The paradox of political representation

Journal of Political Philosophy

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 93-114

  Runciman, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846602361     PISSN: 09638016     EISSN: 14679760     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9760.2007.00266.x     Document Type: Review

References (44)

1. Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967)
2. and 'Commentary: The paradox of representation', Nomos X, Representation, ed. Roland J. Pennock and John W. Chapman (New York: Atherton, 1968), pp. 38-42.
3. For a comprehensive recent account of the way democratic paradoxes play out in the setting of representative institutions, and of the ways in which the paradoxes may be resolved, see Gerry Mackie, Democracy Defended (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
4. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, p. 9.
5. Pitkin, 'The paradox of representation', p. 41.
6. The word 'artificial' can be ambiguous in this context, since it is capable of conveying both that something is essentially unreal and also that it is merely a man-made form of reality. So an artificial leg is not a real leg, but an artificial lake is a real lake. I take the artificial presence generated by the act of representation to denote what is merely a man-made form of reality.
7. 'It may be, as the notion of paradox in the meaning of representation suggests, that the issue is usually formulated in such a way that it cannot be answered and will not allow a consistent response' (Pitkin, 'The paradox of representation', p. 42).
8. In a later book, Pitkin uses the example of the open-endedness in the meaning of the concept of representation to argue that paradoxes of this kind are best understood as a feature of our use of language, and therefore as one of language's resources, rather than as logical flaws in the concepts themselves; see Hanna Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice: The Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).
9. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, p. 155.
10. Pitkin is often taken to have offered just such a straightforwardly substantive definition of representation. See, for example, Adam Przeworski, Susan C. Stokes and Bernard Manin ed. Democracy, Accountability and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 2, in which Pitkin is quoted saying: 'This is what we mean by "representation": acting in the best interests of the public'.
11. This definition is typical of the way Pitkin's work has usually been employed by contemporary political theorists and political scientists, and of the neglect of the role of the paradox of presence in her account of representation. For a similar reading of Pitkin that neglects her concern with the paradoxical character of representation, see David Lublin, The Paradox of Representation: Racial Gerrymandering and Minority Interests in Congress (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).
12. The contemporary use of the term 'stakeholders' to describe all those who may be impacted by a collective project makes this point implicitly: 'stakeholders' include individuals who may otherwise be neglected by focussing on familiar lines of representation (and may for example include individuals whose relationship to a project is simply their physical proximity to it, as 'neighbours').
13. There are of course those who dissent from this view. See for example Anne Phillips, The Politics of Presence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
14. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, p. 155.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid, pp. 129-31.
17. Details of some of the arguments are available at: http://hague.bard.edu/ . For example, from the 6 July 2004 Order on the Future Conduct of the Trial: 'However, the right to defend oneself in person is not absolute . . . there may be circumstances . . . where it is in the interests of justice to appoint counsel. No such circumstances have, as yet, arisen in this trial. However, as the Trial Chamber has said, it will keep the position under review. . . . A Trial Chamber has indeed an obligation to ensure that a trial is fair and expeditious; moreover, where the health of the Accused is in issue, that obligation takes on special significance . . . [W]hile ensuring that the trial is fair and expeditious, a Trial Chamber must also ensure that the rights of the accused, as set out in Article 21 of the Statute, are not infringed'.
18. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, p. 156.
19. On the juristic and philosophical history of this absurdity, see F. W. Maitland, 'Corporation sole' and 'Crown as Corporation', Maitland: State, Trust and Corporation, ed. David Runciman and Magnus Ryan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
20. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, p. 224.
21. Ibid, p. 235. Pitkin concedes that there must necessarily be a gap between this vague goal and 'some fairly concrete, practical and historically traditional institutions intended to serve such an outcome'.
22. Adam Przeworski, 'Minimalist conceptions of democracy', Democracy's value, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 23-50 at pp. 31-3.
23. For a recent summary of some of the implications of this position, see Adam Przeworski, 'Institutions matter?', Government and Opposition, 4 (2004), 527-40.
24. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, p. 155.
25. It is clear that individuals in modern states do often object to the procedure of majority-decision making, so that it is not possible to assume unanimity on this score. Indeed, this is often the point at issue in the objections of minorities to the actions of governments that discriminate against them: they object not merely to the discrimination itself but to the fact that only the objections of the majority could have forestalled it, which sets the bar for many minorities at an unacceptably high level. A recent example of this is the objections of many fox-hunters to the ban imposed on their sport by the British Labour government in 2004, which rested not merely on the fact that they objected to the ban but also on the fact that they objected to the majoritarian presuppositions that lay behind it.
26. Philip Pettit, 'Groups with minds of their own', Socializing Metaphysics, ed. F. Schmitt (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), pp. 167-93.
27. Ibid, p. 188.
28. Ibid, p. 190.
29. Ibid, p. 186.
30. Ibid, p. 189.
31. Although some classic theorists of political representation, including Thomas Hobbes surprisingly, have tried to push the analogy between the parent/child relationship and the relationship between individual citizens and the public as a whole; see Quentin Skinner, 'Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state', Visions of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vol. 3.
32. This is one of the reasons why elected assemblies are so reluctant to allow popular demonstrations to take place in the same place and on the same day that the assembly itself is deciding on matters of importance: the British government allowed mass demonstrations to take place in London against the Iraq war, but did not permit mass protests at Westminster on the days of the crucial House of Commons votes on the war.
33. Ian Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 58.
34. Ibid.
35. On the importance of 'informational access' for the viability of representative politics, see John Dunn, 'Situating political accountability', Democracy, Accountability and Representation, ed. Przeworski et al., pp. 340-2.
36. See David Runciman, 'Is the state a corporation?', Government and Opposition, 35 (2000), 90-104.
37. David Miller, 'Holding nations responsible', Ethics, 114 (2004), 240-68 at p. 249. Miller himself is primarily interested in the responsibilities of nations rather than those of states, because he believes that state responsibility may allow individuals to escape their personal responsibilities: 'So why do we need to consider national responsibility at all? One reason is that if we divorce state responsibility from national responsibility, then it becomes difficult to show how individual people can share in the responsibility to compensate those whom the state they belong to has harmed, whereas if we treat states as acting on behalf of nations, such collective responsibility will be easier to establish'. However, he does not explain in any detail what he means by 'states acting on behalf of nations', which is the point at issue in my discussion here.
38. I consider some of these questions in more detail in David Runciman, 'Moral responsibility and the problem of representing the state', Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations, ed. Toni Erskine (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 41-51.
39. This is essentially Osama Bin Laden's position, as set out in his 'Letter to the American People' of November 24, 2002; available at: http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/report/2002/021120-ubl.htm (accessed 10 July 2006). The possibility of making sense of this very strong notion of democratic accountability within the terms of the Western political tradition has been highlighted by Richard Tuck, 'Democracy and Terrorism' (mimeo., Cambridge 2003).
40. For example, a personal objection to continuing to service the national debt on the grounds that the individual citizen concerned did not want to borrow the money in the first place is an empty gesture, since public debt does not attach to any named individuals, but to the state as a whole. The only meaningful objection is to the representatives who undertook the debt; whether replacing them with different representatives will release individual citizens from the burden of servicing the debt does not depend on who objected, but on what actions the new representatives undertake in the name of the state (above all, on whether or not they repudiate the debt itself).
41. See Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
42. See James Crawford, The International Law Commission's Articles on State Responsibility. Introduction, Text and Commentaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. ch. 2, 'Attribution of conduct to a State'.
43. Andrew Kuper, Democracy Beyond Borders. Justice and Representation in Global Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
44. On the details and fate of this movement, see David Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).