A Decay of the Elites’ Representativeness?

Recent literature on representative democracy has highlighted a dense debate on the determinants of a crisis affecting both public perceptions and the expectations of political actors themselves. The themes at the center of this debate are well known: the mutual distrust between representatives and the represented, the decline of partisanship and party identity, the weakening of participation practices, and the volatility of political attachment.
Much less attention has been paid to the issue of the capacity of the "formal" elites within the chain of democratic delegations – that is, the men and women who hold representative offices in permanent elective assemblies at various territorial levels – to continue representing the demands and characteristics of a changing society. Nearly fifty years after a fundamental work of comparative organization by Robert Putnam, and decades after the publication of other commendable cross-sectional analyses of the characteristics and orientations of political representatives in democratic countries, there is an urgent need to replicate these studies and adapt them to paradigms of descriptive representation and deeply changed models of representative action. The panel welcomes comparative papers of different types on the characteristics of representative elites, discussing these phenomena by evaluating the actual representative capacity of elected officials in contemporary democracies.