Democracy and Representation: The Meaning of Eric Voegelin's Theory of Representation

The current crisis of liberal democracy has become the focus of constitutional, historical, philosophical, theological, and political analysis. Populism and the growing antipathy toward political elites and their dominance in popular representations are increasingly calling into question the nature of representation and the relationship between representation and democracy. The threat posed to representative democracies by authoritarian political leaders was described by the famous political scientist Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) after the overcoming of fascism in Europe with the words: "If a government is nothing but representative in the constitutional sense, a representative ruler in the existential sense will sooner or later make an end of it; and quite possibly the new existential ruler will not be too representative in the constitutional sense".