Crisis of representative democracy

By Neera Chandhoke

The Hindu Saturday, Jun 19, 2004

"Sovereignty," wrote the great defender of direct democracy, Jean Jacques Rousseau, "for the same reason as makes it inalienable, cannot be represented; it lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same or the other; there is no intermediate possibility." Following Rousseau, critics of representative democracy focus on the fact that the sovereignty and the autonomy of citizens is diminished considerably when they delegate the power of representing their opinions, their needs, and their interests to someone else.

However, despite oft dire warnings that indirect democracy compromises the basic normative premises of democracy, it is representative democracy that has come to command the world ever since the institutionalisation of democracy itself. Of course there are very good reasons for this, the primary reason being the sheer size and complexity of modern societies, which renders direct or face-to-face democracy a remote possibility. Therefore, for better or for worse, representative democracy has become synonymous with democracy itself.

Representative democracy in essence calls upon a third set of political agents to mediate between the first two sets of political agents — the citizen and the state. Despite the fact that a number of organisations claim representation, it is the political party that has emerged as the prime mediator between the citizen and the state. I raise this point in the general context of the influential thesis on the `crisis of representation', which challenges the capacity as well as the will of political parties to perform their job: to represent the interests of the constituents and to oversee the production of policies that ensure that something is done about pressing problems.

The shift from political to civil society organisation has been heralded for a number of reasons.

• For one, the practices of civil society organisations promise an exit from centrally controlled, bureaucratic, hierarchical, and oligarchic party structures solely preoccupied with winning the next election.
• Secondly, it is presumed that a multiplicity of agencies in civil society are able to respond immediately to problems and issues that require swift resolution, because they are notably free from rigid and tiresome constraints that characterise older forms of representation.

Whether civil society organisations do not suffer from the same problems that bedevil political parties is however another debate.