With Reconstruction in its death throes, Congress sporadically used its power under Article I, Section 5, to review the elections of its members and, in the process, police racial discrimination in voting, even though much of the disenfranchisement written in law was ostensibly race neutral. As illustrated in Chapter 9, Congress fought back against these disenfranchising regimes, which were adopted across the South over the course of the 1890s and set the tone for the exclusion of Black voters from American politics for almost a century. Congress’s efforts during this period bring this book back to a reoccurring theme: that political limitations, rather than constitutional constraints like federalism, were more of a barrier to the broad implementation of federal power over elections.

During the 1870s, widespread economic and social unrest made the Reconstruction project untenable for many Republicans. The desire to minimize the federal presence in the South not only created a tension with the republican ideals and equality norms that Congress sought to impart on the states, but the lack of enforcement of these new political norms at a critical juncture undermined their ability to constrain political actors (even those who were once allies) moving forward. Chapter 7 shows that Congress’s hypocrisy and complicity in the treatment of Chinese people, women, and the initial beneficiaries of federal intervention – African Americans – diminished Congress’s standing as a counterpoint to the exclusionary tactics used by states.

This chapter examines two major political campaigns under Xi Jinping – the Law-Based Governance Campaign and the Education and Rectification Campaign – as instruments for curbing unsanctioned extrajudicial interventions in the judiciary. Rather than relying solely on institutional reform, the Chinese Communist Party mobilized its organizational apparatus to discipline judicial and administrative officials, compelling compliance with formal legal processes. These campaigns reinforced central control by targeting informal practices that had long undermined court autonomy, such as local interference and internal favoritism. Drawing on the Party’s unique capacity to shape bureaucratic incentives and impose sanctions, these campaigns functioned as top-down mechanisms to insulate the normative state from prerogative encroachments. Together, they helped consolidate a formal legal space by mobilizing political power not against, but in favor of, judicial autonomy – albeit within the bounds of Party supremacy.

This chapter examines how IOs can contribute to the development of representative practices that strengthen global institutional legitimacy. More specifically, it argues that global representative practice can contribute to democratic legitimacy through a distinct set of constitutive representative activities, which function to cultivate – within socially and institutionally emergent groups holding democratic representative claims – those ties of political recognition, integration, and commitment required to constitute them as active and legitimizing democratic constituencies. IOs can engage in this constitutive representation through the orchestration of represented constituencies: intervening in relationships among representatives and their emergent constituents in ways that cultivate their collective legitimating qualities of political recognition, integration, and commitment. These claims are illustrated through an examination of the roles of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN General Assembly (UNGA) as orchestrators of a transnational represented constituency of refugees, via their work in supporting a range of democratic commitments within the Global Compact on Refugees. Overall, this analysis shows how concepts of representation can be brought into closer alignment with the functional demands of democratic legitimation in the complex and dynamic political circumstances of contemporary global politics.

The chapter wishes to make a socio-historical and comparative contribution to the controversy arousing around business participation and the democratization of global governance through a comparison between the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the International Organization of Employers (IOE) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While these two organizations have claimed to represent business and private enterprises at the global level, and have benefited from the legitimization of intergovernmental organizations themselves (the ILO and the UN) for more than a century now, they have done so in a quite differentiated way, both in their external relationships with intergovernmental organizations as in the definition of their internal representativeness. This chapter first delves into the process of institutionalization of the representation of the ICC and IOE. It then reveals the logic of their internal organization, particularly in their relations with their members, employers’ associations and multinational corporations. It insists on their selection process and the way they have built a collective entity now referred to as ‘business’. By doing so, the chapter distinguishes the representation of the ICC and the IOE within international organizations from the representation of business within and by the ICC and the IOE, insisting on the need for a more differentiated and historically grounded perspective on business actors within global governance institutions.

This chapter explores how the party-state has restructured political oversight of the judiciary by channeling interventions through formalized mechanisms. It analyzes two main developments: internal systems such as the Four Types of Cases classification and the Case Review System, and external coordination through Political-Legal Affairs Committees and top-level directives. These mechanisms enable the regime to identify, monitor, and influence politically salient cases while avoiding unsanctioned or arbitrary intervention. By institutionalizing channels for prerogative control, the Party reduces reliance on informal influence and thereby preserves the functional autonomy of courts in routine matters. These reforms demarcate the boundary between the normative and prerogative states more clearly, sustaining the dual state equilibrium. Instead of eliminating political control, the Party has routinized it – replacing ad hoc interference with regularized prerogative governance that is selective, bureaucratized, and aligned with regime interests.

This chapter describes the four modes of representation in international organizations—formal, operational, aspirational, and alternative. They are separate yet intertwined; they contend with yet depend on each other. Together they form the international system of representation. This is not simply descriptively true. The resort to, and the use of, the four modes is also optimal, under current conditions. All four are necessary, as for any successful system to evolve and maintain equilibrium there needs to be a variety of mechanisms available that allow for the balancing of competing values and the reconciliation of formal rules with the actualities of power and expectations of legitimacy, as the alignment will never be perfect. Importantly, the four modes allow a range of entry points for democratic legitimacy in the representative practices of international organizations, creating the possibility of change going forward and meeting that challenge. The international representational system of the four modes is thus second-best. Yet second best is better than any of the possible alternatives while the process of change slowly proceeds.

