Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

expressed as a result of the actions and concerns of representatives.
And this fact undermines the very notion of the idea of representatives
directly tracking existing interests or identities.
It follows from this that if group representation and representative
institutions in general are to be freedom enhancing they cannot
simply ‘track’ interests; rather, they must encourage the formation
of new political interests, especially in conditions in which existing
relations of power create or reinforce situations of domination. The
new interests will be freedom-enhancing if they enable groups to
escape these situations of domination. And therefore here the relationship
between group representation and group freedom is one in
which the freedom of the group is dependent upon whether or not
the representative of the group can generate the right kinds of new
interests and then defend them in the relevant formal institutions of
representation. Depending on context this combines representation
as aesthetic reflection, interest identification and even principal-agent
representation.
The conditions in South Africa today illustrate well these facts
about interests and the shared shortcomings of the ‘aggregative and
‘deliberative’ accounts of democracy: historical inequalities and the
interests formed by conditions of poverty, crime, fear and the persistance
of extreme inequalities cannot be overcome by means of representation
simply ‘tracking’ interests (or post-deliberative interests). Since
individual needs and interests are formed within particular institutional
contexts and these contexts are, amongst either things, characterised by
membership of cross-cutting groups and their representatives embedded
in power relations which may or may not generate domination, it
follows that the individual power to act as one would otherwise act, to
satisfy one’s needs, to evaluate and criticise the norms and institutions
of one’s society and to control one’s economic and social environment
depends upon four associated variables (or components of representation):
a) the nature and relative power of the groups of which one is a
member; b) the relationship of representation that exists between the
members of the group and the group’s representatives; c) the relative
power of the groups’ representatives; and d) the relationship between
one’s groups’ representatives and the formal political representatives
of one’s polity.
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FREEDOM, POWER AND
REPRESENTATION
Lawrence Hamilton