No Representation Without Representativity
* Article: Pas de représentation sans représentativité ? Jacques T. Godbout. Revue du MAUSS 2005/2 (no 26), pages 90 à 104
URL = https://www.cairn.info/revue-du-mauss-2005-2-page-90.htm
Abstract
"The theory and practices of participatory democracy are well known to members of private democratic organizations. Surprisingly, these practices have very little influence on the public sector and the political democratic institutions. On the contrary, politicians have convinced their electors that representative democracy has to be the rule. Those different visions is source of confusion and enhance the fragility of the noble and permanent project of a society that would be guided by the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity and where people would be sovereign. In other words, a society where the individual is not only a subject or a consumer but a citizen. The rebirth of an ethic of common good is probably a step toward a perennial and living democracy."
Summary
From the reading notes of Michel Bauwens, 2006:
Representation is the act of choosing someone as a delegate who can take decisions in your place. In our system, this is done through elections on a territorial basis. Representativity is the degree of similitude between the characteristics of the represented, and their representatives (as a 'statistical' fact). There is always tension between both.
The third term is the sovereign power who always holds it as a gift from a symbolic outside. This outside, this meta-level, is in our system the totality of the People themselves.
Direct democracies are different, may have existed in their pure form only before the neolithic, but important elements of it were practiced in Athens and the Italian cities. It's basis was the lottery, and not elections. There is no 'representation' in such societies, where the people rule themselves. But they are 'communities', founded on belonging.
Our system is not derived from direct democracy but from medieval institutions. It was born out of the opposition of the medieval cities to the external royal power, with representatives which gradually increased their power ('no taxation without representation'), until in one revolutionary moment, they themselves became the government.
These new governments are both part of, and distinct from, those that elect them. A communautarian principle (belonging) is here mixed with a mercantile principle (the neutral contract).
Since we know, from the principle of incompleteness (Godel), that no system is entirely consistent on its own - that a metalevel is always needed, then contemporary democracy is very peculiar: it performs a loop, its lowest level, the people, is also its meta-level.
So there is a strong temptation to create such a meta-level, based on the myth of reason, science and technology. This is what gives rise to technocracy.
In such a system, the base is reduced to feeding the superior system (and this is stronger in the French system, which lacks the Common Law principle, which inscribes the lower level back in the loop). The Anglo-Saxon system, unlike the French, abolishes the utopia of the 'general interest', and instead installs a distrust towards the representatives, seen as distinct from the people.
The reason that direct democracy does not function in our societies is not just their size and complexity, but that they are production-oriented; direct democracy is time-consuming. Representative government dispenses citizens from such a arduous task.
Representation does not mean sameness, and our systems have resisted legal means to oblige representativity. Rather, the effort has been to broaden electoral participation. This is justified because representation is done for government: "the 'best" must be elected, not the "same". Godbout cautions that representative democracy is different from direct forms, and the this logic should not be confused.
Godbout therefore rejects any 'direct democracy" inspired reforms, which go in the direction of greater representativity, and identification. On the contrary, the power of elected politicians should be strengthened.
Excerpt
Jacques Godbout:
"In order to fully understand the representation-representativeness dynamic, it is useful to briefly review a few concepts.
Political representation: it is the fact that people are chosen or delegated to represent others and legitimately make decisions on their behalf. The elective mechanism ensures legitimate representation in a representative democracy regime. Its basis is territorial.
Representativeness: this is the degree of similarity between representatives and those they represent - social, economic, physical (race, sex) resemblance. It can be called "statistical representation" to differentiate it from political representation.
Government, sovereignty, power: government is the body which, in a society, exercises sovereignty - the monopoly of legitimate violence, as Weber said. This is the body that ultimately makes the decisions. We tend to forget it, as we will see.
The ultimate basis of his legitimacy is always outside him: God, the ancestors, the people. The legitimacy of power comes from an imaginary place external to those who govern and "descends" hierarchically, linearly to the ruled. "Every sovereign assumes a part of semblance, but referred to a symbolic body beyond him, elusive (whether divine or popular ...)", writes Ahmet Insel. This is what he calls "the unavailable foundation of normativity" [Insel, 1990, p. 45], meaning thus that any society is ultimately founded on an adherence to something (even if it is to reason ...) to which its members do not have access. And it is the myth of the West to imagine that it can be accessed by reason or otherwise.
...
The levels which, in a hierarchy, theoretically multiply ad infinitum, are always dependent, ultimately, on a meta-level which cannot be involved, which is not like the others, what he calls "The inviolable meta-level".
In the case of representative governments, this inviolable meta-level, this symbolic body, is the people, a body made up of all those who are governed. strangely, in this system, the top returns to its base."