Debating representative democracy

Nadia Urbinati’s book Democracy Disfigured has two main goals. The first is to defend a ‘diarchic’ conception of democracy, based on the interplay between popular will and opinion. The second is to describe three possible disfigurations of this conception of democracy – the epistemic, the populist and the plebiscitarian – all of which alter the balance between will and opinion, undermining the ultimate goal of democracy, which is assumed to consist in laying the conditions for civil and political freedom. The two constitutive poles of Urbinati’s conception of democracy are therefore what she calls ‘will’ and ‘opinion’ (Urbinati, 2014, p. 17). The first is assumed to correspond to the formal rules and procedures through which collectively binding decisions are taken in a free and fair way; that is essentially, voting and majority rule as ways of structuring political representation. Opinion, on the other hand, is assumed to correspond to the multiple processes through which citizens influence collective decisions in an informal and indirect way, beyond the selection of their representatives; that is essentially, participation in the public sphere, political demonstration and other forms of direct action. As Urbinati stresses, opinion is therefore a ‘power that is meant to give voice to citizens’ claims, monitor institutions and devise alternative political agendas’ (Urbinati, 2014, pp. 7–8). The notion of ‘diarchy’ is meant to capture the relation between will and opinion in the context of a system in which the two ‘are different and should remain distinct, although in need of constant communication’ (Urbinati, 2014, p. 2). Thus, as Urbinati puts it, ‘representative democracy is a diarchic system in which will and opinion influence each other and cooperate without merging’ (p. 2). Underlying this model is the idea that democracy promises liberty and uses legal and political equality in order to fulfill this promise. Thus, Urbinati thinks of democracy and political liberalism as inherently related to each other. Echoing the Italian political theorist, Norberto Bobbio, she claims that there is hardly political autonomy without civil and political freedom as its presupposition (Bobbio, 2006). To put it differently,