Contemporary Forms of Representative Democracy

Abstract

In this paper, the author examines contemporary forms of representative democracy in the light of three theoretical and ideological conflicts. The first conflict concerns those who strive for a consolidated representative democracy, and develop theories of “defective democracies”. Advocates of this thrust examine the elements which their regimes lack to operate normally as systems of representative democracy, and no longer classify systems only against formal criteria (parliamentary or presidential representative democracy), but also consider the integration of other subsystems into the system of consistent democratic rules of the game in an “embedded democracy”. The second thrust concerns the rise of populism as a challenge to representative democracy. Countries in which representative democracy has been consolidated are increasingly dissatisfied with the formalised system routines and develop new populist visions of a better and more representative democracy in contrast to the mere procedural democracy in which there is a competition of elites. Finally, the third theoretical thrust concerns new models of democracy developed in normative theories which deal with the deficiencies of representative democracies. In this view, visions of “better democracies” have been developed in the spirit of republicanism, deliberative democracy, reflexive democracy and other concepts of “democratisation of democracy.

Keywords

• representative democracy
• waves of democratisation
• defective democracies
• populism and democracy
• deliberative democracy