Representative Government: Evolution from Ancient to Modern Democracy
Representative Government and the Modern State
Representative democracy was built on the political unity paradigm of modernity: the nation-state, which redefined the political institutions of the Middle Ages to adapt to new social and political conditions. It operated under two principles of the republican tradition: the primacy of law and the limitation of power. Political modernity disrupted the principle of legitimacy of the Middle Ages and replaced it with the principle of individual consent. All these circumstances and developments paved the way for the rebirth of democracy in modernity. According to Sartori, between ancient democracy and modern democracy, there is only homonymy, not homology. There is nothing in common between the democracy of the ancient world and modern democracy. They might share a few words that appear in both vocabularies, but not their meaning.
The first advocates and publicists of representative democracy held republican virtues in the same regard against the vices of pure democracies of antiquity. They were linked to the fact that the new conditions of the modern state were an unexpected gift of fortune. The conditions of the new republics made it necessary for citizens to participate in government indirectly. The distance between rulers and ruled looked like a gushing fountain of innumerable advantages. Representative democracy was the delegated exercise of popular sovereignty, facing an alleged common good. Popular legitimacy and the common good were safeguarded as never before. This idyllic picture was truncated. Legitimacy and consent had triggered the logic of political equality.
The Rise of Mass Democracy
The road the bourgeoisie had opened in search of a speedy political settlement left a trail that other new political groups wanted to follow. The masses were recognized as the sovereign people of the mythical founding of the liberal state, and liberal democracy could not resist the embodiment of its own promises. The extension of suffrage, under the pressure of social movements, opened the floodgates to mass democracy and politics as a market. Politics became a competition for the vote. Schumpeter wanted to put another order to such a removal and confined the normative ideals of representative democracy to an exhausted and implausible doctrine of classical democracy. He maintained that it was not the people who governed, but rather who was sovereign, and that achieving the common good was the government’s action.
The Evolution of Democratic Theory
Many theorists and philosophers have refused to bury the classical concept of democracy. Others reintroduced the debate on scientific and sociological terms. It was the very development and methodology in the analysis of Schumpeterian democracies that contributed to a refinement of the classical theory of representation. Democracy is rule by politicians but also of the people. Many political scientists argue that democracy is also a mechanism for translating votes into seats in parliament. Thus, elections are the institution of representative democracy because they embody the mechanism that translates one model of democracy into another.
Post-Schumpeterian Representation
There are some arguments for the extension of the concept of political representation on the post-Schumpeterian horizon. Political parties take over the existing fragmented social policies by appealing to these different identities. Representation requires that the balance of parties is reflected in the politicians who are representatives. *Schumpeterian democracy is a process and a competition between political parties.*