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