Incarnation, Embodiment, Mirroring: Political Representatives and Their Meaning in Democracy

When scholars in political science and sociology describe the role of political representatives, they often use terms like incarnation, embodiment or mirroring. These terms call attention to the symbolic meaning of the physical bodies of the representatives, but in doing so, they also activate problematic notions for democracy. Contrary to their popular use, the terms embodiment and incarnation are not synonyms. Rather, their roots recall very different historical moments. The word incarnation evokes a sense of medieval representation and is closely connected to the Christian idea of God (Kantorowicz). Embodiment, however, does not presuppose God, but depicts a mode of representation in which the representative absorbs the will of the represented, as in Hobbes’s theory (Skinner). Finally, the term mirroring clearly refers to descriptive representation (Pitkin). But, when this term is applied to the people as a whole and not to specific groups of society, it becomes more problematic. This takes place in the case of populism, where the leader is presumed to be identical to each and every member of the people (Rosanvallon). This paper will explore the semantic meanings of these three terms and delineate their risks for democracy.