Political Representation and the EU: ambivalences and pitfalls of a contested concept

Political representation is a concept that rather recently got back into discussion in political science. The new classics by Pitkin, Manin and Urbinati in this context have shown that the concept of representation in the historical course of Western democratisation did not develop out of a democratic tradition, but out of a quest for moderating feudal and royal powers. One question therefore is whether the concept of representation has to be seen as being rather elitist or rather democratic. Criticism of representative democracy has been quite common in modern democratic theory, strengthening the doubts on whether representation is “democratic enough”. Despite these theoretical and historical backgrounds and controversies, representative democracy is by far the most common practice of democracy throughout the world. In democracy indices like “Freedom House” it has become a normative standard. In short, the concept of representation, as criticized as it rightfully may be, nevertheless defines a crucial benchmark for quality of democracy. Those conceptual and normative ambivalences gain another problem dimension when representative democracy is conceptualized in and for the EU multilevel regime.