Constructivist and Deliberative Representation? Lisa Disch as a Critic of Jürgen Habermas

The move towards ‘constructivist’ theories of representation is one of the most important and interesting recent trends in political theory. The growing prominence of a ‘systems approach’ to deliberative democracy is another. These two lines of research bear a number of similarities. For instance they both tend to accept that we can assess the quality of political representation only by examining the nature of the democratic system as a whole. And yet they also stand in some tension with one another. This paper explores three points of divergence between constructivist and deliberative system approaches to political representation by exploring some of the ways in which the democratic theories of Lisa Disch and Jürgen Habermas come into conflict with one another. In the paper I start to explore what is at stake in these disagreements by examining the philosophical, sociological and political scientific assumptions that underlie the competing positions of Lisa Disch and Jürgen Habermas, by trying to pin down exactly what is at stake when they come into conflict and by offering a tentative evaluation of the arguments.