Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy

Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy. By Nadia Urbinati. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 326p. $45.00.

Nadia Urbinati begins her new book, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy, with the observation that while we call certain contemporary western governments “democratic,” any historical glance at their political institutions will as readily show that they were “designed to contain rather than encourage democracy” (p. 1). She takes as one “main point of reference” (p. 9) for her argument, Bernard Manin's claim in The Principles of Representative Government (1997) that the practice of contemporary democracy is still constrained by the fact that “there has been no significant change in the institutions regulating the selection of representatives and the influence of the popular will on their decisions in office” (p. 229, n. 2). For many, this view of unchanged institutions simply reflects either the more defensive observation that modern governments continue to need Schumpeterian neutralizing restrictions on participation or, conversely, the critical claim that modern democracy continues to fall short of an ideal (or perhaps idealized) Athenian standard of direct self-rule. On both of these views, Urbinati notes, representative democracy is seen as an oxymoron (p. 4). However, she quite forcefully disagrees, and what is more, she believes both the times and contemporary democratic theorizing are on her side.