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