Modern Representative Democracy Research Articles

Revisiting the rhetorical construction of political consent

Abstract How political leaders construct consent is a constant theme of studies in political rhetoric and theories of persuasion. We explore how populist linguistic strategies combine with traditional consensus-building to align populations with the speakers’ messages. We observe similarities and differences in discourse strategies across two contrasting polities, the UK, a foundational modern representative democracy and Russia, which is considered more autocratic. The data comes from speeches given by Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin during the Covid-19 crisis. They were analysed using Corpus Linguistics, compared in qualitative analysis that identities key lexico-grammatical features. The findings show a convergence in some of the strategies and linguistic styles, but also key differences which, we suggest, depend on cultural factors specific to the two nations. The results contribute to our understanding of the operation of these resources in modern political discourse, highlighting the way cultural factors influence rhetorical styles in very different political structures.

Advancing deliberative reform in a parliamentary system: prospects for recursive representation

AbstractRecent theories of democratic representation push beyond ‘minimalist’ notions that only rely on periodic elections to connect officials and constituents. For example, Jane Mansbridge (2019) calls for ‘recursive representation’, which seeks ongoing, two-way interaction between representatives and their constituents. Given the scale and complexity of modern representative democracies, how can such ambitious proposals be translated into practice? We analyze two Deliberative Town Halls (DTHs) convened with a Federal Member of Australian Parliament in 2020 to discuss a complex issue, mitochondrial donation, ahead of a parliamentary debate and conscience vote on this issue. Drawing on interviews with participants, we argue that democratic innovations such as DTHs can contribute to realizing recursive representation when three criteria are met: authenticity, inclusion, and impact. We discuss the significance of each criterion and the role of DTHs in advancing recursive representation in a parliamentary system.

Understanding layered dominance of political dynasties in India: A de-hyphenated reading of dynastic representation and dynasty-led parties

India has witnessed the dominance of a plethora of political dynasties, both at the national as well as the state level, since independence. The post-colonial Indian state adopted a liberal constitutional democracy premised upon modern representative institutions. However, the primordial principle of hereditary succession of power resiliently co-existed in the form of powerful political families that have continued to impact the nature of Indian democratic political discourse till today. The political parties are an instrumental driver of political life in all modern representative democracies including India. Hence, it is crucial to study how the Indian party system has consolidated the prominence of political dynasties especially from the 1970s onwards, in the realm of both party organisation and the representative institutions. In this context, the article attempts to problematise the nature of dynastic politics in India and offers a framework to analyse the causes of its dominance to understand how it impacts the right to equal political opportunity and electoral competitiveness. The article makes three arguments. First, to better understand the amorphous nature of dynastic politics, two elements – dynastic representation in elected institutions and dynasty-led parties – need to be studied distinctively, despite some commonalities. Second, dynastic representation is largely ubiquitous in most political parties (in both dynasty-led and non-dynasty-led parties) due to the party's preference for legacy candidates and their higher chances of electoral winnability. Third, the article offers two typologies of dynasty-led parties, explaining why the dynasties’ grip over their parties, particularly in recent times, appears to be mostly performance-immune and in what circumstances some dynasty-led parties not only perform better in electoral contests than others but also face tough competition for retaining their dynastic control over the party. Lastly, the article concludes with some reflections on how dynastic representation and dynasty-led parties impact the form and substance of the Indian party system and democratic politics.

Інструменти деліберативної демократії: можливості застосування у воєнний та повоєнний час в Україні

The concept of deliberative democracy is one of the attempts to improve and „expand” the boundaries of modern representative democracy. It exists to bring additional mechanisms for thoughtful, reasoned and broader discussion of socially important issues, as well as to use the consensus potential of deliberation to resolve conflicts and consider sensitive issues. Taking into account the considerable attention paid to this concept by the European Union and international organizations, as well as the public demand for discussion of important issues of the functioning of the state even in the conditions of full-scale Russian aggression, the article examines the possibilities and features of using the tools of deliberative democracy during the war and the expected post-war recovery. The author analyzes the results of researches on the experience of other countries traumatized by wars or violent conflicts, as well as the trends of 2022 – the beginning of 2023, which indicate the formation of initiatives in Ukraine to discuss the fundamental issues of state development, post-war reconstruction, and possible changes to the social contract. This is the basis for substantiating the relevance of the search for deliberation tools to increase the effectiveness of discussions and resolve possible resource and other conflicts. The peculiarities of the previous experience of implementing a number of public participation tools in Ukraine, in particular the problems of organizing public consultations, the work of public councils, surveys in the Diya mobile application, are also analyzed in the article. According to the results, the need to improve these tools and increase their deliberative potential is noted. In addition, the positive experience of implementing a number of other, relatively new for Ukraine, deliberative practices (in particular, dialogue and public consultations in a dialogical approach) was analyzed. The author notes that this experience can become an important basis for organizing deliberative discussions during the war and post-war reconstruction.

