Dimitri Landa and Ryan Pevnick, Representative Democracy: A Justification. Oxford University Press, 2025
Representative Democracy explains why the definitive institutional features of representative democracy – the electoral selection of policymaking officials who are independent in the interim between elections – make it attractive relative to salient alternatives (including direct democracy, lottery-based systems, and meritocratic alternatives). It also shows why it is a distinctively attractive institutional arrangement, rather than – as it is often perceived to be – a pale stand-in for more robust and genuine forms of democratic government. Building on novel arguments that connect the distinctive institutional features of representative democracy to important epistemic and stability-based benefits, the book provides a normative account of a well-functioning system of representative democracy against which proposed reforms can be evaluated.
Here are working papers that formally develop some of the arguments we reference in the book:
Kun Heo and Dimitri Landa, “A Theory of Policy Justification”
Marlene Guraieb and Dimitri Landa, “Institutional Trust and Political Authority”