Rethinking representative democracy : Representation beyond contestation & partisan politics

Sammanfattning: The current forms of representative democracy have come to face various fundamental challenges such as: decrease in political participation, distrust in partisan politics and politicians and perhaps increase of ideological polarization. To take solace in the belief that the current democratic tools are far from perfect yet the finest in modern societies, has not contributed to solution-oriented modifications of its efficacy. In this thesis Lua Nazerian intends to address the inadequacies and inherent limitations in the current form of representative democracy, by analyzing its underlying assumptions through a critical examination of the fundamental challenges in Classical pluralism, Agonist and Deliberative democratic theory. Furthermore, it proposes some modifications drawn from the Socratic idea of the non-pursuit of power, the bottom-up political approach and the learnings from the worldwide Baha’i community. The study is carried out within the field of international relations with a normative approach as well as it incorporates a case study of the Baha’i electoral and decision-making principle. Nevertheless, by using the Socratic idea together with the Baha’i principles in a bottom-up approach shifts then the paradigm from the inherent competitive culture of representative democracy to a more inclusive solution-oriented culture of learning.