The obvious risk is that this distance becomes a gulf and that public officials govern for a few, rather than ‘for the people’ - that an oligarchy operates rather than a democracy. The aspiration of representative democracy is that this distance is bridged by strong mechanisms of accountability and responsiveness, as well as an ethos based on the public interest, all of which seek to ensure that government officials rule ‘for the people’. Yet as representative, not direct, democracy, there is structured distance between ‘the people’ and those who exercise governmental power. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims, ‘(t)he will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government’. The central justification for representative government is popular sovereignty. There is a deep paradox at the heart of representative democracy: it is a form of rule by the people that distances itself from the people.
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