III.

Representative Democracy

From around the 10th century ad, democracy entered a second historical phase whose centre of gravity was Western Europe. Shaped by forces as varied as the rebirth of towns, the rise of the first parliaments, and the conflicts unleashed by self-governing councils and religious dissent within the Roman Catholic Church, democracy came to be understood as “representative democracy”. This at least was the term that began to be used in France, Britain, and the newly created United States during the 18th century, for instance by constitution-makers and influential political writers when referring to a new type of government with its roots in popular consent. Again, nobody knows who first spoke of representative democracy, though one political writer and thinker who broke new ground was the Marquis d’Argenson (1694-1757), the French nobleman who had been foreign minister under Louis XV. He was perhaps the first to tease out the new meaning of democracy as representation. “False democracy”, he noted in his Considérations sur le Gouvernement Ancien et Présent de la France (1765), “soon collapses into anarchy. It is government of the multitude; such is a people in revolt, insolently scorning law and reason. Its tyrannical despotism is obvious from the violence of its movements and the uncertainty of its deliberations. In true democracy, one acts through deputies, who are authorized by election; the mission of those elected by the people and the authority that such officials carry constitute the public power.”

This was a brand new way of thinking about democracy, by which was meant a type of government in which people, understood as voters faced with a genuine choice between at least two alternatives, are free to elect others who then act in defence of their interests, that is, represent them by deciding matters on their behalf. Much ink and blood was to be spilled in defining what exactly representation meant, who was entitled to represent whom, and what had to be done when representatives disregarded those whom they were supposed to represent. But common to the second historical phase of democracy was the belief that good government was government by representatives. Often contrasted with monarchy, representative democracy was praised as a way of governing better by openly airing differences of opinion, not only among the represented themselves, but also between representatives and those whom they are supposed to represent. Representative government was also hailed for encouraging the rotation of leadership guided by merit. It was said to introduce competition for power that in turn enabled elected representatives to test out their political competence before others. The earliest champions of representative democracy also offered a more pragmatic justification of representation. It was seen as the practical expression of a simple reality: that it was not feasible for all of the people to be involved all of the time, even if they were so inclined, in the business of government. Given that reality, the people must delegate the task of government to representatives who are chosen at regular elections. The job of these representatives is to monitor the spending of public money. Representatives make representations on behalf of their constituents to the government and its bureaucracy. Representatives debate issues and make laws. They decide who will govern and how, on behalf of the people.

As a way of naming and handling power, representative democracy was an unusual type of political system. It rested upon written constitutions, independent judiciaries, and laws that guaranteed procedures that still play vital roles in the democracies of today: inventions such as habeas corpus (prohibitions upon torture and imprisonment), periodic election of candidates to legislatures, limited-term holding of political offices, voting by secret ballot, referendum and recall, electoral colleges, competitive political parties, ombudsmen, civil society and civil liberties such as the right to assemble in public, and liberty of the press (see Journalism). Compared with the previous, assembly-based form, representative democracy greatly extended the geographical scale of institutions of self-government. As time passed, and despite its localized origins in towns, rural districts, and large-scale imperial settings, representative democracy came to be housed mainly within territorial states protected by standing armies and equipped with powers to make and enforce laws and to extract taxes from their subject populations. These states were typically much bigger and more populous than the political units of ancient democracy. Most city-states of the Greek world of assembly democracy, Mantinea and Argos for instance, were no bigger than a few score square kilometres. Many modern representative democracies, including Canada (9.98 million sq km/3.86 million sq mi), the United States (9.83 million sq km/3.8 million sq mi), and the largest electoral constituency in the world, the vast rural division of Kalgoorlie, in the state of Western Australia (in 2006 comprising 82,000 voters scattered across an area of 2.5 million sq km/975,000 sq mi), are incomparably larger.

The changes leading to the formation of representative democracy were neither inevitable nor politically uncontested. Representative democracy was in fact born of different power conflicts, many of them bitterly fought in opposition to ruling groups, whether they were church hierarchies, landowners, or imperial monarchies, often in the name of the people. Exactly who “the people” were proved to be a deep source of controversy throughout the era of representative democracy. The second age of democracy witnessed the birth of neologisms, such as aristocratic democracy (that first happened in the Low Countries at the end of the 16th century) and new references (beginning in the United States) to republican democracy. Later came social democracy, liberal democracy, Christian democracy, and even bourgeois democracy, workers’ democracy, and socialist democracy. These new terms corresponded to the many kinds of struggles by groups for equal access to governmental power that resulted, sometimes by design and sometimes by simple accident or unintended consequence, in institutions and ideals and ways of life that had no precedent. Written constitutions based on a formal separation of powers, periodic elections, and parties and different electoral systems were new. So too was the invention of civil societies founded on new social habits and customs—experiences as varied as dining in a public restaurant, or controlling one’s temper by using polite language—and new associations that citizens used to keep an arm’s length from government by using non-violent weapons like the liberty of the printing press, publicly circulated petitions and covenants, and constitutional conventions called to draw up new constitutions.

This period unleashed what the French writer and politician Alexis de Tocqueville famously called a “great democratic revolution” in favour of political and social equality. Spreading from the Atlantic region, this revolution often suffered setbacks and reversals, especially in Europe, where it was mainly to collapse in the early decades of the 20th century. The democratic revolution was fuelled by rowdy struggles and breathtaking acts, such as the public execution in England of King Charles I in 1649. Such events called into question the anti-democratic prejudices of those—the rich and powerful—who supposed that inequalities among people were natural. New groups, like slaves, women, and workers, won the franchise. At least on paper, representation was eventually democratized, stretched to include all of the population. But such stretching happened with great difficulty and against great odds. Even then it was permanently on trial; in more than a few cases, the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries included, the definition of representation was actually narrowed by withdrawing the right to vote from certain groups, particularly black and poor people.

Not until the very end of this second phase, during the early decades of the 20th century, did the right to vote for representatives come to be seen as a universal entitlement. That happened first for adult men and later, usually much later, for all adult women (see Women’s Suffrage). But even then, as the experiences of totalitarianism and military dictatorship show, the opponents of democratic representation fought hard and with considerable success against its perceived inefficiencies, its fatal flaws, and supposed evils. They demonstrated that democracy in any form was not inevitable—that it had no built-in historical guarantees.