direct power to which adult citizens are always entitled. But, as Benjamin Constant observed in 1814, it is paradoxical to call it democratic, for the only moment the citizens decide directly is when they delegate their lawmaking power. Consequently, the function of elections, Giovanni Sartori wrote in 1965, is “not to make a democracy more democratic, but to make democracy possible. Once we admit the need for elections, we minimize democracy for we realize that the system cannot be operated by the demos itself ” (108).Thus whether the government of the moderns is democratic depends on how elites are selected and how their selectable characteristics are formed. The extent to which representation is democratic relies on the extent to which these characteristics are not associated with inborn qualities but can be de jure acquired by all. Joseph Schumpeter’s classical formulation was the best rendering of representative government: what makes it democratic is only the equal right and possibility citizens have to elect and be elected, to dismiss and be dismissed.

Unlike these scholars, the main theorists of representative democracy, Thomas Paine, François Brissot, and le Marquis de Condorcet (to be followed by John Stuart Mill in midnineteenth century), agreed that state institutions should be organized to facilitate the coexistence of representation and participation. They interpreted representation not as the opposite of direct rule but as an enrichment of democracy. According to Paine, only two forms of government met the criterion of legitimacy by consent: democracy in its simple form and democracy in its representative form. Following in the footsteps of the authors of The Federalist Papers, Paine used the word republic to denote the latter. But unlike them, he did not interpret it as a strategy of popular exclusion. As he stated in 1792, it is wholly inaccurate to see representation as a mere remedy for the implementation of popular sovereignty in a large territory. In fact, representation allows popular sovereignty to exist and to operate in a legal and social space composed of individuals who have the same rights and who are not defined by their social status or communitarian membership regardless the size of the state. For Paine, Athens proved by default that if Athenian democracy had a turbulent and unstable life, it was because it did not have institutional means to cope with the effects of individual freedom. Indeed, without the unifying work of representation, Athenian democracy lacked the capacity of transforming the plurality of interests and views held by its free and equal citizens into a unitary process of decision that was able to protect the general interest from direct interference by factions and classes. Hence, Paine concluded that “Athens, by representation, would have surpassed her own democracy” (2000, 180).

Contemporary democratic theory endorses Paine’s reading. Indeed, representation now engages democracy scholars more directly, a change from the traditional defense of representative institutions by the Schumpeterian theorists of the circulation of elites and electoral democracy against the proponents of “participatory” or “strong” democracy. George Kateb (1981) has recently argued that the institution of representation is the source of the “moral distinctiveness” of modern democracy, and even the sign of its superiority over direct democracy. Even more radical is David Plotke’s argument that in a representative democracy “the opposite of representation is not participation” (1997, 19), but exclusion from representation. Rather than being inimical to participation, Iris Marion Young has suggested, “political representation is both necessary and desirable,” while the “elevation of direct democracy to the apex,” as the only “real” democracy, “is mistaken” (1997, 352). Thus whereas theorists of electoral government from Sieyès, Schumpeter, Robert Dahl, Sartori, and Bernard Manin have identified democracy with the right to vote for representatives and the right to free speech and association by which means citizens contribute in the making of the government by discussion, theories in the tradition of Condorcet, Paine, and Mill have proposed instead we stretch the meaning of representation and see it as a political process and an essential component of democracy. Hence, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has argued that it is paramount that we understand government is representative “not by demonstrating its control over its subjects but just the reverse, by demonstrating that its subjects have control over what it does” (Pitkin 1984, 232).

Participation And Representation

This brief historical excursus shows that the term representative democracy conveys the complexity, richness, and uniqueness of the political order of the moderns, an original synthesis of two distinct and, in certain respects, alternative political traditions. Democracy, a Greek word with no Latin equivalent, stands for direct rule (“making things done”) by the people. Representation, a Latin word with no Greek equivalent, entails a delegated action on the part of some on behalf of someone else. As a mixture of these two components, in its standard meaning representative democracy has four main features: (1) the sovereignty of the people expressed in the electoral appointment of the representatives; (2) representation as a free mandate relation; (3) electoral mechanisms to ensure some measure of responsiveness to the people by representatives who speak and act in their name; and (4) universal franchise, which grounds representation on an important element of political equality. The central element of this standard account is that constituencies are formally defined by territory, not economic or corporate interests or cultural identities, an aspect that belongs to democracy since Cleasthenes’ reform of Athens’s demes in sixth century BCE. This basic formal equality in the distribution of the voting power among adult citizens gives the mark of authorization and legitimacy to a government that relies on consent.