Kant on the future of representative democracy

Kant’s Staatsrecht in his “Metaphysics of Morals” likely represents the sharpest analysis and critique of democratic modernity after 1789. At the same time, it provides a unique outlook on the future of modern representative democracy. This has gone largely unnoticed, with scholars often lamenting the problematic nature of the late text, blamed either on the author’s supposed senility or on the inscrutable composition resulting from confusion during the printing process. Rather than affirming these readings, I will argue that they are merely attempts to wrestle with the brilliance of Kant’s philosophical rhetoric. Through a new reading of a key passage in the Staatsrecht, I substantiate this claim by reconstructing Kant’s late account of repres- entative democracy and its future.

The Eclipse of Equality in a World of Extremes

Abstract Christianity and democracy have in common the idea of equality before God and the law. But how seriously was this notion taken by the Christian architects of modern representative democracy, and how seriously is it taken in today’s deeply unequal democratic societies? Democracy has long embraced the idea of a formal equality of persons but has generally held substantive equality to be incompatible with the secure possession of private property, which is its overriding priority. This article explores the relationships of Christianity and democracy to property and wealth, and the ever-present tension in both between less and more rigorous forms of each. Christianity and democracy are for many people little more than identity markers, but their survival as robust and relevant approaches to social life depends on a vision – which includes Christ’s teachings on renunciation and democracy’s egalitarian ethos – underlying the forms.

Wisdom of the crowd? Information aggregation in representative democracy

The Condorcet Jury Theorem and subsequent literature establish the feasibility of information aggregation in a common-value environment with exogenous policy options: a large electorate of imperfectly informed voters almost always selects the correct policy option. Rather than directly voting for policies, citizens in modern representative democracies elect candidates who make strategic policy commitments. We show that intermediation by candidates sometimes improves policy choices and sometimes impedes information aggregation. Somewhat paradoxically, the possibility of information aggregation by voters encourages strategic conformism by candidates. Correlated information or partisan biases among voters can mitigate the political failure we uncover. We also discuss possible institutional solutions.

Incentives for non-participation: absence in the United Kingdom House of Commons, 1997–2015

The ability to hold MPs accountable for their actions is one of the cornerstones of modern representative democracy. While it is important for MPs to send signals to both their constituents and to their party, a large number of MPs remain absent from votes. Those absences are an important part of the MP’s toolbox, but absences carry limitations, rooted in electoral and political constraints. We investigate how—conditional on the electoral cycle—some well-established political constraints along the government and opposition lines vary in strength. We examine the absence probabilities of MPs in the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2015, and find that as the next elections are approaching, political constraints somewhat weaken and electoral ones take over, but marked differences emerge between parliamentary sessions.

A Dire Need for Parliamentary Reform: or, the Role of Elite Fears in Britain’s Great Reform Bill of 1832

Countless historians consider the 1832 reform bill one of Britain’s most pivotal legislations in transitioning into a modern representative democracy for its undeniable impact on the country’s electoral system. The same historians, however, vary on their determination of its causes mostly from comparing major developments surrounding the bill. Parliamentary speeches tend to be neglected or presupposed which causes valuable aspects of the development to be missed. This work demonstrates that fear of revolution, launched by France and catalyzed by Bristol, by the British elite was the primary motivator for reform. It does so by focusing specifically on parliamentary debate between the pro-reform party (Whigs) and the anti-reform party (Tories), supplemented by private correspondence and other public documents. Whig M.P.s insisted Britain reform or face revolution, but Tory M.P.s downplayed any immediate threat. When massive unrest materialized at Bristol, the conversation radically shifted. Bristol exploded because the House of Lords rejected an earlier form of the bill, giving the Whig’s argument substance. Direct resistance to the bill faded as Whig urgency increased. While some contemporary and modern historians doubt the reformers’ true fear of revolution, the speeches and letters reveal that preventing disaster was the sincere objective.

When Is A Pledge A Pledge?

