Comparative Politics Commons^™

Rethinking “Representative” Democracy, Tawreak Gamble-Eddington

Honors Theses

The rapidly changing dynamism of the 21st century has left democratic institutions in shambles as populists rise to power and, arguably, threaten to undermine the very fabric of the democratic way of life through increasingly exclusionary politics. The prominence of populist leaders and re-emergence of ethnonationalism demonstrates a shortcoming of many representative democracies, their elites’ ability to adequately represent the masses. In this paper, I will argue that recent trends in the decline of democracy can be partially attributed to a lack of democratic legitimacy that has been caused by a failure to intentionally account for demographic diversity in the …