Representation Reset

This journey began almost 10 years ago, under the giant arches of one of the most amazing libraries in the world. Dipòsit de les Aigües, at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, used to be a sanatorium, and before that it was a water tower that counted among its architects Antoni Gaudí. There is now a zoo next to it so that when you are reading, you can hear the tigers and elephants. It was in this eclectic environment that I first read the words of Jane Mansbridge:

Mansbridge had written some of the most important challenges to what I call in the book the “reductionist” approach to representation, the idea that political representation is something that happens only in parliaments. It is an old approach that does not work well for a new world.

At the time I was developing these ideas, I was living in Barcelona, Bogotá, and Princeton. In all these places I saw that in the most relevant political processes — the independence process in Catalonia, the peace process in Colombia and the Trump election in the United States — the main representative actors were not legislators or political parties. In all these contexts, citizens struggled to find their representatives in many different quarters: from victims’ associations, activism on Twitter and Facebook, and the media. When Trump signed his travel ban just two weeks after taking office, while Congress was almost paralysed, most of the challenge came from protesters and the courts. These were the relevant representative voices at the time.

The idea that political representation is something that happens only in parliaments is an old approach that does not work well for a new world.

John Stuart Mill said that Parliament was the arena of public opinion; now it is only one part of that arena. That’s why I chose J. M. W. Turner’s The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons for my book cover. The painting shows Parliament in flames and people fleeing into the River Thames. I did not want to evoke the idea that our current parliaments are in flames, but instead, the process of transformation that burning represents. In some years or even months, we are predicted to see the first artificial intelligence representatives, new profiles in social networks capable of creating and disseminating their own content. This future may frighten many, more so if we don’t think about it seriously and if we continue to equate representative politics with parliamentary politics only. Representation is not in crisis; the reductionist view of representation is.

Political representation means something much more plural and much more diverse. Think of influencers, or emerging institutions like citizens’ assemblies, civil society organisations, ombudsman’s offices, or activists. We did not elect these representatives. But we have created the public freedoms that have allowed these new representations to emerge. As Philip Pettit explains, constitutionally, we, the citizens, have given a plural actor the task of representing us in lawmaking, an actor composed of — to varying degrees under varying circumstances — the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. I call these “plural” representations. Think of the media; whistleblowers; and protesters. All these elements represent our public interest when, for example, our laws are challenged, or when it is demanded that information be made public or that public actions be legitimately confronted.

Following Mansbridge, and another giant in the field, Hannah Pitkin, I define a representative system as the collection of individuals and institutions, both formal and informal, that the people entrust with, in the broadest sense, making public policy on their behalf. A representative system is not just a loose collection of different instances of representation, both governmental and societal. That may be the representation part of the concept, but the system part of the concept also involves all these elements acting together to perform a public function: to represent us in some way.

As I wrote this book, a plebiscite took place in my own country, Colombia, on the peace agreement between the Government and the FARC guerrillas; the vote against the agreement won. What could a representative system have done in this case? Some people believed the Government should have done away with the agreement and restarted the war. I disagree. That would have been a majoritarian result, perhaps, but not a representative one. For while individuals and groups can have their own individual and collective representatives in the system, the system as a whole must represent the people as a whole. Good systems of representation must produce aggregate outcomes in public policy that can be said to represent all citizens, not just majorities.

Good systems of representation must create generatively new institutions in which citizens can play a representative role.

Public policies are not the product of just one actor or group, but of many, and we can legitimately ask whether, after all these interventions, we, the citizens, are adequately represented by our governments. To evaluate this, I propose four criteria required to enact successful democratic representation: self-governance; inclusivity; education; and deliberation. Almost every contemporary democracy has its own system of representation with its own peculiarities, but that does not mean they have successful systems of representation in light of these four functions. Good systems of representation must produce descriptive representation of gender and race, among other criteria, throughout the system and not just in parliaments through legislative quotas. Good systems of representation must create generatively new institutions in which citizens can play a representative role. Present-day citizens’ assemblies, I believe, are an example of such innovation.

Jorge Luis Borges said there is only one book you can write. One book is always a prelude to another. I would like to believe that in this book I have planted some seeds for further works. I would like readers to get the same feeling of surprise that I got from my first readings on representation. The idea has always captured my imagination and always will. It’s so paradoxical, so omnipresent, and so important. I hope that readers will find inspiration for their own journey, for their own discovery of other ways and institutions in which political representation can be possible. Whenever I present the book, people ask how to legitimise representation in the informal sector, what public institutions can be built to improve the educational function of representation, the place of sortition in these systems, if the electoral rules can be changed, and how we can design institutions that allow intensity to be expressed. I don’t have all the answers, but I am happy that we are considering all these questions.

The idea of representation has always captured my imagination and always will. It’s so paradoxical, so omnipresent, and so important.

In one of his incredible stories, Borges describes a city of cartographers so advanced they made a map as detailed as the city they were mapping, so detailed that animals and beggars could live in the map. Any description of a system of representation will itself be a representation, a contingent and partial description of reality that may emphasise some aspects only to leave others uncovered. This is what I like most about the systemic approach: that although many people will not agree with my own depiction, they can try theirs.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank everyone who has taken an interest and read this work, and the Journal of Deliberative Democracy. Special thanks to Jane Mansbridge and Lucy Parry.

About the Author

Felipe Rey is Professor of Public Law at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia and a founding partner of the democratic innovation laboratory iDeemos.