Although Williams’ argument was focused
on representing historically disadvantaged
groups, she built on the emerging
discourse of group representation to cast political
representation as fundamentally about
inclusion and exclusion—that is, about the
basic problems of democratic theory and
practice (cf. Phillips 1995, ch. 7). At the
same time, the strain of thinking originated
by Manin—that focusing on the relationship
between representation and political
judgment—increasingly intersected with
deliberative democracy, drawing the “aristocratic”
approach to representation closer to
democratic problems of discursive inclusion
(Plotke 1997, Young 2000, Ankersmit 2002,
Urbinati 2005, cf. Williams 2000). Together,
these lineages are now producing a new wave
of democratic theory.