Representative Democracy and the Boundary Problem

초록

Democratic theorists have increasingly confronted the so-called boundary problem over the last two decades, i.e. who should have membership in a democracy and why. One persuasive normative position insists that we need to have a basic notion of democracy and what membership in it means before principles can be adduced regarding the boundary problem. Usually this is understood as a kind of participatory democracy. Nevertheless, inquiry into the boundary problem has largely neglected the central role of representation in actual democracies and has failed to recognize that representative democracies are inadequately described or valued on the basis of individual persons’ decision-making activities. By contrast, representation treats individuals as members of groups – constituencies – which are not sets of all members but abstractions of a kind. Moreover, fruitful, i.e., effective, representation is of fundamental value to representative democracies. These two elements of representative democracy yield two representative principles relevant to the boundary problem. One, inclusion can only be offered for persons who can be represented as members of some current or potential constituency qua abstraction. Two, inclusion can only be offered if it is tied to the effective possibility of fruitful representation. Mere formal inclusion can disguise or worsen illegitimate subjection.

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