Democracy is the only form of government that allows people to rule themselves. Ironically, political representation enables modern democracies to exclude virtually everyone from the institutions that govern them. The concept of constituency defines how, in any particular nation, the excluded are legitimately reconstituted prior to, or simultaneously as, they select their representatives who will rule them. The electoral constituency, then, is the quintessential institution of official exclusion, for it defines how it is the excluded get reconstituted for their only formal roles as members of a modern democracy.

Democratic government in its direct or representative form has been around for thousands of years. Yet given the thousands of sovereign cities and states that have laid proper claim to its name, there has been a remarkably small set of institutions by which democracies have actually been governed. Thomas Pogge recently put it this way:

It is likely that our limited exposure to these “conventional forms of democracy” has dulled our imagination of what could be.