Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

the rulers and the ruled – is (paradoxically) to exclude the people from
politics in their active or judgmental, role. If the gap is closed there is
no longer any room for the various groups that constitute ‘the people’
to evaluate the images of themselves on offer, in most cases because
the effect of closing the gap will be to remove the possibility for the
portrayal of other competing images or visions of the polity. When
functioning properly, therefore, political representation understood in
these aesthetic terms highlights the advantages of some institutional
arrangements over others.
Group Representation and Group Freedom in South Africa
To articulate this overall insight regarding representation is to identify
which groups and their representatives are kept off the agenda,
either through lack of meaningful representative or via one group or
set of representatives successfully closing the gap. In South Africa
the unemployed as a group tend not to have meaningful representation,
despite dubious claims to the contrary by the African National
Congress (ANC) that they represent them, not only because they lack
organization and representatives, but also because their situation of
poverty makes their immediate interests poor competitors in the race
to reflect a successful version or vision of ‘the people’. Moreover, the
system of party list proportional representation used in South Africa
excludes alternative versions or visions of the polity since it is based
on a completely different (and deeply problematic) conception of
representation: that the legislature should directly reflect the electoral
tally of parties rather than either the interests of the electorate as a
whole or a vision of that whole. It sacrifices the ‘gap’ and the potential
for competition amongst various visions for an alleged exact copy of
‘the people’ via replicating in parliament identical proportionality of
party support. [34]
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FREEDOM, POWER AND
REPRESENTATION
Lawrence Hamilton
34
South Africa’s electoral system is in fact very rare. Only Israel has the same system. In
every other democracy in the world, citizens are represented by where they live (though
exactly how and what proportion of the representatives are elected in this fashion varies
quite widely). A. Rehfeld, The Concept of Constinuency: Political Representation, Democratic
Legitimacy, and Institutional Design (CUP 2005), p. 3.