Principal Themes of the Workshop
How plausible are these claims about the decline or decay or disappearance of representative democracy? The purpose of the workshop is to address such claims by taking stock of the present and future ideals and institutions of representative democracy. Our aim is to combine a small group of key academic figures of the study of democracy and a group of younger scholars whose ongoing research focuses on this subject and to engage them into a discussion.
The design of the workshop is straightforward. There will be a brief introductory presentation and two main sessions. Each session will seek to clarify the overall contours of the subject through detailed presentations and discussions:
Introduction: Visions of Representative Democracy
The introductory presentation will briefly revisit the origins and modern development of the ideals of representative government. It will also set the stage for the following discussion, highlighting the concepts to be debated, the issues at stake, and the challenges ahead.
First Session: The performance of existing representative democracies
The first session of the workshop will examine the evidence for the claim that present-day institutions of representation are functioning inadequately, at least when measured in terms of the norms of representative democracy. This part of the workshop will likely cast doubt on notions of the existence of a ‘golden age’ of representative democracy; and it will suppose that the actual performance of representative institutions is bound to have a decisive impact on the future of representative democracy.
Second Session: The Future of Representative Democracy
The second session of the workshop will reconsider the well-known claim by Tocqueville that one of the great virtues of democracy is that it makes ‘retrievable mistakes’. Participants will be encouraged to ask whether, in matters of representation, Tocqueville’s insight still applies to actually existing democracies. Among the principal questions to be addressed are: do the principles and practice of democratic representation still have a future? Are we witnessing, as some observers claim, the emergence in some countries of post-democratic polities held together by heavily mediated caesarist leadership, the decline of active citizenship and its replacement by a culture of consumption, scripted telepopulist appeals to ‘the people’ and the selective application of force to marginal and dissenting minorities? Or are there observable present-day transformations that imply or promise a different and more positive future for representative democracy? What are the prospects for the reform of actually existing representative democracies? The workshop will address such questions, as well as deal with conjectures that have a deliberately speculative quality: in war-ravaged and other contexts previously denied representative democracy, for instance, might it be possible to leapfrog the standard pathways associated with the originally European model of territorially bound representative democracy? Is it possible to envisage at the global level quite different future models of representative democracy? Might some regions of the world be living through an historic transformation of democracy, one that results in more complex forms of self-government marked by the proliferation of mechanisms of public accountability wherever power is exercised? If so, what might be the core institutions of this coming ‘monitory’ or ‘post-representative’ democracy, and what name should it be given?
Read: A proposal for rethinking the origins and future of Representative Government. John Keane, Berlin, Nov. 2007. [HERE]