AbstractDespite the central role of election pledges in modern representative democracy, it remains uncertain how voters define pledges. We examine this by focusing on four rhetorical dimensions of political statements: the pledge giver, the formulation of commitment, the policy content and quantification. In three conjoint experiments on representative samples totalling around 6,000 respondents in the United States, Britain and Denmark, we find remarkably consistent results. On the one hand, voters consistently differentiate between statements in a highly focused manner: a promise is a promise if it is sincere and realistic – no matter who made it and whether it can be checked. On the other hand, voters are not willing to hold their party accountable for a given statement – even if they consider it an election pledge. We demonstrate that this is the perceptual logic of election pledges in Western democracies.

Letters to Sir Syed: Lajpat Rai’s Response to the Muslim Refusal of Minorityhood

ABSTRACT This article explores the thought of Syed Ahmed Khan, India’s most prominent nineteenth-century Muslim politician-thinker, and argues that Khan’s resistance to the Indian nationalist-democratic frame represented an early attempt by a Muslim aristocrat to resist the transformation of India’s Muslims into a new kind of vulnerable minority. It further examines the public refutation of Khan’s arguments by Lajpat Rai, a young Congressman later to become one of colonial India’s most well-known Hindu politicians, and illustrates that Rai’s easy and eager embrace of the Indian nationalist-democratic frame entailed an affirmation of Muslim minoritisation. The article argues that their different understandings and evaluations of modern representative democracy and nationalism, and their different emotive responses, dread or optimism, to these new phenomena was not a natural extension of their religious identity. What mattered more were their distinct socio-economic identities and belongingness to an all-India minority or majority.

Journalistic Values in Modern Democracy: Balancing Power Between Constitutionalism and Populism

In modern representative democracy, political legitimacy is based on potentially conflicting principles: (1) the “popular sovereignty” principle, stating that the republic must be based on “the opinion of the people,” and (2) the “rule of law” principle which suggests that constitutional values of the republic must be protected from “irregular interpositions of the people.” As a parallel institution supporting the democratic republic (e.g., the press as the “Fourth Branch”), the role of journalists has continuously changed, and the journalistic institution has been balancing those two potentially conflicting principles. This study examines the current status of journalistic values as part of modern democracy. Traditionally accepted news used to balance the conflict between constitutionalism and populism by distancing journalists from both the existing elites and the mass. However, due to the recent transformation of the media landscape and the uprising of people’s anti-establishment feelings, news audience has struggled to relate their everyday lives to the mainstream journalism institutions. As a key alternative journalistic value of the traditional journalistic standard, the “news objectivity,” this study suggests “social empathy” as a solution of the modern political conundrum between two potentially conflicting principles that most representative democracies face.

Decline, adaptation and relevance: political parties and their researchers in the twentieth century

The sub-field of political party research is an interesting case study of the broader development of the discipline of political science over the past 20 years as it demonstrates the reflexive and evolving relationship between politics researchers and the organizations that they study. Party research has moved on from crises of existence, to studying the resilience and adaptation of these organizations with new and evolving methodologies that have taken party research into the twenty-first century and fostered more collaborative, specialist and increasingly internationalized relationships within the research community. In the last two decades, expectations around research engagement and impact have heightened in response to changes in the research funding environment and the political pressure to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of the discipline has intensified. The increasingly heterogeneous, specialized and quantified nature of the subfield has enabled party scholarship to find impact and relevance through the provision of technical advice to parties and policymakers, thereby affecting how parties organize. However, while political party researchers have been able to engage audiences outside academia with this specialized and technical advice, the sub-discipline has shifted away from some of the “bigger picture”, normative questions surrounding the role of parties in modern representative democracies.

Why lot? How sortition could help representative democracy

In this paper we present a new analytical model of a Parliament and investigate the beneficial effects of the selection of legislators by lot in order to reduce some of the drawbacks of modern representative democracies. Resorting to sortition for the selection of public officers used to be in the past a popular way of taming factionalism in public affairs. Factionalism is assumed to be detrimental since public officers tend to favour their own faction instead of pursuing the general interest. In this respect our mathematical model shows in a rigorous way how it is possible to improve the efficiency of a Parliament by introducing the use of sortition to select part of its members. It will be shown that, starting from a Parliament working with two parties (or coalitions), where the costs of representative democracy are quite apparent through the detrimental effects of party discipline, one can beneficially move towards a Parliament where independent, randomly selected legislators sit alongside elected members. In particular, we show that increasing the number of independent legislators up to a critical point enhances the efficiency of the Parliament and puts into check the factionalism likely to arise from party discipline.

