Page 275 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes 1. Here is emphasis on the importance of individual rights, especially the inviolability of
individual’s property and the necessity of limiting the powers of government to protect these
rights. Liberal-democracy implies not only an extension of the franchise but an equality of
voting rights. The representative represents individuals, their opinions and their interests, and
therefore he is elected according to geographically demarcated constituencies and not according
to classes, occupational distinctions or distinct social interests.
2. Man is a rational being and he can identify his own opinions; he is also aware of the wider
claims of the community. He will, therefore, use his vote in an intelligent manner and is
consequently entitled to share in the selection of the representatives.
3. There should be universal adult franchise, secret ballot and fair and free periodic elections.
Constituencies should be earmarked for the recruitment of the representatives acting according
to the will of their electors; the business of the elected assembly is to protect the interests of its
constituents against any encroachment made by the executive or by the majority acting in the
name of ‘general good’.

The authority of the representative is not only created by the constituent power, but
it is subject to change by the amending power under the constitution.”

Opposed to this is the theory of representation as given by the socialists or collectivists whose salient
features may be thus pointed out:
1. Emphasis should be laid not on the individual but on the class. The assemblies should represent
not the individuals and their opinions but the majority class whose interests have been
subordinated by middle-class parliaments.
2. Democracy means the presence of social equality and absence of economic exploitation.
Representation should, thus, be governed by this important consideration.
3. There may be different parties and groups to represent social interests in the pre-socialist period;
there must be only one party when the era of socialism is ushered in. The existence of the
Communist party alone is justified on the ground of the absence of class conflicts.
As claimed by the writers in the socialist countries, their representative system differs from a bourgeois
system in matters of principle. They deprecate the bourgeois representative system as a process of
growing emasculation and limitation and instead admire their own system as being dependent upon
the line of popular self-government and self-administration the model of which can be seen in the
Soviets of the former USSR and the communes of China. Socialist countries have also adopted a
number of direct democratic devices and institutions such as method of recall, rural and town meetings,
system of imperative mandate, role of social activists, popular initiative of legislation and the like so
as to demonstrate that it ‘’should be a distortion of the institution of socialist representation if all
these existing traits were ignored in a study of the organs of state power, the representative institutions.
It is thus maintained that socialist representation is a form of indirect democracy which is increasingly
completed with a series of direct democratic institutions, and which is absorbing these institutions or
part of them.”
Two important points strike us here from what we have discussed above. First, it is not easy to define
the term ‘representation’ in a precise manner. Differences exist as to whether needs and common
values of the whole community or with particular needs of the individuals or special interests of the
social class in conflict wiht each other. Acute differences in view also exist on the point as to which
individuals, groups or parties are to be considered as genuine representatives and what kind of
people ought to be chosen to act for others. Second, the political representatives should in no sense
be treated as ‘duplicate of the average citizens.

270 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY