Democratic respresentation and political participation. A philosophical inquiry into the meaning and scope of political agency with representative democracy.

The proposed project focuses on the idea of representation with the goal of showing that politics, and therefore democracy, is possible only ina representative way. This raises the question of the meaning and impact of political participation: What can political participation be, insofar as it is necessarily inscribed in a representative logic? And, further: How can we couple together political participation and democratic representation? More specifically: What are the preconditions of political participation in the context of democratic representation?
Besides endorsing the inevitability and even desirability of representation for democratic participation, I argue that the latter has a peculiar character, insofar as it does not consist in any natural feature or in the independent capability of human beings to judge their representatives. Rather, every form of political participation thus, ultimately, politicalagency is always already inscribed in a broader web of power relations and influences.
The main objective of this project is to present the relations between representation and participation, and to offer a view on the possibilities of political agency, taking into consideration two main elements that necessarily condition and influence the latter in ademocratic context, namely: [i] the unavoidability of representation and [ii] the presence of ideological, (proto)hegemonic relationsof power.

Keywords:Hegemony, Ideology, Politics, Power, Agency, Participation, Democracy, Representation

Disciplines:Ethics, Other philosophy, ethics and religious studies not elsewhere classified, Theory and methodology of philosophy, Philosophy

Project type:PhD project