Chapter 3 - Late Returns

Summary

In the last chapter I looked at several more or less reasonable – as well as several more or less outlandish – attempts to make representative democracy work. From the “suppositional” designs of ballot boxes to the intricacies of Hare’s machinery to the representational aspirations of the realist novel, the things I considered were variously committed to the idea that, given the right system, one could accurately represent the will of a single individual and then somehow aggregate the accurate representations of many individuals into yet another, accurate second-order representation of the will-of-all. As the figures I looked at understood, this isn’t easy – first, because any effort to represent the will of an individual relies on a complicated and maybe impossible set of assumptions about what an individual is and, second, because, even if one could settle on a way to represent an individual, arriving at a meaningful second-order representation of the aggregation of other representations is itself wickedly difficult. Before one could settle on an electoral design for parliamentary and other elections, one had to decide whether political representation was supposed to represent what individuals thought, what different types of individuals thought, what the state thought, what a party thought, what a strategic coalition of parties thought, what different places thought, what simple majorities thought, or what the people as le Peuple thought. These were and still are hard problems. Despite that, the figures I looked at believed in parliamentary democracy; they believed in its power, its potential, and its seemingly limitless capacity for expansion and reform.