Three Concepts of Representation
By Keith Sutherland

The parliamentary expenses scandal has led some people to conclude that our MPs are a bunch of petty criminals. But what about their much larger 'crime' – standing by while their colleagues in government squandered billions of pounds of our children’s money on dodgy PFI loans, Mesopotamian adventures and bailing out profligate bankers? Unfortunately the sums of money involved are so huge as to be unimaginable, but we can all relate to the price of a bath plug or a plasma TV.

The privileging of the trivial is not just a modern phenomenon, here’s an excerpt from Sidney Low’s (1904) Government of England:

A minister may have cost the country thousands of lives and millions of pounds, but his defeat may eventually be brought about because his colleagues have decided – perhaps even in opposition to his own wishes – to put an unpopular tax on bread or beer.

Maybe it’s all been a long time coming and the expenses scandal was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Parliamentary government requires that we trust, respect and defer to our representatives and we no longer live in a deferential age. But before coming up with a package of knee-jerk reforms we really need to unpack the concept of ‘representation’ so that we better understand the problem.

I would like to outline three concepts of representation:

1. deliberative representation
2. delegate representation
3. descriptive representation

and argue that, over time, we have moved from 1) to 2) and are now entering 3), the age of descriptive representation.

Deliberative Representation

Edmund Burke defined parliament as ‘the deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole’. To understand Burke’s view we need to go back to parliament's medieval origins:

The origins of Parliament go back to the 12th century, when King’s councils were held involving barons and archbishops. They discussed politics and were involved in taxation and judgments. Over time, these councils took a more formal role and saw knights representing each county. This was the beginning of a Commons element in Parliament. The word ‘Parliament’ was used to describe these meetings by the early 13th century. www.parliament.uk/about/history/institution.cfm

Note the aristocratic provenance of the body that was set up to deliberate with the king and his ministers – even the ‘Commons’ were represented by knights of the shires.

Deliberative representation is defined by Edmund Burke in his 1774 Speech to the Electors of Bristol:

Authoritative instructions, mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote and to argue for . . . these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our constitution.

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole.

Burke is here suggesting that MPs are a cut above the rest of us, in that they are capable of pursuing the common good through disinterested debate. Needless to say the independence of mind that such noble creatures possessed was underwritten by independence of means and it would not have occurred to Burke that he and his colleagues were simply representing the interests of a privileged social class (although Burke was by no means a wealthy man).

Machine Politics and Delegate Representation

Whether or not Burke’s vision of parliament as a vehicle for government by conversation bore any resemblance to eighteenth-century practice, it did not survive the social and intellectual upheavals of the late nineteenth century. The organised mass political party was a direct result of the Second Reform Act (1867) which dramatically increased the size of the urban electorate. This marked the end of parliament as a deliberative assembly, as MPs had to align themselves with one or other of the two major parties in order to get elected; and their independence was drastically reduced. It remained possible to cross the floor of the Commons without committing political suicide (Churchill being the obvious example), but from then on MPs simply transferred their allegiance from one corporate body to another.

Although the first example of ‘machine’ politics – where the honourable members were told by the whips that they owed their seats purely to the colour of the rosette pinned to their lapel – is usually taken to be Attlee’s 1945 administration, a liberal traditionalist observed it as early on as Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham caucus during the 1880s:

a great revolution had been suddenly and silently wrought . . . the control of the Liberal party had passed out of the hands of its old leaders into those of the men who managed the new ‘machine’.

To Disraeli the political party represented ‘organised opinion’ – a bit rich coming from him of all people, as Disraeli was an opportunist, who changed his opinions along with changes in the weather. In any event he was wrong – adversarial politics long pre-dated the age of ideology. Marx was closer to the mark when he noted that party ideology merely reflected the material interests of the social class that the party represented. Both analyses pointed to delegate representation, the difference being that when ideology is emphasised then the MP is a delegate from the party to the electorate; when the representation of interests is emphasised then the MP is a delegate of the electorate to the legislature. But it matters little whether one privileges ideology or material infrastructure, the salient point being that Burke’s notion of Parliament as a deliberative assembly ‘of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole’ had been banished to Platonic heaven.

If Marxian sociology provides the best tool for understanding the era of delegate representation it also helps us to understand the breakdown that it has been undergoing over the last two decades. Delegate representation is usually a binary creature – Liberal/Tory; Socialist/Capitalist; Labour/Conservative etc. No doubt this was a reflection of the class structure, as voting behaviour used to be inherited along with the family silver (or lack therof).

But these simple binaries all started to fall apart when the Berlin Wall collapsed. Fukuyama proclaimed the end of ideology and prime minister John Major informed us that we now inhabit a classless society. Major’s observation prompted his successor Tony Blair’s hubristic claim that New Labour aspired to the political representation of the entire British people.

Such a proposition might make sense in a one-party state, but what on earth could it mean in a liberal democracy? The concept of liberal democracy itself, like so many lexical compounds, is oxymoronic. Liberalism is essentially a doctrine of individual choice; however, as demonstrated by public choice theorist Kenneth Arrow as early as 1951, there is no general, acceptable way to aggregate individual preferences at the level of the collective demos. This is particularly problematic in our ‘post-ideological’ and increasingly classless society when attitudes on social issues no longer have any significant correlation with attitudes on economic issues. In such an atomized age political labels tend increasingly to represent the persona of the party leader, making it impossible for voters to make sensible choices based on policy issues. Political psychologists have discovered that the face shape, height, accent or haircut of the party leader is more likely to lead to failure or success in the ballot box.

