From representation to participation: a change among representative democracy authors

Abstract

Within the democratic theory debate, this article aims to show the ideas of Pitkin (1967, 2006), Manin (1995, 1997) and Dahl (2005, 2012) about the concept of representation, the principles of representative government and the representative institutions. These authors have studied the representation throughout their academic lives, but in their late works, they have shown concern on participation, usually taken as the opposite of representation. Thus, we present their contributions on participatory democracy (PITKIN, SHUMER, 1982), non-institutionalized participations ways (MANIN, 2013) and political inequality (DAHL, 2006). We observe that there has been a displacement from the representation to participation in their works, as there also has been a change from participation to representation in those authors who have studied democracy from participatory and delibertive democracies (ROMÃO, 2011; GURZA LAVALLE; ISUNZA VERA, 2011)