Representative Democracy – The Binding Chaos Lexicon

Representative democracy has become a cripplingly paradoxical system which celebrates nouns over verbs and is far more concerned with representation of every conceivable group than the governing actions being taken.

Expanded explanation

Two impossible premises hold the system up, and Marsh's argument is that both are false rather than merely awkward. Representative democracy requires universal acceptance that groups may act as individuals and that individuals may act as groups. Neither is sound. A group is a collection of individuals united for a time by a specific idea, experience or common bond, and while individuals can associate, exchange ideas, agree, cooperate and collaborate, the group they form does not become an individual and cannot logically be granted a voice, a vote or political and legal power. It only seems essential in a system governed by groups that does not respect individual rights. Conversely there is never a need for an individual to act as a group. What follows from the two premises is the system she describes. Individual rights are negotiable, bigotry is integral and action is carried out with no public debate, because the system is designed to care about which noun a person identifies with and how strong the lobby group attached to that noun is. Celebrating nouns over verbs is the compressed version of the same point, since what is represented is identity rather than action. The mechanical failures follow. Representatives are elected by land mass and time span rather than by system and chosen for charisma rather than expertise, and the experts they appoint owe their positions to cronyism with a politician rather than to recognition by the population affected.

In Heather Marsh’s words

Marsh identifies two premises the system requires and holds that both are logically unsound rather than merely inconvenient.

“the group they form does not become an individual”
Binding Chaos

Examples

Two impossible premises: Groups acting as individuals and individuals acting as groups are both required and neither is sound.
Nouns over verbs: What gets represented is which category a person belongs to rather than what is being done.
Expertise by cronyism: Advisers owe their standing to a politician rather than to the population affected, which breaks the link between knowledge and decision.

How others use it

Democratic theory has a large internal literature on representation, with Hanna Pitkin's analysis distinguishing descriptive, substantive and symbolic forms and much subsequent work asking whether representatives should mirror constituents or act for them. Group representation is defended by Iris Marion Young and Will Kymlicka as a remedy for exclusion, which is the position Marsh's argument denies at the root. Public choice theory questions whether aggregated preferences are coherent at all, following Arrow. Marsh's objection is logical rather than empirical, since she holds the premises unsound rather than the outcomes disappointing, which leaves no reformed version of the system available.