There are at least two politically salient senses of “representation”—acting-for-others and portraying-something-as-something. The difference is not just semantic but also logical: relations of ...representative agency are dyadic (x represents y), while portrayals are triadic (x represents y as z). I exploit this insight to disambiguate constructivism and to improve our theoretical vocabulary for analyzing political representation. I amend Saward’s claims-based approach on three points, introducing the “characterization” to correctly identify the elements of representational claims; explaining the “referent” in pragmatic, not metaphysical terms; and differentiating multiple forms of representational activity. This enables me to clarify how the represented can be both prior to representation and constituted by it, and to recover Pitkin’s idea that representatives ought to be “responsive” to the represented. These points are pertinent to debates about the role of representatives, the nature of representative democracy, and the dynamics of revolutionary movements.
An important focus of empirical accounts of representative democracy is the policy-opinion nexus. Drawing from the thermostatic model (Wlezien, 1995), this study examines the dynamic relationship ...between public opinion and immigration policy, one of the more salient issue domains that have reshaped European democracies since the 1980s. As a counter-factual to social identity accounts of immigration politics, this study argues citizens have policy preferences and when immigration policy changes, the demand responds. The result is a known movement between opinions and policy that we describe as an 'immigration thermostat'. We rely on dozens of high-quality surveys (more than 500 separate series, corresponding to nearly 2,500 marginals) and a dyadic-ratios algorithm to design comparable immigration opinion measures for 13 countries. We find evidence of both public and policy responsiveness for immigration, although not to the same extent. This suggests an asymmetrical 'immigration thermostat' but effective representation in the immigration domain across Western Europe.
Why do citizens support holding a referendum? In this article, we argue that citizens are instrumental by using heuristics and cues from parties, independent experts, and the population to decide ...whether to hold a referendum. We further expect that populist and non-populist citizens differ in how they respond to these cues. Using pre-registered survey experiments in Austria and Germany, we find that citizens' support depends mainly on their attitudes towards the respective policy and the opinion of their preferred party, while the views of experts and the public play only a subordinate role. Crucially, we find no systematic differences between populist and non-populist citizens, suggesting that even populists' support for holding a referendum depends mainly on instrumental rather than normative considerations. This study provides comprehensive insights into the causal mechanisms of support for direct democracy and their implications for liberal and representative democracy.
Direct democracy is seen as a potential cure to the malaise of representative democracy. It is increasingly used worldwide. However, research on the effects of direct democracy on important ...indicators like socio-economic, legal, and political equality is scarce, and mainly limited to Europe and the US. The global perspective is missing. This article starts to close this gap. It presents descriptive findings on direct democratic votes at the national level in the (partly) free countries of the Global South and Oceania between 1990 and 2015. It performs the first comparative analysis of direct democracy on these continents. Contradicting concerns that direct democracy may be a threat to equality, we found more bills aimed at increasing equality. Likewise, these votes produced more pro- than contra-equality outputs. This held for all continents as well as for all dimensions of equality.
Despite repeated appointments of technocratic governments in Europe and increasing interest in technocracy, there is little knowledge regarding citizens' attitudes towards technocracy and the idea of ...governance by unelected experts. This article revisits normative debates and hypothesises that technocracy and democracy stand in a negative relationship in the eyes of European citizens. It tests this alongside a series of hypotheses on technocratic attitudes combining country-level institutional characteristics with individual survey data. While findings confirm that individual beliefs about the merits of democracy influence technocratic attitudes, two additional important factors are also identified: first, levels of trust in current representative political institutions also motivate technocratic preferences; second, historical legacies, in terms of past party-based authoritarian regime experience, can explain significant cross-national variation. The implications of the findings are discussed in the broader context of citizen orientations towards government, elitism and the mounting challenges facing representative democracy.
The American public has affectively polarized such that partisans increasingly dislike the “other side,” and this may have deleterious consequences for a representative democracy. Yet, efforts to ...reduce partisan hostility arrive at mixed results. We propose a new approach that involves strategically priming civic norms with language tailored to a target audience. We argue that emphasizing group-based civic norms that invoke an “obligation to others” can reduce out-party animus. We test this approach on an important subgroup: U.S. military service members. Like the broader American public, service members have unfavorable feelings toward the opposing party, and these feelings appear to have become more negative in recent years. We use a survey experiment to demonstrate that priming an obligation to others civic norm attenuates affective polarization. Our study advances public opinion research on an understudied subgroup of the population, but more importantly, the theoretical argument has implications for addressing polarization and partisan discord among the mass public and other subgroups.
Responsiveness is a central quality of representative democracy. During the past decades, a number of innovative studies have advanced our knowledge about actual responsiveness processes. However, ...research on the consequences that follow from responsiveness has lagged behind and forms the subject of this special issue. Our introduction identifies a range of conceptual issues that arise as we focus attention on citizens’ reactions to the ways in which politicians relate to public sentiments between elections.
The Condorcet Jury Theorem and subsequent literature establish the feasibility of information aggregation in a common-value environment with exogenous policy options: a large electorate of ...imperfectly informed voters almost always selects the correct policy option. Rather than directly voting for policies, citizens in modern representative democracies elect candidates who make strategic policy commitments. We show that intermediation by candidates sometimes improves policy choices and sometimes impedes information aggregation. Somewhat paradoxically, the possibility of information aggregation by voters encourages strategic conformism by candidates. Correlated information or partisan biases among voters can mitigate the political failure we uncover. We also discuss possible institutional solutions.
Despite their multiplication over the last 15 years, studies on the support for assemblies composed of citizens selected by lot are rare and the few that exist analyse citizens’ attitudes towards ...such mini-publics as consultative bodies associated with traditional representative institutions. In this article, we examine support for citizens selected by lot as new policymakers who take the most important political decisions instead of political representatives. We contrast support for this radical democratic innovation with support for two other reforms that increase citizen participation: generic support for a greater involvement of citizens in policymaking, and specific support for citizen-initiated referendums. The goal is to understand whether the drivers of support for citizens selected by lot overlap or differ from the drivers of support for other forms of citizen participation. We rely upon data from the 2017 French Election Study.
Уговор из Лисабона предвиђа да ће функционисање Европске уније бити засновано на представничкој демократији. Главни носиоци представничке демократије требало би да буду политичке странке, у овом ...случају европске политичке странке. Зато је предмет овога рада положај евространака у политичком систему Европске уније. Основно питање је да ли су евространке у могућности да допринесу демократском функционисању политичког система Европске уније и на тај начин изграде свој препознатљив идентитет. Уколико имамо у виду постојећи конституционални поредак Уније, и положај евространака у њему, јасно је да оне нису у стању да допринесу формирању европске политичке свести и изражавању воље грађана Уније.
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