Representative Democracy

Despite the not-so-distant invocations of the “end of history,” representative democracy is, today, under siege even from corners where one once might have expected strong sympathy and support. Indeed, confidence in representative democracy has, in recent years, been shaken by the economic and political performance of many such regimes. Representative Democracy explains why the definitive institutional features of representative democracy - the electoral selection of policymaking officials who are independent in the interim between elections - are attractive relative to salient alternatives (including direct democracy, lottery-based systems, and meritocratic alternatives) and, relatedly, why it is a distinctively attractive institutional arrangement, rather than - as it is often perceived to be - a pale stand-in for more robust and genuine forms of democratic government. Building on novel arguments that connect the distinctive institutional features of representative democracy to important epistemic and stability-based benefits, the book provides a normative account of a well-functioning system of representative democracy against which proposed reforms can be evaluated.

Despite the not-so-distant invocations of the “end of history,” representative democracy is, today, under siege even from corners where one once might have expected strong sympathy and support. Indeed, confidence in representative democracy has, in recent years, been shaken by the economic and political performance of many such regimes. Representative Democracy explains why the definitive institutional features of representative democracy - the electoral selection of policymaking officials who are independent in the interim between elections - are attractive relative to salient alternatives (including direct democracy, lottery-based systems, and meritocratic alternatives) and, relatedly, why it is a distinctively attractive institutional arrangement, rather than - as it is often perceived to be - a pale stand-in for more robust and genuine forms of democratic government. Building on novel arguments that connect the distinctive institutional features of representative democracy to important epistemic and stability-based benefits, the book provides a normative account of a well-functioning system of representative democracy against which proposed reforms can be evaluated.