Pitkin did not, however, inquire mo

Pitkin did not, however, inquire more broadly into the kind of political participa- tion that representation brings about in a democratic society. Nor were her initial for- mulations further debated or developed. In- stead, they stood as the last word on repre- sentation within democratic theory for three decades, until the appearance of Manin’s The Principles of Representative Government (1997). Manin combined an elitist-realist approach to democracy with a deliberative approach, arguing that representative government is a unique form of government owing to the con- stitution of deliberative politics through elec- tion. Manin’s work departed from the stan- dard model by focusing on the deliberative qualities of representative institutions. But in other respects, he replicated the standard divi- sion between democracy and representation. In the spirit of Montesquieu, Manin viewed elections as a means of judging the charac- ters of rulers. The value of democratic elec- tion is that the many are better than the few at recognizing competent individuals, though worse than the few at acting competently (Manin 1997, ch. 4). But electoral suffrage in itself, in Manin’s view, produced no change in the practice and institution of representation, which are substantially the same today as they were when few citizens had the right to vote. Representative government is inevitably an elected form of aristocracy because it discrim- inates among citizens and excludes some from the decision-making process. As de Malberg (1920, p. 208) put it, the very purpose of rep- resentative selection is to form an aristocratic regime. On this line of thinking, it follows that discourses that implicate representative insti- tutions as exclusionary are simply incoherent. Such institutions cannot be something other than they are, namely, aristocratic entities that are at best constituted and contained by demo- cratic elections. Thus, in this account, parlia- mentary sovereignty can be seen as an elec- toral transmutation of Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will of the people, which, para- doxically, transforms the people into a passive body, with periodic capacities for selection but not voice (De la Bigne de Villeneuve 1929– 1931, p. 32).