Two Concepts of Representation

The idea of representation has been enjoying a boom of late. Of course, our modern democracies are representative ones, and the idea that our governments and parliaments should be representative has been around for a while. Increasingly, though, other groups of people are expected to be representative too, from teaching staff at universities to the boards of corporations. There’s even a feeling that the fictional worlds presented to us in books and films should be representative of the real world that we inhabit.

These two concepts of representation are actually quite different, however. The first has been used in formal political institutions since ancient times in an effort to make sure that it really is the people—or a good sample of the people—that is exercising political power. The second is more focused on the idea that specific groups—not just political institutions, but also companies, clubs and other organizations—should reflect the demographic make-up of society as a whole. Only the first conception is truly democratic; the second has taken on some of the prestige and legitimacy of democracy, but has very little to do with it.

The first conception of representation is grounded in the core idea of democracy: that the people (dēmos) should exercise power (kratos). What exactly this means is, of course, open to interpretation: there are a range of different democratic institutions and procedures, each with a fair claim to embody the power of the people. Whether they incorporate referenda, proportional representation or other measures, all these institutions and procedures are designed to create as accurate a picture as possible of what people actually want.

In this, they resemble a particular kind of applied statistics. Now, an essential part of arriving at sound statistical conclusions about a population is obtaining a sample that is truly representative. Just as a good social scientist strives to ensure that her sample will allow her to drawn reliable inferences about the population she’s studying, so a good political system will produce a more or less accurate picture of the balance of opinion in society as a whole.

There are various ways of doing this, and, through the course of history, more than a few have been tried. The citizens of ancient Greek cities were often divided into subdivisions, which were then used as a basis for selection to central political institutions. In Athens, for example, the citizens were subdivided into ten tribes; each year, fifty men randomly selected from each of the tribes would make up the city’s Council of Five Hundred, one of the democracy’s central institutions. The men selected wouldn’t necessarily be expected to speak on behalf of their tribe, but they did provide it with a presence in one of the city’s main organs of state. The fact that they only served one-year terms ensured that a fair number of the members of each tribe would, at some point, have a seat on the council, and take part in its proceedings. These tribes were artificial subdivisions of the citizen body. They served, essentially, as a kind of built-in mechanism to ensure that members of the central council came from all across the Athenian citizenry. It was a low-cost but effective way of coming some way towards a representative sample of the Athenian dēmos.

Nowadays, of course, we do representation differently. In our much larger states, significant numbers of citizens cannot turn up to central institutions in person. Instead, we have them elect representatives to speak on their behalf in a central parliament or congress. There’s a long-running controversy about what exactly this should entail: eighteenth-century statesman and writer Edmund Burke, for example, argues that MPs should represent their electors’ best interests, not necessarily what the electors think are their best interests. But this is a pretty rare view nowadays: most people insist that their representatives make some effort to reflect the beliefs and preferences of their constituents. How do representatives get an accurate sense of the opinions of the people who have elected them? This, of course, has long been part of the craft of politics. Electoral success (or failure) can give politicians an idea of what the people want. So can being deeply embedded in the norms and networks of particular communities. Over the years, the craft of finding out what constituents want has become a kind of science, with teams of pollsters on standby to measure voters’ feelings on any number of issues.

The ancient Athenian system and our modern ones, then, can be seen as different approaches to the problem of how to make sure that the preferences of the people as a whole are communicated to the major institutions of the state. But why is it so important that these institutions are representative? First and foremost, because major state institutions wield the considerable powers of the state. They have, as Weber puts it, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence; they also make the decisions that will shape the future of the communities we live in, for good or ill. But these bodies are also supposed to be democratic institutions, and one of their major functions is to manifest the will of the nation in microcosm. In fact, their function as embodied opinion polls and their function as organs of the state go hand in hand, since, in a democratic order, it’s primarily those decisions that reflect the will of the whole people that are seen as legitimate.

In short, then, it’s important for democratic political institutions to be representative because they’re democratic political institutions: their purpose is to exercise the specific and extraordinary prerogatives of state power, in a democratic way. This brings us to the non-political realm and to our second concept of representation. I’ll call this demographic mirroring, since the ideal seems to be that any particular group of people—from the attendees at an academic conference to the characters in a film—should approximate the demographic proportions of society at large as closely as possible.

People are found together in lots of different agglomerations and very few of these, if you take them separately, display exactly the same distribution of attributes that you’d find in the population at large. How could they? Human beings don’t acquire their various attributes randomly: they are the result of a combination of genetics and of the things that have influenced them during their lives. Neither of those things will be exactly the same irrespective of where you happen to be—which means that there will be many differences between groups in different parts of the world or even within a single country. However, whereas democratic political institutions have an obligation to be representative of the balance of opinion in society, there’s no reason for other groups to bear the same burden.

It also makes little sense to impose such an obligation on fictional groups of people, such as the characters in a film. Many films are set in the distant past, in places that were significantly less ethnically diverse than many modern nations. Some novels and films even depict groups of people who have never existed, but might at some time in the future. Should they have to reflect our current demographic balance too? Parliaments should be representative in some sense, but why should the cast of characters in a work of fiction? They don’t even exist.

This second concept of representation is also sometimes applied to formal political institutions. For example, Justin Trudeau’s first cabinet was designed to “look like Canada” in that it reflected the country’s demographic balance. That, of course, was meant to make it representative. But in what sense? Since this was a formal political institution, it would seem that our first concept of representation must have been somewhere at the back of people’s minds. It was a good thing that the members of Trudeau’s cabinet were of different ethnicities (the assumption seemed to be) because they’d be able to speak on behalf of the groups they represented.

But the idea that an ethnically Indian politician would be able to speak on behalf of other Canadians who happen to be ethnically Indian is a curious one. The ethnicity with which you identify may correlate with some things (for example, which religion you espouse) to some extent, but it is not a good way of predicting your views on a range of discrete political issues in any detail. Ethnicity might be a proxy for certain attitudes, but even then it’s a very rough one, and if we really want to find out people’s political views there are ways of doing that: face-to-face meetings, polls, elections, etc. The democratic procedures we have are already designed to make sure that our representatives have some knowledge of what our views are, and so can re-present them in our central democratic institutions. We don’t need to have recourse to crude guesswork based on what people look like. In political institutions, then, though a demand for representation is clearly more legitimate than it is in a rugby club or a TV series, it can be focused on the wrong thing—on race or sex rather than on people’s political opinions and preferences. The point of democratic political processes, after all, is to get a more or less accurate sense of the distribution of views, not of the distribution of skin colour or other physical characteristics.

So why is representation invoked so often, even in instances where its focus might be wrong, or where it obviously has no place? Maybe people are simply confused about where the concept should apply, and where it shouldn’t. But it’s also possible that the concept of representation has been co-opted because of its prestige. Saying a film or a university department needs to be more representative has a legalistic, almost constitutional ring to it: the claim that a film should have more Canadians in it (say) is suddenly elevated to the same level as the idea that a parliament should reflect the views of the population at large.

In reality, though, a wide gulf separates the first concept of representation, which aims to ensure that the spread of a nation’s views is reproduced in its most powerful decision-making bodies, and the second, which reflects a desire to have a country’s demographic make-up echoed by a whole range of smaller groups. There may be other considerations in favour of that desire than the ones I’ve looked at here. But to describe it as a striving for representation just looks like an attempt to draw on that concept’s connotations of democratic legitimacy for purposes that have very little to do with democracy.