Representative Democracy: Quasi-Representative and Pure Representative
The majority rule mentioned in “One Person One Vote and One Yen One Vote” (No. en3 ) implicitly assumed direct democracy. Let us now consider representative democracy (Note).
Representative democracy is a system in which members of the parliament, who are elected following an election by the people and residents, and then carry put collective decision-making in parliament on behalf of the people and residents. It can be said that the system has been adopted as a constructive direct democracy because there are too many voters in large societies such as today’s nations and local governments. However, there is also another completely different form of representative concept. This is not the same as constructive direct democracy, but in order to overcome the harmful effect of direct democracy, that is, the so-called mobocracy where representatives completely bow to the wishes of the masses. In this system, elected persons, or good persons, make collective decision-making on behalf of the general public or ordinary people.
The difference between these two representative systems lies in the relationship between the voters and the members of parliament. The representative system known as constructive direct democracy requires the members of parliament to be merely agents of the voters and to carry out actions that reflect the political will of the voters. This representative system is referred to as a “quasi-representative” system. On the other hand, in the delegation system whereby enlightened selected persons carry out collective decision-making on behalf of the general public, members of parliament are entrusted with a blank sheet of delegation from the voters. The representative based on this idea is called a “pure representative” and is comparable to a “quasi-representative.” It is sometimes said that the quasi-representative is the people’s representative and the pure representative is a representative of the whole nation.
The electoral system that selects representatives with different aims and meanings has different desirable systems due to the difference in its underlying philosophy. The proportional representation system is the preferred election system for selecting quasi-representatives (people’s representatives), and the single-seat constituency system is the preferred election system for selecting pure representatives (representatives of the whole nation). In reality, a representative democracy is a system that has both quasi-representatives and pure representatives.
Next time, I will discuss voting and abstention in a representative democracy.
(Note) This essay is based on A. Yokoyama (1998) “Economic Theory of Democratic Democracy” H. Tanaka, H. Mifune, A. Yokoyama, Y. Iijima, Public Economics, Toyo Keizai, Inc., p.196.
(Author: Akira Yokoyama)
This essay is the English version of No. 72, October 1, 2019 on the Japanese website.