On a concept of representative democracy

Abstract

Political theory distinguishes between two concepts of representative democratic decisions. Under the first concept, representatives do not decide issues as independent individuals but merely reflect the ‘will’ of their constituencies; under the second, the decisions are made by the elected representatives themselves on the basis of their independent judgments on political issues. In the literature of democratic choice, the first concept has been formalized by Murakami, Fishburn, Pattanaik among others, in terms of decision procedures where the representative is identified with the preference-pattern emerging from the aggregation of the preferences of individual voters in a given constituency. Here we formalize the second type of representative democracy and show that it comes into conflict with certain essential features of a democratic group decision rule. In particular decisiveness and monotonicity are violated. The violation of monotonicity is of particular significance because it has come to be regarded as one of the fundamental principles for the ethical acceptability of democratic decision procedures. I am also grateful to the University Grants Commission of India for the financial assistance in carrying out this study.