Response #2

Representative Government: It's not just vote counting

In the final minutes of class today, Professor King remarked on the differing views of Edmund Burke and Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau regarding the nature of representational government. Is it enough, as Burke presented, to elect officials to act as proxies for the views of the nation while using their best judgment and expertise to make decisions in the best interest of their constituency? Or as Mirabeau believed, do elected officials need to mirror their constituency, resembling the body of which they are representative?

This week's study of electoral systems examines how representatives are elected. As Pippa Norris notes, majoritarian systems produce "elected dictatorship[s]." Giving the representatives elected by a majority or pluralistic vote leeway to do whatever they want until the next election cycle when roughly half of the population will choose who next will govern makes it easy for politicians to cater and serve only those constituents who put them in office. Other electoral systems such asSTV and Preferential allow significant minority factions to gain representation in a manner roughly proportionate to their incidence in the population.

It is interesting to see how preferences are reflected in these alternative electoral systems which practice vote transferal or give people the option to record a second choice; rather than the most fervently popular, a candidate with whom most people are happy is elected under these terms. Different countries or regions may go out of their way to give special interests groups representations. In Lebanon, the presidency is reserved for a Maronite Christian, while the Prime Minister is required to be a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of Parliament aShi'a Muslim. Donald Horowitz (ref in Reilly157) feels that this "defuse[s] the importance of ethnicity" and religion and makes voters think about broader issues.

I think this leads to artificiality in representative government. It may be prudent to see that representatives are actually representative of the views of the constituency as per Mirabeau, but people don't necessarily want to exclude certain qualified candidates from public office simply to meet a quota (ie, male/woman ratio). There should be enough flexibility to reflect true preferences.