Representation (politics)
Categories: Politics stubs | Political terms
| The Politics Series |
|---|
| Democracy |
| Elections |
| Political parties |
| Edit |
In politics, representation describes how residents of a country are empowered in the government. Representation usually refers to representative democracies, where elected representatives speak for their constituents in the legislature. Generally, only citizens are granted representation in the government in the form of voting rights, however some democracies have extended this right further.
Contents |
Descriptive representation
Descriptive representation, sometimes called passive representation or symbolic representation, is the idea that candidates in democratic elections should be elected to represent ethnic and gender constituencies, as well as other minority interest groups, rather than the population at large. According to this idea, an elected body should resemble a representative sample of the voters they are meant to represent concerning outward characteristics - a constituency of 50% women and 20% blacks, for example, should have 50% female and 20% black legislators.
Generally, voting systems that obtain proportional representation also tend to achieve descriptive representation as well, however this can only be guaranteed to the extent that voting patterns in a system of proportional representation also reflect descriptive characteristics of the voters. If a particular trait is not a concern for voters or prospective candidates (for instance, eye color), then an elected body will resemble a random sampling of the voters instead.
Some [Ulbig 2005] argue that cynicism and distrust towards government of disadvantaged minorities is partly due to not having representatives with similar characteristics. Supporters of this argument point out that as descriptive representation increases, distrust decreases. This can be the basis of laws imposing that half the candidates on a given list be women (for example in France since 2001) or of voluntary symbolic measures (Spain's current government has 8 women and 8 men). Opponents of such as logic point out that after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, polls indicated that only 2% of African-Americans supported the Bush administration despite the high-profile nominations of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
Apportionment
Apportionment, or reapportionment, is the process of distributing seats for a legislative body among different sectors of the country by creating constituencies. Typically, this is done proportionally to the population in the individual sectors to prevent unequal representation among different constituencies. The United States, for instance, delimits the House of Representatives seats proportionally between states, who then create districts for House members to run in.
Apportionment is also applied in party-list proportional representation elections to distribute seats between different parties once they've won a particular percentage of the vote, much like how different U.S. states obtain different shares of the population from the census.
Because there is almost certain to be some degree of rounding error, different mathematical schemes for calculating apportionment can produce different results in terms of seats for the relevant party or sector. These methods include the Jefferson method, the Webster method, the Huntington-Hill method, and the Hamilton method.
See also: United States Congressional apportionment, Apportionment in the European Parliament.
Malapportionment
Malapportionment, or unequal representation, is broad and systematic variance in the size of electoral constituencies resulting in disproportionate representation for a given voter. Malapportionment is only possible within electoral systems that have districted constituencies - an electoral system with only one national constituency, such as those in Israel and the Netherlands, cannot be malapportioned.
It is a tendency for the size of constituencies to vary according to some factor such as geographic location. Well-known examples include the differences between urban and rural constituency sizes in many Australian states (currently Western Australia, though Queensland and South Australia in the past afforded far more notorious examples), and the recently abolished smaller United Kingdom parliamentary constituencies in Scotland. The UK retains a substantial malapportionment in favour of urban voters, which currently benefits the British Labour Party. The effects of malapportionment vary with time: deliberate over-representation of rural Queensland changed from favouring Labor to favouring the National Party.
In contrast to the United States House of Representatives, which is only malapportioned slightly due to rounding error, the United States Senate is deliberately malapportioned, granting two senators to every state regardless of population size. This results in two senators representing over 33 million Californians and two senators representing less than half a million citizens of Wyoming, leading to an individual voter in Wyoming having nearly 66 times the voting power of a Californian. However, it must be remembered that at the time the United States Constitution was written, the Senate was intended to represent the interests of the states themselves rather than the residents of those states, and thus apportionment was divided equally among the states rather than among the population at large.
The United States Senate has become steadily more malapportioned since its creation. In 1787, it would have taken a theoretical 30 percent of the nation to elect half of the Senate. Today, in 2005, it would take only 17 percent of the nation to elect half the Senate. Extremes of representation have also increased. Virginia's population in 1787 was only twelve times Delaware's. Today, California's population is over 66 times greater than Wyoming's. (see History of the United States Senate and Connecticut Compromise)
Senate malapportionment leads to great distortions in federal spending. As an example, in the 2005 federal highway bill, California and Texas, the two largest states, only received $77 and $36 per person, respectively. Wyoming and Vermont, the two smallest states, received $269 and $544, respectively. Alaska, the third smallest state, received $1,501 per person.
Another example is the systematic over-representation of voters in more rural prefectures and under-representation of voters in more urban prefectures in elections to the Japanese parliament. The conservative Liberal Democratic Party thus wins more seats in the Japanese parliament because its voters are concentrated in more rural prefectures.
See also: rotten boroughs
References
- Ulbig, Stacy G. (2005) "Political Realities and Political Trust: Descriptive Representation in Municipal Government". Southwestern Political Science Association Meeting. Retrieved from [1] on July 19, 2005.
- Breakdown of Federal Highway Spending, State by State