How can non-elected representatives secure democratic representation?

Research on the democratic legitimacy of non-elected actors influencing policy while acting as representatives is often lacking in governance literature, despite being increasingly relevant worldwide. Recent theories of representation argue that there are non-electoral mechanisms to appoint such non-elected representatives and hold them responsible for their actions. Consequently, democratic non-electoral representation can be achieved. Through empirical analysis, this article explores democratic non-electoral representation in governance networks by comparing how non-elected representatives, their constituents and the decision-making audience understand the outcome of representation to benefit the constituency, authorisation and accountability. The research findings conclude that all three groups mostly share the understanding of democratic non-electoral representation as ongoing interactions between representatives and constituents, multiple (if any) organisational and discursive sources of authorisation and deliberative aspects of accountability. All of these are non-electoral mechanisms that secure democratic representation. These findings make an important contribution to the literature on non-electoral representation in policymaking.

Revamping the menu – or just offering what’s in stock? Candidate list volatility in open-list PR systems. Evidence from Finland

Why do parties change candidate lists between elections? Although candidate list volatility is an important indicator of the responsiveness of electoral representation, it has received little attention in research. We offer a critical case study of party list volatility in Finland, using a candidate-centred open-list proportional (PR) electoral system with ideal conditions for ‘ultra-strategic’ party behaviour. Our explorative two-stage research design begins with party elite interviews, to extract factors that can affect list volatility, which in the following step are tested in a regression analysis of 564 party lists in parliamentary elections 1983–2019. Our results show that list formation is a complex phenomenon, where demand and supply factors interact in a contingent fashion. Following trends of voter dealignment, personalization and ‘electoral-professionalization’ of parties, volatility has increased over time. Electoral defeats and declining party membership increase volatility, but a member-driven mass-party heritage that limits party elites’ strategic capacity has a stabilizing effect.

Representation by Development Organizations: Evidence From India and Implications for Inclusive Development

This article focuses on development organizations’ construction of representative roles in their work at the environment–development interface and on implications of these constructions for inclusiveness. While much of the past literature on representation has dealt with electoral representation, this article highlights the importance of nonelectoral representation. It follows a constructivist approach and is based on 36 in-depth interviews with the staff of different types of India-based development organizations working on disaster risk management. The article shows how development organizations in India contribute to inclusive development by representing groups that are vulnerable to disaster risk in diverse ways. Showing this diversity and how it is mediated by organizations, the article makes clear that representation is much more complex than literature commonly suggests. This complexity enables organizations to engage with specific dimensions of inclusive development. The article also illustrates how representation by development organizations happens through opportunities found and created through the intertwining of capacity development, service delivery, and advocacy. At the same time, the mediated nature of representation, and its embeddedness in a wide set of relations, makes representation by development organizations indirect and questionable in ways beyond the commonly understood dominance of powerful nongovernmental organizations.

Social workers, critical theory and the political sphere: addressing political misrecognition and marginalisation in the Republic of Ireland

Despite the traditional social justice mandate of social work, and critical and radical theoretical traditions that pursue egalitarian and just societies, the engagement of the social work academy with Irish politics has been underwhelming at best. While there are abstract analyses that address sociopolitical theory and ideological wrongdoings related to neoliberalist rationality, attention in social work academia to the nuts and bolts of everyday political life in Ireland, such as democratic party politics and electoral representation, leaves much to the imagination. This article therefore pursues a more grounded reading of social justice in Irish politics for social workers. The supporting proposition is that to effectively interject in political misrecognition and marginalisation, social workers must understand the present political state of play. Towards achieving this, Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition aids thematic critical commentary on the literature.

