Representative democracy is a form of indirect rule by the majority of the electorate. In this system (the only widespread form of democracy in actual practice), political decision-making is done by a small number of people elected by the whole electorate. Typically the elected representatives in a national legislature will number only a few hundred, regardless of whether the electorate is a few million or hundreds of million. The usual system is to divide the nation into geographical constituencies, each sending one or more representatives to the legislative assembly. In each constituency several will compete to be elected, and, depending on the details of the electoral laws, the person or persons most popular with the voters will be elected. It may also be the case that the political executive is elected by the people, especially as in a presidential system like that of France or the USA.
There are two problems that lead critics sometimes to challenge the ‘democracy’ claim of representative democracy. The first is that the vagaries of voting systems and voting patterns may well result in the control of the legislative assembly lying in the hands of a group representing very much less than a majority of the population. It is common in the United Kingdom, for example, for a government to be formed by a party which, though having a majority of members of the House of Commons, was supported at the polls by perhaps only a third of the total electorate. Nevertheless, this highly ‘unrepresentative’ group may be able to force the passage of laws bitterly disliked by a majority of the population for the whole term of a parliament; furthermore, each member of the ruling party would claim to be representing all of their constituents, whichever candidate they had voted for. The second point relates to the whole doctrine of representation. There are really only two models of how the mass of the individuals can be represented by a few people. One, delegation, involves elected members being instructed by those they represent exactly how they should vote in the legislative assembly.
In this way the majority of preferences of each constituency are directly transmitted to the assembly, and the mass of the population can be said, in some sense, to have their views turned into law. The other model, most ably and famously defended by Edmund Burke in his addresses to his own constituents in 18th-century Britain, rejects the idea of binding delegation. Instead the representative is seen as chosen for their qualities, and perhaps for the general principles on which they stand for election. Once chosen, however, they become a free agent, entitled to cast their legislative vote as they believe best, regardless of the opinions of their constituents. At best this latter model is what is practised in actual representative democracies. In fact the usual system does not even give the voter the chance of selecting someone who will at least stand by their own convictions. Instead most electoral systems operate so that only those nominated by major political parties can be elected, and most parliamentary systems with tight party discipline controlling how ‘representatives’ vote. Thus the voters are in fact choosing among rival party-teams, and the character of the person they elect is largely irrelevant, except perhaps in parochial matters. Exactly who is being represented, and exactly how democratic representative democracy actually is, can therefore be placed in substantial doubt. There has also emerged, in the last decades of the 20th century, an argument that bodies with authority, whether parliaments, courts or any élite, should be representative of the people they rule in the sense of having approximately the same gender, ethnic and socio-economic make-up. Politically this has been most obvious in the demand that positive discrimination (or ‘affirmative action’ steps should be taken to ensure that women are equally represented in parliaments. The demand is hard to satisfy without clashing with other values such as the right for anyone to stand for election, and the absolute freedom of choice guaranteed to the electorate. Thus the French Conseil d’État struck down part of a bill passed through the National Assembly in 1984 which would have required parties to have quotas amongst their candidates for women. This was regarded as unconstitutional; similar quota systems proposed for the British Labour Party were held to be illegal.
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