Freedom of the Press and Public Responsiveness

Public responsiveness to policy is contingent on there being a sufficient amount of clear and accurate information about policy available to citizens. It is of some significance then, that there are increasing concerns about limits being placed on media outlets around the world. We examine the impact of these limits on the public’s ability to respond meaningfully to policy by analyzing cross-national variation in the opinion–policy link. Using new measures on spending preferences from Wave 4 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, merged with OECD data on government spending and Freedom House measures of press freedom, we assess the role of mass media in facilitating public responsiveness. We find evidence that when media are weak, so too is public responsiveness to policy. These results highlight the critical role that accurate, unfettered media can play in modern representative democracy.

Election Result Prediction using Spatial Statistical Method

Since 17th Century, Modern representative democracy in all forms is being made possible by having a formal way of collecting people's overall opinion on who is to be chosen as their representative. Election is a most important event in any democratic country. Confronting on predicting the winning person/party in the election is the biggest challenge here. In this paper, a study of spatial statistics method to predict the election result using the exploratory data analysis is carried out by applying spatial statistical methods. The paper presents, prediction of the election result with respect to the income level of the citizen and also a comparison of results obtained from the different statistical methods

Grote’s analysis of Ancient Greek political thought: its significance to J. S. Mill’s idea about ‘active character’ in a liberal democracy

ABSTRACTGeorge Grote (1794–1871) published the History of Greece between 1846 and 1856, thereby providing the first positive evaluation of democratic Athens in the early modern period and a novel interpretation of the roles of the sophists and of Socrates, premised on his understanding of democratic Athens. Grote’s account offered a sociological explanation of the moral psychology cultivated by the constitution of the Athenian polis through the citizens’ active political participation. This participation cultivated civic virtues, emotional and ethical attachment to the polis, and a sense of obligation towards the polis, even at the expense of self-interest. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was familiar with Grote’s historical works and emphasized the parallels between the ancient direct democracy and the modern, representative democracy, which he himself promoted in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861). In this article it is argued that J. S. Mill’s concept of the ‘active character’ of the citizen in a modern representative democracy was inspired by Grote’s understanding and positive evaluation of ancient democratic Athens and its moral psychology. This is one example of the phenomenon mentioned in the editorial to this special issue, namely that accounts of past philosophy may influence philosophy proper.

Candlelight demonstrations and the presidential impeachment in South Korea

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce and analyze the short-term and long-term causes of the candlelight demonstrations and the ensuing presidential impeachment in South Korea, as well as the characteristics of the organization that planned the candlelight demonstrations and the participants of them. Design/methodology/approach The research is based on the previous literature, news articles, as well as various surveys on the randomly selected participants of the demonstrations and on a representative sample of Korean electorate, including non-participants as well. Findings The candlelight demonstrations, although “triggered” by a news report, would not have occurred, without angers and discontents accumulated over the president’s whole term by the irregularities and wrongdoings of the administration. The system of checks and balances in democratic system did not work properly. In that regard, the candlelight demonstrations and the ensuing presidential impeachment were just an unanticipated expression of the problems and defects built in the Korean democratic system of 1987, which would have found a way out in any form eventually. Originality/value Based on the analysis of the candlelight demonstrations and the ensuing presidential impeachment, the paper suggests instructive implications on a new democracy as well as on modern representative democracies that are in jeopardy now.

A Study on the Modern Representative Democracy system -Focusing on the Re-recognition of the Referendum as a Direct Democracy Factor-

A Study on the Modern Representative Democracy system -Focusing on the Re-recognition of the Referendum as a Direct Democracy Factor-

Democracy without political parties: the case of ancient Athens

AbstractPolitical parties, formal, durable and mass organizations that inform voters on public policy issues, nominate candidates for office and fight elections for the right to govern, are ubiquitous in modern representative democracies but were absent from the direct participatory democracy of ancient Athens. The paper investigates how the political institutions of Athens may explain their absence. The arguments explored include voter homogeneity; the conditions at the start of the democracy, characterized by single constituency configuration of the demos, simple majority voting and lack of organized groups; the irrelevance of holding public office for determining public policy; appointment to public posts through sortition; and voting on single-dimension issues. The paper then discusses how in the absence of parties voters became informed and how political leaders were held accountable by the courts.