Descriptive Representation

This is part and parcel of an overall shift from delegate to descriptive representation as we now expect our representatives to be more like us (rather than just representing our views and/or material interests). Descriptive representation requires that the representative ‘mirror’ his constituents. In the era of delegate representation, it was less important who the delegate was, so long as he voted in the right way. Whereas previously economic, educational, occupational and social class factors might have mattered, it is now considered necessary to include gender equality (via all-female candidate lists) and increased representation for racial minority groups. A parliament with a 50-50 gender balance and racial minority MPs proportionate to the overall population is now be felt to be more representative than one comprised of largely white males.

However this modern ‘descriptive’ form of representation is better achieved by sampling techniques than by the election of parliamentary representatives. Just as delegate politics could be achieved by a machine (or by driving a herd of sheep through the division lobbies), descriptive representation is best achieved by random selection. Any reasonably-sized sample would automatically achieve the balance of gender and ethnicity and would also, incidentally, achieve a much better representation of the occupational diversity of the nation. In the words of two advocates of random selection for the US Congress:

About a quarter of the body would be blue-collar workers, some of them accustomed to the rigors of debate in community meetings and union halls. You might try to pick out, scattered around the chamber, the ten percent who had been unemployed when their number came up: laid-off laborers, seamstresses, cooks, teamsters, seamen, secretaries, clerks. You might find it easier to spot the two doctors or dentists, the one school administrator, the two accountants, and the one real estate agent whom chance would bring to the body most years. There would also be several dozen managers and administrators dressed in upper-middle-class style. Few would be expensively groomed. Most would have the kind of faces you see in jury boxes. (Callenbach and Phillips, 2008)

The only way to achieve US founding father John Adams’ ideal for a legislative assembly as ‘an exact portrait of the population in miniature’ is via random selection by lot (as is the case with jury trials). Preference elections used to return ‘notables’ (including, of course, Mr Adams and his friends) rather than seamstresses and clerks. Nowadays elections return mostly lawyers, policy wonks and party activists with Oxbridge PPEs. No amount of tinkering with the electoral system will fulfil the goal of descriptive representation.

The jury analogy is an important one, for randomly-selected trial jurers are not expected to have legal expertise or oratorical skills. Their job is simply to listen to the arguments of competing advocates and then vote on the outcome.

If this works in jury trials then why not the High Court of Parliament? Pursuing the legal analogy there would be a need for Advocates for and against the parliamentary bill that was being ‘tried’. Given that the only chamber of our existing parliament that conducts intelligent debates is the House of Lords, then the Lords would be a useful starting point for a chamber of Advocates. Note: as in a jury trial, the Advocates would debate, but only the randomly-selected jury of the Commons would vote on the outcome.

The Separation of Powers

The other prerequisite for a parliamentary system based on descriptive representation would be the formal separation of executive and legislative powers (as is, nominally, the case in the US). Socrates was right to point out that electing most of the magistrates of state ‘by beans’ was as foolish as using the lot to choose a pilot, an architect or a flute-player. If this was true for a small Greek city-state then how much more for the government of a complex twenty-first-century state?

The ‘fused’ nature of the British constitution – whereby the executive is formed out of the largest party in parliament – was an unintended consequence of the Act of Settlement, which ensured that the Royal succession would go to a foreign prince with a poor grasp of the English language and little interest in the government of his new principality. The original Act stipulated that no ‘placeman of the Crown’ should sit in parliament, but this was overturned when the Whig group in parliament seized control of the government.

But there is no reason why this act of happenstance should retain hallowed status, especially in the post-ideological age when citizens view the task of government as ensuring that the trains run on time rather than constructing the New Jerusalem. Government ministers should be appointed on merit alone and held to account by the new bicameral parliament of Advocates and randomly-selected Commons.

The Representation of Interests

Advocates of the sort of descriptive representation that can be furnished by citizens’ juries tend to assume that this is quite sufficient. But Hannah Pitkin famously pointed out the fundamental difference between descriptive representation and the representation of interests. Citizen juries could vote on the passage of legislation but who should propose the bills? Most bills would, in practice, be initiated by government ministers – even Rousseau and other classical advocates of direct democracy restricted the introduction of legislative proposals to the magistracy. But such a conservative arrangement would generate howls of outrage in a post-Marxian world of conflicting interests. The binary interests that characterised the age of delegate representation may have splintered into a thousand flowers in our postmodern multicultural society, nevertheless it would take a braver man than the present author to argue that we have returned to the Burkian world of ‘one interest, that of the whole’.

The only way of providing for the representation of competing interests is via preference elections, so the political party (or coalition of parties) that secured the most votes would be able to introduce legislative proposals based on manifesto commitments. But all parliamentary bills would still need to win the arguments and secure the assent of the randomly-selected Commons. No longer would it be possible for the largest political party to steamroller a bill through parliament just because it was hidden in a manifesto which nobody bothered to read.

The full details of this constitutional blueprint are contained in my book A People’s Parliament www.imprint-academic.com/pp