In Varietate Concordia: The representation of the people in liberal democracies

While politics consists largely of discord and strife, the very idea that certain issues are political in nature – that is, that they belong to the public political sphere – is an important shared understanding that helps to promote social cohesion. The public sphere creates an imagined community, which ties political obligation to the idea that citizens are part of something bigger than themselves. This can draw much of the sting from social conflicts, since politics comes to be understood in terms of disagreement over a common good.

As part of the social imaginary, this vision of politics is propagated through symbolic representation. The central legitimating myth in modern politics is that of popular sovereignty: the idea that all claims to political authority implicitly invoke the name of ‘the people’. This logic is at the heart of the modern liberal understanding of politics, but it brings with a threat – there is always the risk that the regime will come to be seen not merely as the representative, but as the embodiment of the people, thus destroying the space for legitimate political disagreement.
The legislative assembly plays a key role in maintaining a liberal understanding of the people, by serving as a powerful ‘condensation symbol’ that holds together both ideas of unity and ideas of diversity. Owing to a historical sedimentation of various layers of meaning, the assembly is able to represent both the regime governing in the name of the people and the people as something distinct from the regime. As a large, diverse, deliberative body, it brings together the legitimating power of popular sovereignty with liberal ideas of pluralism and contestability.

For various reasons, recent decades have seen a ‘decentralisation’ of politics, with a diminution in the salience of the legislative assembly. Some have welcomed this as a move towards greater pluralism and an increase in the channels for participation and accountability. There is, however, a risk that these developments dilute the symbolic potency of the assembly, and thus cause the liberal understanding of popular sovereignty to lose ground, either to a neoliberal imaginary grounded solely in individual interests, or to a populist imaginary that would invoke the people but without accepting its innate contestability.