Assessing Representative Democracy: the Need of New Mechanisms of Political Representation

Abstract

Western neo-liberal Democracies are often and shortly characterized by having a representa-tive procedure of participation in the public sphere of life, determining a self-ruled form of politicalregime, affirming the sovereignty of the people in a specific territory; an economic welfare system; po-litical institutions that administrate and organize public life based on their citizen ́s confidence; publicsecurity and order. Yet, the lack of political representation of local communities, or at least their senseof ineffectiveness of the representative system to respond to their needs, promotes their alienation fromnational political systems and weakens it. It is a vicious circle, i.e., the political system does not ade-quately represent the political communities, and these, if not represented, weakens the political systemand its ability to respond to the needs of local communities. Our intent is to show that breaking this vi-cious circle means strengthening democracy with new mechanisms of political representation.

Keywords

• constituency
• democracy
• identity
• political representation