Because representative democracy is first and foremost the name of a form of government, reference to people’s sovereignty and authorization is essential, not accessory. Electoral representation is thus crucial in expressing the will of the people, even if the claims of elected officials to act in the name of the people unavoidably become an object of contestation by citizens. This tension is at the core of representation and also accounts for the complexity of representative democracy. Representation is the locus of the dynamics that keep the political process in motion and activates the communication between state institutions and society. Thus, although political representation starts with elections, because it starts with the equal distribution of the power of voting, a merely electoral rendering of representative democracy does not exhaust the meaning of representation and democracy. Nor does it exclude the possibility of a different approach and also different institutional solutions. Far from a homogenous category, representative government can be best described as a complex and pluralistic family whose democratic wing is not the exclusive property of those who argue for participation against representation and its representative wing is not the exclusive property of those who identify it with the electoral selection of an elite against participation. To better capture this complexity, the meaning of representation has to be revisited.

Political Unity, Pluralism, And Liberty

Representation emerged in the Middle Ages within the juristic tradition. Scipione Maffei, writing in 1736, maintained that representation was practiced in the Roman Empire as a means that unified its large territory by a federative system in which communities ruled themselves on issues pertaining to the government of their localities, while submitting to the central power on issues of military defense and taxation. Yet notwithstanding Maffei’s perspicacious link between federalism and representation, it was in the Middle Ages that the rule of the contract (of representation) was fully inscribed in public law. Representation was born in a confrontational environment within Christianity and between secular and religious powers. Its origins are to be found in the context of the medieval church and the relationship of power between localities and the emperor, and between the nobles and the king. Representation was thus born as an institution of power’s containment and control, and moreover as a means of unifying a large and diverse population. In synthesis, unification (of the multitude) and subjection (to the decisions made by chosen delegates) merged in the institution of representation. These two aspects presumed an active involvement of both partners because the representative, who was sometime called procurator and commissary, was supposed to speak or act for a specific group of people, who endowed that person with the power of representing their interests in front of an authority that was recognized as superior. When a given community delegated some members to be represented before the court of the king or the pope, with powers to bind those who appointed them, there lay the origins of representation. Then the technique was transferred to other contexts and used for other purposes.

The origins of representation account for its mix of private (Vertretung or legal representation in court) and political (Repräsentation or representation in government) elements. On the one hand, representation conveys the idea of somebody being authorized to act or speak for somebody (the Latin word re-presentare means to make something manifest or present). On the other hand, it conveys the idea of the representative forming a unitary will that did not exist before. From this dual nature another duality arises—namely the fact that representation has both a passive character and an active one. In the juristic tradition to which the modern conception of sovereignty as authorized will belongs, the representative is unavoidably related to the represented not only because of the dependence on the latter’s designation or choice but also because the representative is under the inspection or monitoring surveillance of the represented.

Representation designates a relation of interdependence that brings to the fore a novel kind of liberty, one that does not need to be associated with the agent’s direct action or presence in the place where decisions are made, as was the case in ancient democracy. The sources of representation’s richness and fault rest precisely in its complex relation to political autonomy. No one else could render this tension better than Immanuel Kant, who was not only the philosopher who categorically defined the concept of freedom as exit from tutelage or autonomy, but also the political theorist who declared representation an essential condition for constitutional government. Kant was aware that representation made autonomous persons (citizens) trust someone else to act on their behalf, more or less like individuals, such as children, women, servants, and aliens, who were declared in need of tutelage by the civil authority. Not surprisingly, critics of representative democracy have turned precisely to direct presence as the unavoidable condition of political autonomy when they wanted to stress the ambiguous nature of this form of government.

A Diarchy Of Will And Judgment

Thus the term representative democracy does not entail an oxymoron, on condition that political autonomy is apprehended beyond the intermittent and discrete series of electoral instants that the conception of sovereignty as the authorizing will entails and located in the continuum of informal power (influence) and formal power (voting) that the open public sphere creates and recreates. To paraphrase Augustine Cochin, the public sphere is not inhabited by isolated electors, and representative democracy is not a consenting “crowd of inorganic voters”; political parties and movements are the means citizens create to give their political interests and beliefs a presence in politics and make their influence effective and persistent through time. The strength and social rootedness of these political associations signal the strength of democratic representation.

Representative democracy is the name of a government that starts with elections but develops beyond them. It opens up a domain of participation that, although informal and not authoritative, can deeply influence the political direction of the country. In democratic politics, representation is not “acting in the place of somebody,” but more precisely, is a political relation of sympathetic similarity or communication with those in the place of whom the representatives pass laws (from here citizens’ quest that representatives’ choices should enjoy representativity or be in a reflective adhesion with citizens’ opinions comes). The development of this kind of reflective sympathy (which is the foundation of the advocacy aspect of representation) is revealed by the statute that regulates how the representatives vote in the assembly: except in clearly specified cases (which pertain to decrees, not laws), the voting record must be made public. Electors need to know what the representatives do and say and how they vote in the assembly because they need to compare representatives’ judgment to their own judgment. It is thus appropriate to describe representative democracy as form of popular government that rests on a diarchy of will and judgment and an endogenous tension between institutionalized power and extrainstitutionalized power, or between representative institutions and citizens’ participation.

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