The future of representative democracy in the eyes of elected representatives

One’s vision of the future of democracy highly depends on one’s diagnosis of the present, because it is usually dissatisfaction with the status quo that motivates democratic reforms. The aim of our paper is to study what kind of changes elected representatives perceive as necessary and to link this with their perception of the representative process as it exists. Is the commonplace diagnosis of a crisis of representation shared by elected representatives? They have incentives to publicly defend their legitimacy and therefore not to question the capacity of elections to provide quality representation. But how do they picture the situation when their anonymity is protected, in interviews? What are the main difficulties linked to the representative mission that they report? Do they diagnose a lack of connection with their constituents, for example? And what kind of solutions do they envision? Do democratic innovations immediately come to their mind as is often the case with citizens or theorists? Do they sometimes develop an alternative vision of democracy strongly differing from the status quo? To answer these questions, we have conducted qualitative in-depth interviews with more than forty French-speaking Belgian elected representatives at the Brussels regional level. These interviews were held between October 2023 and February 2024 at the dawn of the 2024 Belgian general elections. One thing that makes these MPs particularly interesting is the fact that they all took part in, or were close witnesses of the mixed-member deliberative committees that have been institutionalized in the Brussels regional parliament. In line with some recent works that analyze representatives’ discourses and attitudes towards democratic innovations (Buge & Vandamme, 2023; Rangoni et al., 2023; Reuchamps & Sautter, 2023), we want to look at these interviews through the lens of democratic theory by articulating their discourses with different understandings of representation, and to contrast MPs’ views with the emerging literature on citizens’ process preferences (Hibbing 2001; Font et al. 2015; Bedock & Pilet, 2020; Pilet et al. 2023).