Fifty years of representative and responsible government: contemporary relevance, theoretical revisions and conceptual reflection

Over half a century has passed since the publication of A. H. Birch’s Representative and Responsible Government (1964), yet it still continues as a seminal source for leading contemporary political scientists (see for example Rhodes 2011:280-1). Along the way it has been identified as one of the classic analyses of UK constitutional politics (Flinders 2010:73) and more broadly as one of the ‘best analytical surveys of representation’ (Wahlke 1971) as well as offering exceptional insights into notions of responsibility (Mair 2009:11). Birch’s (1964:21) initial linkage of representation and responsibility - ‘a representative system enables a government to be responsible’ in a number of different ways - has come under sustained and critical reflection by subsequent scholars of both government and governance. This critical political analysis complements Birch’s own recognition of the complexities and ambiguities in his conceptualisation of both representation and responsibility (plus the practical vagaries, tensions and contradictions inherent in their systemic interconnectedness as ‘representative and responsible government’). In the intervening five decades these complexities and ambiguities have multiplied and this is reflected through increased conceptual sophistication, in a ‘rethinking’ of notions of representation and responsibility, and through increased complexity and indeterminacy of government itself, to the extent that the term ‘governance’, with all of its associated adjectives – decentred, multi-level, global, meta – is now seen as a more accurate descriptor of governing practice. In turn, these ideational and empirical challenges have resulted in claims that representative and responsible government has now been displaced by representative versus responsible government (Mair 2009, 2011); or, more dramatically still, that there has been an ‘end to representative politics’ (Tormey 2015) and, simultaneously, the displacement of ‘standard model’ linear forms of responsibility in more complex models reflecting the expansion of lateral or horizontal modes of accountability, captured most vividly in Keane’s (2009, 2011) notion of ‘monitory democracy’. From this perspective electoral processes and institutions in themselves provide for neither representative nor responsible government.