The future-oriented franchise: Instituting temporal electoral circles

European Journal of Political Theory (forthcoming)
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Abstract

In representative democracies, the absence of responsiveness by elected officials to the interests of the represented often generates problems of legitimacy, accountability and effectiveness. However, responsiveness also tends to narrow the time horizons of democratic decision-making and promote short-termism. This paper advances the notion that responsiveness to interests involving distant time horizons is possible by reconfiguring the franchise in a time-sensitive and future-oriented way. It is divided into two parts. The first pinpoints a few inconsistencies in the available proposals for making responsiveness and the long term compatible (e.g., promoting youth turnout, narrowing the franchise to robust epistemic fitness, establishing future-oriented institutions). The second advances the creation of temporal electoral circles operating alongside territorial electoral circles in order to prompt responsiveness to multitemporal interests. The conclusion asserts that this kind of franchise design is the best available option for introducing temporal aspects into the character of democratic representation.

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Andre Santos Campos
Universidade Nova de Lisboa

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References found in this work

The Concept of Representation.Hanna Fenichel Pitkin - 1967 - University of California Press.
Epistemic democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet jury theorem.Christian List & Robert E. Goodin - 2001 - Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (3):277–306.
Plural Voting for the Twenty-First Century.Thomas Mulligan - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (271):286-306.

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