Nowe interpretacje zasady reprezentacji politycznej
New Interpretations of the Principle of Political Representation

Summary/Abstract: This article examines new approaches to the constitutional principle of political representation, otherwise called indirect democracy or responsible government. However, as it turns out, this principle, which nowadays is the basis for all democracies, is subject to constant reinterpretation, mostly in rapidly developing political sciences. The traditional, which is typical to constitutional law, approach to representation as vesting (by the act of election) in the representatives (Members of Parliament) the right to act in the name and on behalf of voters, is today deemed undoubtedly insufficient. Consequently, new explanations and justifi cations for political representation are sought. Therefore, some recognize that representation is merely a simulation of that what those represented could do if they were capable of taking particular action, while others are likely to treat representation as substitution, i.e. traditional taking action for someone else. Representation is also seen as parallelization, that is reproducing by the representative of the traits of the represented person. Yet another different approach to representation considers it as a correlation, or striving to substantial consensus of appraisals of the representative and the represented person irrespective of the degree of similarity of their structural features, or in the category of a conversion, i.e. a transition of “an input” (of appraisals represented) to “an output”, i.e. the decision of a representative body. Representation is sometimes perceived from the perspective of interaction, deliberation, the right to veto or a complex control mechanism. All these approaches are common to the three major theories of representative democracy, which is either a replication (repetition of appraisals of the represented person), or an aggregation, i.e. an arithmetic sum of partial interests, or a deliberation, which means a search — irrespective of differences and dissimilarities — for the essence of representation as establishing the common good. The development of the above-mentioned new concepts and research approaches is enhanced by a phenomenon known as the crisis of representation, or failure of electoral mechanisms, which to date were the essence of representative democracy.

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