Representative Democracy

Really good books ask important questions and offer creative, plausible answers. By this measure, Dimitri Landa and Ryan Pevnick have written a really good book. Representative democracy is under attack as a scheme of political domination by corrupt and incompetent elites. What could justify it? The answer-a full-throated defense-is that representative democracy better serves some fundamental political values than direct democracies, lottocracies, and non-electoral meritocracies. Their case for this conclusion is carefully argued, clearly written, and deeply considered-the best treatment I have read of this essential question.

Auteur
Dimitri Landa is a Professor of Politics at New York University. He has written on a broad range of topics in political economy, democratic theory, philosophy, and law. Ryan Pevnick is an Associate Professor of Politics at New York University. He is the author of Immigration and the Constraints of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2011), as well as articles on a broad range of topics in political theory.

Résumé
Despite the not-so-distant invocations of the end of history, representative democracy is, today, under siege even from corners where one once might have expected strong sympathy and support. Indeed, confidence in representative democracy has, in recent years, been shaken by the economic and political performance of many such regimes. Representative Democracy explains why the definitive institutional features of representative democracy - the electoral selection of policymaking officials who are independent in the interim between elections - are attractive relative to salient alternatives (including direct democracy, lottery-based systems, and meritocratic alternatives) and, relatedly, why it is a distinctively attractive institutional arrangement, rather than - as it is often perceived to be - a pale stand-in for more robust and genuine forms of democratic government. Building on novel arguments that connect the distinctive institutional features of representative democracy to important epistemic and stability-based benefits, the book provides a normative account of a well-functioning system of representative democracy against which proposed reforms can be evaluated.