Why “Representative Democracy” Does Not Work — and Why All the Official Explanations Are Wrong
Abstract
Contemporary political systems that call themselves “representative democracies” are widely experienced as failing: citizens feel disempowered, political outcomes do not reflect collective will, and institutional legitimacy erodes. In response, a broad literature offers explanations for what has gone wrong. These explanations differ in ideology and emphasis, but they share a fundamental assumption: that the existing system is a form of democracy whose failures are contingent, accidental, or externally caused.
This article argues that this assumption is false. The system does not fail because it is distorted, corrupted, captured, or obsolete. It fails because it is structurally designed to exclude citizens from sovereignty, while preserving the appearance of popular rule through representation. Representation is not the problem. The problem is that representation is not embedded within a constitutional architecture that preserves continuous citizen authority over the system itself.
The persistence and stability of the system in the face of massive criticism is evidence that the official explanations do not target its core. They function as a containment field for dissatisfaction. The true cause — the deliberate constitutional exclusion of citizen self-institution — remains absent from mainstream discourse because it would delegitimate the system itself.
1. Introduction: The Market of Explanations
Public dissatisfaction with contemporary political systems is no longer episodic but structural. Voter turnout declines, trust in institutions collapses, political alienation becomes permanent, and citizens increasingly perceive that they do not control the conditions of their own lives.
The system responds not by repressing critique, but by organizing it.
A wide menu of explanations is offered:
- Democracy is in decline because society has changed.
- Democracy fails because voters are ignorant or irrational.
- Democracy is broken because elections produce elites.
- Democracy is hollowed out by capitalism.
- Democracy is distorted by media and technology.
- Democracy cannot function in complex societies.
These explanations appear critical, pluralistic, and open. But they all share a defining feature: none of them questions the legitimacy of the system’s constitutional architecture itself.
They all assume that the system is a democracy that is somehow malfunctioning.
This article rejects that premise.
The problem is not that democracy is failing. The problem is that democracy is structurally prevented.
2. Why Stability Refutes the Official Explanations
The political system remains remarkably stable.
- Constitutions persist.
- Electoral cycles repeat.
- Institutions reproduce themselves.
- Citizens obey.
- Legitimacy rituals continue.
This stability is not compatible with the claim that the system is in deep structural crisis. If any of the dominant explanations were fundamentally correct, they would destabilize the system at its foundation. They would force constitutional transformation, collapse, or delegitimation.
But this does not happen.
Instead, critique is absorbed, circulated, debated, and institutionalized — and nothing essential changes.
This is not accidental. It is diagnostic.
The system tolerates precisely those critiques that do not threaten its generative principle: the exclusion of citizens from sovereignty combined with the symbolic inclusion of citizens as a source of legitimacy.
The system does not suppress critique. It selects it.
3. “Democracy Is Aging”
Claim
Representative democracy worked in the past but is now obsolete.
Why it is wrong
This explanation assumes that representative democracy was ever democracy. It treats legitimacy as historically contingent rather than conceptually grounded.
If democracy means that those who are subject to the law are also its authors, then a system in which citizens never possess lawmaking authority is not a degraded democracy — it is a different regime.
Calling it “aging” disguises a structural exclusion as a historical decline.
Why it is tolerated
Because it frames the system as noble but tragic, not illegitimate.
4. “Voters Are the Problem”
Claim
Citizens are ignorant, irrational, biased, or emotional.
Why it is wrong
Citizens are politically incompetent because they are politically disempowered. A system that reduces political agency to occasional symbolic acts produces apathy and ignorance by design.
The system creates passive citizens and then blames them for being passive.
Why it is tolerated
Because it shifts responsibility downward and protects institutions.
5. “Elections Are the Problem”
Claim
Elections produce elites and oligarchy. Replace them with lotteries.
Why it is wrong
Sortition changes who is selected, not the structure in which selection occurs. It still substitutes a few for the many without subjecting them to continuous citizen control.
It preserves the architecture of exclusion.
Why it is tolerated
Because it appears radical while leaving sovereignty untouched.
6. “Elites Hijack Democracy”
Claim
Power is captured by elites who corrupt democracy.
Why it is wrong
Elites are not an external parasite. They are structurally produced by systems that concentrate decision power.
Where citizens do not govern, someone else must.
Why it is tolerated
Because it personalizes a structural problem and offers villains instead of diagnoses.
7. “Capitalism Corrupts Democracy”
Claim
Markets hollow out democracy.
Why it is wrong
Markets colonize political voids; they do not create them. Capital moves into spaces where citizens are absent.
Why it is tolerated
Because it allows moral outrage without institutional critique.
8. “Media and Technology Destroy Democracy”
Claim
Algorithms and misinformation distort public discourse.
Why it is wrong
Information distorts democracy only because democracy has been reduced to opinion instead of collective decision.
Why it is tolerated
Because it blames instruments instead of structures.
9. “Society Is Too Complex for Democracy”
Claim
Modern societies are too complex for mass self-rule.
Why it is wrong
Complexity is organized. It is produced by institutional design. It is not a natural fact but a political construction.
Why it is tolerated
Because it naturalizes exclusion as necessity.
10. The Structural Diagnosis: Designed Disempowerment
The core problem is not corruption, capture, or decay.
The core problem is that citizens are constitutionally excluded from sovereignty.
- They cannot write or rewrite the constitution.
- They cannot write or rewrite electoral law.
- They cannot restructure institutions.
- They cannot override institutional power.
- They cannot reclaim authority from the system.
There is no standing civic body with constituent power.
There is no permanent institutional space where citizens exist as sovereigns.
Citizens authorize power but never possess it.
They may choose rulers. They may not choose the structure of rule. They may vote. They may not self-legislate.
This is not a failure. It is the design.
The system is engineered to simulate popular sovereignty while structurally preventing it.
That is why it is stable.
That is why reform fails.
That is why dissatisfaction persists.
11. Conclusion
The menu of explanations exists not to solve the crisis but to contain it.
The crisis persists because its cause is excluded from discourse: that the system is designed to prevent citizen self-rule.
The system survives not despite dissatisfaction, but through it — by channeling it into harmless forms.
That is why representative democracy does not work.
Not because it is distorted. Not because it is corrupted. Not because it is obsolete.
But because it was never meant to.