The Character Sketch, the Aesthetics of Representativeness, and Rip Van Winkle’s Electoral Double Vision

This essay examines how a literary genre called the character sketch shaped the ways Americans came to understand electoral representation as representative. Now little known but central to eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literary culture in the US and Britain, character sketches and a related aesthetic discourse about how to distinguish “well-drawn characters” from caricature helped to naturalize the notion that meaningful, legitimate representation should be grounded in clearly delineated categories and distinctions that were true to the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” However, this aesthetic and political framework intersected uneasily with the early nineteenth century’s alcohol-soaked electoral public sphere. This public sphere was rife with fear that electoral “combinations” would so badly misrepresent the electorate that the United States would be functionally returned to tyranny. And these abstract fears often became entangled with the embodied discomfort genteel white men like Washington Irving experienced when “beer-barrel” politics brought them into contact with fellow voters whom they considered themselves naturally socially or racially distinct from. As a result, this paper shows, writing for and about early US elections—including Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), whose electoral plot is often overlooked—was imbued with a disconcerting sense of double vision. Only by recovering that double vision’s embodied and racialized electoral context can critics fully grapple with the aesthetic and political legacy of American literature’s uneasy foundations.

Eric Voegelin and Representation

This chapter discusses the political theory of Eric Voegelin as the earliest example of anti-Schmittian political theology based on the rejection of sovereignty. The chapter shows how Voegelin adopts Schmitt’s suggestion that political theology turns on the idea of a non-electoral representation of political unity but rejects Schmitt’s identification of this representative with the sovereign. Voegelin instead argues that ‘democratic’ societies are characterized by a dual system of representation, where philosophical and theological representatives of the transcendent God stand above sovereign representatives. Conversely, ‘totalitarian’ societies are societies that ‘close’ themselves to divine transcendence because they see salvation as a function of enacting immanent social laws. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relation between Voegelin’s idea of non-sovereign representation and contemporary accounts of populism, especially that of Ernesto Laclau.

6. Beyond Electoral Representation

This chapter examines some of the main alternatives to representative methods of democratic decision-making practised in contemporary Europe. The chapter first focuses on referendums, providing an overview of their use across Europe’s democracies and examining how much scope is given to citizens to control when they are held and what they are about. The chapter then reviews the wider panoply of democratic innovations that, in combination, see democracies move beyond being merely ‘vote-centred’ representative processes. This includes the relatively recent emergence of deliberative forms of democracy, in which citizens are brought into the heart of debates on key policy issues through their involvement in ‘deliberative mini-publics’ such as citizens’ assemblies.

Who Controls the Purse Strings? A Longitudinal Study of Gender and Donations in Canadian Politics

Gender gaps in voter turnout and electoral representation have narrowed, but other forms of gender inequality remain. We examine gendered differences in donations: who donates and to whom? Donations furnish campaigns with necessary resources, provide voters with cues about candidate viability, and influence which issues politicians prioritize. We exploit an administrative data set to analyze donations to Canadian parties and candidates over a 25-year period. We use an automated classifier to estimate donor gender and then link these data to candidate and party characteristics. Importantly, and in contrast to null effects from research on gender affinity voting, we find women are more likely to donate to women candidates, but women donate less often and in smaller amounts than men. The lack of formal gendered donor networks and the reliance on more informal, male-dominated local connections may influence women donors’ behavior. Change over a quarter century has been modest, and large gender gaps persist.

Legitimacy and Representation beyond Elections (Part Two)

This chapter determines whether non-elected bodies with intrinsic democratic credentials, such as mini-publics and self-selected representative groups like social movements, also have the legitimacy to make binding decisions for the rest of the polity. It returns to the question of political legitimacy and proposes that the democratic legitimacy of representatives comes not from individual consent, as eighteenth-century theory of legitimacy understood it, but a plurality of factors, including majoritarian authorization as a necessary but insufficient condition. Majoritarian authorization need not be of directly individual representatives but, instead, of the selection mechanism through which they are selected. The chapter then considers the circumstances under which self-selected representatives can acquire a minimal form of democratic legitimacy even in the absence of any explicit majoritarian authorization of the selection mechanism or of the individual persons thereby selected. It also looks at the problems posed by potential conflicts of legitimacy between different democratic representatives and assesses how these problems may be solved. Finally, the chapter returns to electoral representation and asks whether it could be sufficiently democratized through so-called liquid democracy schemes, which would create a system labelled as “liquid representation.”