The history of political representation is that of the rise of European parliaments, through the transformation of the sovereign’s councillors into a sovereign assembly.
The medieval monarch used to seek advice from persons chosen at his discretion for their competence and trust. But since he wanted them to report from all the land and then to convey his orders and tax demands back to ‘their’ people, he tended to pattern his selection after the actual social hierarchy, choosing those in the nobility and high clergy, whose fiefs and dioceses constituted his kingdom, and (as early as the thirteenth century in England) important commoners.
During crises, when the king most needed their co-operation, the councillors demanded and obtained the right to be convened periodically and to be masters of their agenda. Also, instead of answering individually to the king for their particular community (which was soon to be reapportioned into electoral districts), they made collective deliberations and rendered them obligatory and compelling. They were now acting as one single assembly (whose number, election, immunity and so on had to be formalized) and speaking for the people as a whole; thus the king, who had been seen as the head, and natural representative, of his people, implicitly began to speak only for himself.
Not only political legitimacy, but also power, had shifted: in the name of political representation they had in fact established their rule. For example, the slogan of the American Revolution did not mean ‘no taxation without our spokesman to the king’ but ‘without our share of power’, indeed ‘without governing ourselves’. Parliament, instead of the king, was sovereign.
Whatever its constitutional formula, representative government is an awkward proposition, first, because the more faithful the representation, the less the ability to rule, that is, to make choices or even compromises or coercions; and second, because the demands of modern politics have both glorified government (the rise everywhere of the executive branch which executes always less and rules always more) and diminished the role of parliaments based on territorial representation. When the representational logic of the former royal councillors came to its democratic triumph with their election according to the principle ‘one man, one vote’, it appeared that one vote is too little to be correctly represented: all people want to press for their multifaceted interests through specific spokesmen or organizations which will fight the suppressions, amalgamations and distortions that territorial representation implies in each electoral district and then at the legislative level, whatever the endeavours of special and minority groups to force their ‘quotas’ into elected or appointed bodies.
Political representation takes an ironical turn, first, when advocates of functional representation criticize parliaments for disregarding obvious demands of the people and arbitrarily imposing their idea of the common interest (much like the kings had been criticized as unrepresentative); second, when parliamentary elections often become geared to the nomination of a government rather than of representatives; and third, when the executive branch surrounds itself more and more formally with ‘councillors’ drawn from the most important interest groups in the country and whose ‘advice’ tends to become obligatory and compelling.
Jean Tournon
University of Grenoble
Further reading
Birch, A.H. (1971) Representation, London.
International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions (1984) Assemblee di Stati e istituzioni rappresentative nella storia del pensiero politico moderno (secoli XV–XX), Rimini.
Morgan, E.S. (1989) Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, New York.
Pennock, J. and Chapman, J. (1968) Representation, New York.
Pitkin, H. (1967) The Concept of Representation, Berkeley, CA.
Reid, J. (1989) The Concept of Representation in the Age of the American Revolution, Chicago.
Schmitt, C. (1988) The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, London.
