210117 SE M11: What is political representation? (2025S)

It is uncontroversial that the quality of democracy is closely bound up with the quality of political representation. But what exactly is political representation? This theoretically-oriented course aims to examine this central question, equipping students with a good sense of the major debates and controversies in the field. The course divides into three parts. The first part looks at how the meaning of the term political representation changed between the early modern period and the nineteenth century. Along the way, students will discover what major political thinkers like Thomas Hobbes had to say about representation, as well as learn why the act of electing representatives was originally regarded as “aristocratic,” rather than democratic, in character. The second part of the course sheds light on how later observers, especially in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, sought to reconceptualise political representation for the age of mass democracy. The course focuses here on what would turn out to be major point of disagreement among scholars: whether democratic representation is an essentially “constructed” relationship that arises from discursive interactions in the public sphere – or whether it exists in some “real” sense, as in the view that increasing the number of women or ethnic minorities in parliament would automatically mean that women or ethnic minorities receive better political representation. Building on these debates, the third and final part of the course explores the most recent theoretical advances. Chief amongst the issues that will be discussed are the implications of intersectionality theory for how we think about the representation of women or ethnic minorities, new ways in which social movement activists frame their claims to represent others, and institutional design strategies for how to connect elected representatives and the represented.