New Dialogs Taking Place: Political Representation, Participation and Democracy in Latin America

The debate on political representation has achieved significant importance in recent years, resulting in a profusion of research on democracy that focuses on electoral performance, political parties, and especially on the relationship between the representative and the represented. Furthermore, a considerable number of studies have analyzed the causes and consequences of this crisis of representation in terms of institutional quality characteristic of the modern democratic project as the act of making present a political subject that is not literally present. In this sense, it grants to representation the condition of being present in some way in absence of the represented. Presence of the representative is justified by the absence of the represented, insofar as absence of the represented is validated in the presence of the representative. Contemporary democratic theory has struggled to question the current democracies, particularly certain modes of political representation that resemble each other in their relation to low levels of trust and party preference, thereby expanding among citizens the feeling that they are not represented (MANIN). The current boundaries of political representation invigorate the debate about the type of mandate and control of the representatives by the represented. A wide range of papers have discussed the limits of representation, even under the aegis that representative democracy has become necessary and desirable. Therefore, this work aims to: a) describe and analyze the body of democratic theory studies on the subject, including those on Latin American democracies that seek to rethink political representation for the forms of political control by the represented; b) discuss the diversity of empirical research on political representation and the currently most relevant empirical designs; and c) situate the types of theoretical and analytical tools geared to conceiving participation as a resource internally placed in the institution of representation (a type of "presumption of agency" on the part of liberalism), as well as a type of control and political practice capable of generating quality for democracy and representation.