Elements of Political Representation in Digitally Enabled Movements

The growing mismatch between the formal rule of representative democracy and its actual achievement has created a loss of confidence in representative democracy – in particular, elections and parties - as the facilitator of popular opinion formation and the embodiment of popular will. Like earlier generations, citizens in contemporary democracies express disappointment, and emphasize the need to “do democracy differently.” Still, while rejecting conventional features of the system, many continue to engage with it in other forms. Emerging at the nexus of these developments are digitally enabled movements such as the 15M that practice a distinct way of organizing popular action and voice. Committed to minimizing hierarchy and formal bureaucracy, they build on a complex set of interactions involving participation across a wide set of actors, platforms and places, and organization enabled by digital communication networks. Part of the point is often to develop organizational forms that connect people rather than represent them. The working assumption of this paper is that instead of fundamentally challenging (or sidestepping) the notion of representative democracy, such developments on the contrary help illuminate important but neglected elements within it. Drawing on recent literature on representative democracy, according to which mobilization is a key dimension in representation rather than something opposed to it, the paper has two aims: to identify the distinct elements of political representation at work in these complex organizational forms, and to explore the relationship between them. Clarifying the elements and interrelations in this context is an important step towards deepening our understanding of the limits and potentials of representative democracy under late modern conditions.