Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

Group Representation
136
DEMOCRACY TODAY
All modern states contain at least two distinct groups of people: the
rulers and the ruled. In formal political terms the rulers are the government,
sovereign powers, law-makers, or the representatives; while the
ruled are the citizens, people, voters, or the represented. [21] The relationship
of representation is what holds these two groups together, and
in representative democracies it is what enables the rulers to exercise
some form of control over the rulers (at the very least via the ballot
box). But this picture is too stark: even ‘the rulers’ may be comprised
of various different groups, not to mention the large number and
diversity of groups that make up ‘the ruled’. The extent of control or
power any subsection of the ruled have over the rulers will depend
therefore upon the relationship of representation their group or groups
have with the ruled.
The representative of a group can be given a warrant to act on
behalf of the group in one of a number of a ways. First, if the group is
an agent and thus can act as a principal, a principal-agent relation of
representation can exist. In this case the group (the principal) appoints
another (the agent) to perform some action or function on their behalf.
Here rules must exist by means of which the decisions of the group’s
members are put together to generate a collective decision, normally
achieved though unanimity or majority decision. But the latter warrant
is always subject to the possibility of the ‘tyranny of the majority’, where
a majority may rule at the expense of the interests of the numerical
minority. [22] There is no clear solution to this persistent problem. What
is clear, though, is that the scope for groups to act on each side of this
principal-agent relation is very narrow. These groups will need to be
sure of the consent of individual members and the representative will
have to further the specified directives of the group. There are some
groups like this, such as small-scale workers cooperatives, but many
groups do not fit this model, mainly because they lack the capacity for
collectivized reason and robust exit mechanisms, e.g. states. But the
21
Ibid., p. 126.
22
Madison, ‘Federalist No. 10’ in Hamilton, Madison and Jay, The Federalist Papers (CUP
2003), pp. 40-6.