![handle is hein.journals/pspvepc15 and id is 1 raw text is:
How to cite this paper:
Loia, L. (2022). Assessing Representative Democracy:
the Need of New Mechanisms of Political Representa-
tion. Perspective Politice. XV (1-2), pp. 5-19.
DOI: 10.25019/perspol/22.15.1.
Received: April 2022.
Accepted: June 2022.
Published: December 2022.
Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Submitted for possible
open access publication under the terms and conditions
of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
Article
Assessing Representative Democracy: the Need
of New Mechanisms of Political Representation
Abstract: Western neo-liberal Democracies are often and shortly characterized by having a representa-
tive procedure of participation in the public sphere of life, determining a self-ruled form of political
regime, affirming the sovereignty of the people in a specific territory; an economic welfare system; po-
litical institutions that administrate and organize public life based on their citizen's confidence; public
security and order Yet, the lack of political representation of local communities, or at least their sense
of ineffectiveness of the representative system to respond to their needs, promotes their alienation from
national political systems and weakens it. It is a vicious circle, i.e., the political system does not ade-
quately represent the political communities, and these, if not represented, weakens the political system
and its ability to respond to the needs of local communities. Our intent is to show that breaking this vi-
cious circle means strengthening democracy with new mechanisms of political representation.
Keywords: constituency; democracy; identity; political representation
1. Introduction
Luis LOlA
Centre for Philosophical
Universidade Catolica P
Assistant Professor, Lis
ORCID: 0000-0003-432
Iuisloia@ ucp.pt
An instrumental approach to the definition of Democracy, characteris-
tic of liberal societies, as it was put forward by Joseph A. Schumpeter
([1942]; 2003: 269), means that: the role of the people is to produce
a government, or else an intermediate body which in turn will produce
a national executive or government. And we
define: the democratic method is that institu-
tional arrangement for arriving at political de-
and Humanistic Studies, cisions in which individuals acquire the power
ortuguesa, to decide by means of a competitive struggle
bon, Portugal; for the people's vote.
8-7251; So, Indirect Democracy or Representative
Democracy is an effective and recognizably
just mechanism whereby political institutions
regulate, administrate, and attempt to resolve the conflicts that natural-
ly emerge in everyday life in social communities. They do, through the
electoral system, sustain that exceptional and in many ways incompre-
hensible virtue of the prevalence of the will of the majority that, most
of the times, ignores the profound legitimate, democratic, and morally
sustained claims of the minorities that also take an important role in the
health of a democratic regime. Commonly, we understand the justice](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/pspvepc15&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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