Democratic Representation: Who Pays What?

Debates on democratic representation often pit representatives’ entitlement to represent against represented citizens’ entitlement to sanction their representatives for failing to act in accordance with their wishes. At the beginning of this paper, I argue that, when we focus on these two entitlements, this binary framework of the debate obscures two important distinctions: between moral rights to sanction representatives and moral rights to sanction representative democratic institutions, and between strong and weak moral rights to sanction. From this preliminary conceptual analysis, I further argue that, according to most of the available theories of democratic representation, all citizens have weak moral rights to sanction representatives, some citizens have a strong right to sanction representatives for given reasons and in specific circumstances, and citizens do not have moral rights to sanction democratic representative institutions. Given so, this paper explores how a theory of democratic representation can include a reflexive mechanism that allows citizens to sanction representative democratic institutions. In particular, I argue that citizens have an entitlement to sanction representative democratic institutions grounded in a universal moral right to resist all political institutions – democratic and non-democratic, which prevent a person from trying to get the rest of the society to endorse political ideas and worldviews she supports. Specifically, I argue that, in certain circumstances, constituents have a strong moral right to sanction all political institutions, regardless of the existing represented-representative relationship. For the representatives, I demonstrate that the right to resist makes morally permissible otherwise undemocratic practices.