Within and through international institutions, public and private, international, transnational and national actors have reacted to recent crisis-phenomena in the field of international health, nuclear disarmament, and climate change by launching new political and legal initiatives. Broad coalitions of small and middle-sized states, including civil society organizations are currently pushing for major institutional reforms in and outside certain international institutions through complementary treaties reacting rather creatively to a perceived institutional stand-still often caused by great powers defending the legal and political status quo. The new treaty projects claim a specific legitimacy due to a stronger focus on those actors who are negatively affected by the existing regimes and their perceived deficiencies. The contribution describes these recent initiatives as a form of “corrective treaty making” promoted by coalitions of “the most affected” analyzing their legal and theoretical repercussions in the context of broader legitimation-narratives in the law of international institutions.

International organizations (IOs) are instances of international governance, i.e., places where international (normative) power is exercised. As such, they are subject to requirements for democratization, among which is the need for democratic representation. The meaning of democratic representation varies. When applied to IOs in the context of globalization, democratic representation is understood as the set of mechanisms and techniques that make individuals present in their functioning, particularly in the making of international norms, including soft norms. Among these mechanisms and techniques, parliamentarization is supposed to involve national parliaments to a greater extent, either as such, through their members, or through the institutions that brings them together: the international parliamentary institutions. Notwithstanding their diversity, these institutions appear to be the preferred vehicle for the parliamentarization of IOs because they institutionalize international parliamentary representation. Yet, the extent to which this parliamentarization effectively serves democratic representation in IOs is open to discussion. First, representation within international parliamentary institutions reveals that the parliamentary representative can be a false friend of IOs as democratic representatives. Moreover, representation by international parliamentary institutions or their members is often a false pretence of democratic representation within IOs, despite clear democratic virtues for their functioning.

What might entitle agents or agencies that are not sponsored by the state, only by some other social group or organization, to represent their people in an international forum. A state-centred approach would deny that they ever have a title to such a role, while an individual-centred approach would hold that they have as good a title as the state. Both approaches have problems and the paper presents a third, more satisfying alternative. On this approach, such bodies may claim to represent their people insofar as the state enjoys standby control over their proposals, being able to oppose them, should it wish to do so, with a radical veto or a moderate refusal to be bound. Ideally, however, the state with such standby control will be required to allow the proposals to be publicized domestically and to provide reasons for opposing them, if that is what it chooses to do. Under the arrangement proposed, state-independent representatives will be able to explore innovative ideas collaboratively with their counterparts from elsewhere, to identify imaginative solutions to common problems, and to have the opportunity to persuade their own states, under domestic pressure, to fall in line.

This chapter analyzes how the party-state sought to depoliticize the judiciary by diverting socially sensitive disputes away from courts. Focusing on the Litigation Source Management Campaign, it shows how the regime mobilized grassroots mediation systems, including neighborhood committees and administrative agencies, to intercept disputes at the prefiling stage. By encouraging citizens to resolve grievances outside the formal legal system, the campaign significantly reduced the volume of potentially destabilizing cases reaching the judiciary. This strategy prioritized dispute containment over adjudication, aligning with the Party’s broader aim to prevent legal forums from becoming flashpoints of contention. In tandem with the suppression of court-centered activism, these diversion efforts further dejudicialized politically risky matters, shielding the courts from the pressure to deliver politically sensitive rulings. The chapter concludes that these tactics helped sustain judicial autonomy in routine cases by structurally removing threats to stability, thus reinforcing the dual state’s separation between normative legality and prerogative oversight.

The political community of “We the People” represented all of those individuals in the American polity who could claim the protection of the federal government – including women, children, and propertyless White men – but who were not necessarily voters. The Founders believed that government could limit the electorate and still be republican in form because “We the People” retained their natural right to alter or abolish government even if they could not vote. In contrast, the community of “We the Voters” had suffrage rights, but their access to the ballot was closely policed by the state. At the Founding, the electorate consisted of a small subset of Americans who could meet varying requirements concerning property ownership, age, gender, race, and citizenship. As Chapter 3 shows, after the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment, an individual deemed part of the political community entitled to vote in both state and federal elections could not be unlawfully disenfranchised without violating the Guarantee Clause’s requirement of republican government.

This contribution questions the reality and possibility of the claim that the European Union (EU) is founded on “representative democracy”. In the absence of a European demos, three consecutive difficulties are analyzed: the question of the unity of the represented, the representation of citizens as EU citizens, and, finally, the quest for representativeness of the European society. The reflection’s conclusion points towards the complementarity and inseparability of the representative and participatory forms of democracy in a transnational context, with the participatory forms adding a transnational dimension to the European representative democracy.