Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

efore being represented; instead the act of representing them creates
a new version of the people and their interests, and this creative process
gives representation its dynamism. Political representation is not
designed therefore as a means either to ‘track’ pre-existing interests or
provide a reflection of the people and their interests/identities; ‘rather
it is designed to give the people an image of themselves to reflect on’. [28]
This ‘gap’ between the rulers and ruled is itself filled by groups and
their representatives, and so it is in this gap that the degree of a group’s
freedom is therefore played out.
Group Representation and Group Freedom
The freedom of the group will depend ultimately not on the individual
freedom of any of its constitutive members (however that may be measured
or aggregated) but on the relationship of representation that exists
between the group and its representative and the power of the representative
in question. The internal warrant for a representative to act ‘for’ the
group can come from any (or a mix) of the four kinds of representation
outlined above. However, the extent to which the representative (and by
extension the group) is free to act will depend not only on internal warrant,
but also on a number of other powers, capacities and conditions,
such as the power to overcome any internal and external obstacles to
its decisions and actions and its relative power vis-à-vis other representatives.
This relationship between representation and freedom is
most obvious in the case of a group with the collective agency to act as a
principal, but given that the principal-agent relation of representation in
groups is the exception rather than the rule, we have to look elsewhere for
the normal relation between group representation and group freedom.
This is where the ‘aesthetic’ theory of representation really comes into
its own, particularly with regard to the nature of representation and the
role of representation in the formation of interests.
First, the aesthetic theory of representation establishes that what
matters is not whether representatives establish a mimetic form of
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FREEDOM, POWER AND
REPRESENTATION
Lawrence Hamilton
28
Vieira and Runciman, Representation, p. 139; Ankersmit, Political Representation (Stanford
UP 2002), pp. 112ff.