Representative Democracy

Representative democracy is government by elected deputies who deliberate and decide on behalf of those who chose them, rather than by the direct vote of the whole citizen body on each question. Conservatives defend it not as a second-best substitute for direct rule, forced on us by the size of modern states, but as the better arrangement in its own right, because deliberation among people who must answer for their decisions produces judgements that a plebiscite cannot.

The classic English statement of the case is Edmund Burke’s address to the electors of Bristol on 3 November 1774, delivered after his election to the Commons. A representative owes his constituents his industry and his judgement, Burke told them, and he betrays rather than serves them if he sacrifices his judgement to their opinion.¹

Key Takeaways

• The conservative case rests on the trustee model: a member represents the whole nation’s interest, not a mandate transcribed from his constituents.
• Representation adds a filter of deliberation between public feeling and public law, which is the point of it, not a defect.
• Madison in Federalist No. 10 argued that a large representative republic controls faction better than a small direct democracy, because interests must combine to govern.
• Bicameralism, fixed terms, judicial review and party discipline exist to slow the translation of majority sentiment into permanent law.
• The main rival is the delegate model, which treats the representative as an instructed agent and pushes toward referendums and recall.

History And Context

The idea grew out of practice rather than theory. English kings summoned knights and burgesses to consent to taxation, and the parliaments of 1265 under Simon de Montfort and of 1295 under Edward I set the pattern of shire and borough members attending on behalf of communities that could not attend in person. Consent given by a deputy bound those who sent him. That legal device, worked out for fiscal convenience across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, became the constitutional structure of the English-speaking world.

Burke gave it its philosophical form in 1774. Parliament, on his account, is not a congress of ambassadors from rival interests but the deliberative assembly of one nation with one interest, and a member arrives at his conclusion through argument with his colleagues rather than by instruction from home. Bristol did not forgive him. Facing certain defeat over his support for free trade with Ireland and for relief of Catholic disabilities, Burke declined the poll on 9 September 1780 and withdrew, which is a fair measure of the price the doctrine can carry.

In America the argument was made in institutional terms. James Madison, writing as Publius in the Daily Advertiser on 22 November 1787, defended the extended republic on the ground that elected representatives would refine the public view by passing it through a body chosen for wisdom and patriotism, and that a large and various territory would make it harder for any single faction to command a majority.² The Constitution drafted that summer in Philadelphia built the argument into a structure: a House on two-year terms, a Senate on six, an executive chosen indirectly, and judges appointed for life.

John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government, published in 1861, made the mid-Victorian liberal case for the same form, while pressing for wider suffrage, proportional representation and open contest over the qualifications of electors.³

The Conservative Position

Conservatives argue for representation on four grounds.

Deliberation. Legislation requires the weighing of consequences, the hearing of affected parties and the amendment of first drafts. An assembly can do this because it sits continuously, keeps a record, and contains members who know the subject. A referendum electorate cannot amend a question; it can only accept or reject the wording placed before it.

Accountability with distance. A member serves a fixed term and then faces the voters on his whole record. That interval lets him support an unpopular measure that later proves right. Instant responsiveness destroys the interval and with it the capacity to govern against the mood of the month.

The protection of minorities and of the future. Majorities are transient and interested. A structure of chambers, terms and conventions means a temporary majority cannot rewrite the constitutional order in a single session. Burke’s partnership between the living, the dead and those yet to be born requires institutions capable of resisting the present.

Political virtue. Representation selects for a class of people who make politics their study. Conservatives accept that this creates a distinct political class with its own faults, and prefer those faults to the alternative of decisions taken by an electorate that has spent an evening on the question.

Differing Positions

The delegate model holds the opposite. Sovereignty rests with the people, and a representative who substitutes his own judgement has usurped what he was lent. Jean-Jacques Rousseau put the strongest version in Du contrat social in 1762: the general will cannot be represented, and the English are free only during the election of members of parliament, after which they are enslaved again.⁴ From this follow the instruments the delegate tradition favours: binding mandates, recall, initiative and referendum.

Participatory and deliberative democrats add a further charge. Representation concentrates power in a professional class insulated from ordinary life, and the resulting government reflects the interests of that class. They point to citizens’ assemblies, such as the Irish assembly that considered the Eighth Amendment before the 2018 referendum, as evidence that ordinary citizens given time, evidence and expert testimony reach considered judgements.

The referendum record cuts both ways for both sides. The British vote of 23 June 2016 settled a question that Parliament had been unable to settle for forty years, and the ensuing three years of parliamentary deadlock were read by one camp as proof that the Commons had lost touch with the country and by the other as proof that a binary question cannot substitute for the detailed work of legislation. Conservatives who defend the representative principle should concede that it fails when the representatives will not decide.

References

1. Edmund Burke, “Speech to the Electors of Bristol,” 3 November 1774, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 1 (Henry G. Bohn, 1854).
2. James Madison, The Federalist No. 10 (1787), in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New American Library, 1961).
3. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (Parker, Son and Bourn, 1861).
4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (Marc-Michel Rey, 1762), book III.