Abstract
This chapter examines selected aspects of the historical, conceptual, and political relationship between representation and democracy. The chapter first sketches six distinct approaches to understanding how these concepts relate to each other: 1) the ancient and early modern view of representation and democracy as entirely separate concepts; 2) the view of eighteenth-century liberal elites that representation and democracy are inherently opposed; 3) the populist or “folk theory” of democracy, widespread since the late-nineteenth century, that says democracy is representative to the extent that government decisions correspond to public will and opinion; 4) the closely related mid-twentieth-century view, implicitly shared by theorists of participatory and elite democracy, that representative democracy is an oxymoron; 5) the recent view among some political theorists that democracy is inherently representative and, hence, that representative democracy is a tautology; and 6) the constructivist idea that democratic constituencies are partly created by claims to represent them. The discussion then turns to two key challenges associated with efforts to democratize political representation: the representation of groups under conditions of structural inequality, and questions of democratic legitimacy.