REPRESENTATION RUINED

In this thesis I will analyze the different practices of representative democracy through Urbinati’s ‘figure’ of the democratic diarchy. In this figure, the sovereign is presented as having two normatively separate powers, which are nonetheless in constant communication. On the one hand ‘will’, the formal political institutions and its contents, and on the other hand ‘opinion’, the informal extra-institutional process of opinion formation. In the space opened up by the ‘figure’ of the democratic diarchy, Urbinati is able to identify forces which disrupt its workings, so-called ‘disfigurations’. She presents this figure as being a logical consequence of, or at least congruent with, the ‘representative turn’ in political theory, the turn in which representation is recognized as the mechanism that makes democracy possible at all. However, Urbinati’s depiction of the democratic diarchy, and the forces of representative democracy which then become identifiable, suffers from two problems: [1] the locale of political representation, and [2] the nature of the disfigurations. The aim of this thesis has thus been twofold. First, to localize political representation within the democratic diarchy. Urbinati herself remains conspicuously quiet about this process. Where then does this process of representation play out? I will argue that we should see political representation as the very mechanism by which the ‘will’ and ‘opinion’ of the sovereign are both separated and brought in constant communication. It serves, therefore, as the bridge between these two normatively separated poles. Therefore, and second, I will re-interpret the disfigurations thematized by Urbinati as the products of forces operative within representative democracy. These forces are dialectical: they are inherent to the practice(s) of representative democracy and (partly) develop the practice itself through continuous interaction between the forces; our view, our understanding, of the political practice, partly shapes the practice, and the continued interaction of those forces propels its development.