Sometimes elected representatives are not really the rulers. Explain the statement with the help of a suitable example.
Answers
Answer: yeah
Explanation: At first glance political representation in a liberal democracy such as Australia is a straightforward concept: about every three years at a national level there is an election where citizens in defined geographic areas (be it a local electorate or a state/territory) choose from a range of candidates—themselves citizens living in (or near) that same area—and elect a few to sit in the national parliament as representatives of the people living in defined geographic areas. Yet both theoretically and in practice it is far more complicated. While representative democracy is often poetically described as government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’, it is not only ‘the people’ who are represented: political parties, ideologies, states, business, unions, the environmental movement—to name but a few—are also represented. Furthermore, even the very notion of ‘the people’ is amorphous as a representative cannot possibly represent the full diversity of ‘the people’ and all their divergent and conflicting interests.
These complexities actually relate to the actors rather than the institutions. That is, the practice of being a representative and the act of representing is less straightforward than the institutions of political representation, as the institutional norms are clearly defined. In this regard, Blom defines representation ‘as a set of procedures or rules that select people to formulate and legislate the public interest in an accountable way … representation is the accountable aggregation of interests’.[1] The Constitution and standing orders of the Houses of Parliament circumscribe the functions and powers of the legislature and the actions of those within it, which a learned judiciary adjudicates, guided by widely accepted precedents and conventions. Yet the roles and responsibilities of the legislators outside the institutions are not so clearly defined, as they are contested and ultimately judged by a more unpredictable populace. It is this activity of representing, or the conception of representation as ‘acting for’ others, that this monograph is most interested in, which Pitkin defines in terms of what the representative does and how s/he does it.[2]
Delegates with a mandate or trustees with independence?
There is much literature on the idea of representative democracy and how to institutionalise and practise this idea, while the roles of political actors are overlooked or subordinated. Rather it is the roles of citizens and their engagement with representative democracy that excites interest and invites further investigation. Of the comparatively smaller number of scholars who have focused on the role of representatives, eighteenth-century political philosopher Edmund Burke, and more recently, American political theorist Professor Hanna Pitkin, are two of the most cited theorists in this area. In his famous Speech to the Electors of Bristol at the Conclusion of the Poll (when he was elected to Parliament as a member for Bristol) Burke expressed his now famous ‘trustee’ view of representation. Burke writes:
Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole—where not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament.[3]
While this view is still popular and useful for analysing the behaviour of contemporary politicians, his work has been criticised for its inconsistencies. Proceeding cautiously, Pitkin devotes a chapter to Burke in her landmark work The Concept of Representation (1967). Representatives have also been variously conceived as agents, trustees, deputies and delegates.[4] Reflecting language norms of the time, the quotes in this monograph are reproduced with the author’s gender-bias. Pitkin asks: ‘Should (must) a representative do what his constituents want, and be bound by mandates or instructions from them; or should (must) he be free to act as seems best to him in pursuit of their welfare?’.[5] Pitkin summarises the mandate-independence debate: