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It is often argued today that representative politics is in crisis. Trust in politicians, political parties and even the political system is lower than ever, and for many people politics is at best an entertaining spectacle. At the same time, new forms of politics have emerged. In The End of Representative Politics, Simon Tormey argues that these new forms of politics represent a hope for the future. They do so by eschewing old forms of representative politics in a 'politics without representatives', and we have seen this in, among other places, the alter-globalisation protests, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the indignados in Spain, Occupy Wall Street, and anti-government protests in Brazil and Turkey. These new forms of politics challenge our assumptions about politics and representation, and force us to think beyond the traditional party based democratic institutions - and that's a good thing too. In this review symposium, Lisa Disch, Pablo Ouziel, Neal Lawson and Simon Tormey discuss the future of representative politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the constructivist approaches in understanding the important differences that exist between constructivist and other democratic theories of political representation. Topics discussed by the author include their relationship to the standard account of representation, their intellectual lineage, and approach to normative analysis, the significance of radical democratic theory, and the comparison between constructivism and democracy.

That acts of democratic representation participate in creating the interests for which legislators and other officials purport merely to stand gives rise to the “constituency paradox.” I elucidate this paradox through a critical reading of Hanna Pitkin's The Concept of Representation, together with her classic study of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein and Justice. Pitkin's core insight into democratic representation is that democratic representation is “quasi-performative”: an activity that mobilizes constituencies by the interests it claims in their name. I develop this insight together with its implications for contemporary scholarship on the political effects of economic equality. I conclude by arguing that the fundamental democratic deficiency of the US political system goes much deeper than its disproportionate responsiveness to wealthy interests; it is a matter of system biases that foster the formation and expression of those interests, while mitigating against mobilization by those Americans who want inequality to be reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the conceptions of democratic representation found in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Hanna Pitkin. Whereas Laclau takes Pitkin as his foil, I contend that her treatment of representation has much more in common with Laclau's than he gives her credit for. Pitkin made a bold critique of foundationalist notions of responsiveness and acknowledged representation's constitutive function. Yet, her antipathy to symbolic representation made Pitkin recoil from the most radical implications of her argument: she would see as a threat to democratic politics that which Laclau casts as its vitality. Laclau's work, then, does not merely refute Pitkin's but advances a line of argument that she set into motion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes what I term “the dilemma of democratic competence,” which emerges when researchers find their expectations regarding democratic responsiveness to be in conflict with their findings regarding the context dependency of individual preferences. I attribute this dilemma to scholars' normative expectations, rather than to deficiencies of mass democratic politics. I propose a mobilization conception of political representation and develop a systemic understanding of reflexivity as the measure of its legitimacy. This article thus contributes to the emergent normative argument that political representation is intrinsic to democratic government, and links that claim to empirical research on political preference formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented which discusses a political theory by philosopher Bruno Latour regarding how political ecologists should consider themselves as spokespersons representing a political view. She refutes Latour's concept of political representatives as spokespersons and suggests he views them as mediators who translate political messages.