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."
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."