Deliberative Representation in Formal Philosophy

This thesis explores the legitimacy of political representation in deliberative democracies.More specifically, I investigate (i) how a system of proportional representation should be designed in a deliberative democracy, and (ii) what conditions should be met for deliberations among representatives to be democratically legitimate.Chapters 2, 3, and 4 deal with the first sub-question: how a system of proportional representation should be designed in a deliberative democracy.Chapter 5 addresses the second sub-question: what conditions should be met for deliberations among representatives to be democratically legitimate.Chapters 2, 3, and 4 deal with the question of how a system of proportional representation should be designed in a deliberative democracy.Chapter 2 takes a critical look at the Chamberlin-Courant (1983) system of proportional representation.This system aims to achieve fairness to individual voters by ensuring that the deliberations and decisions of the committee are as close as possible to deliberations and decisions in the ideal direct democracy where all are able to participate.This is an individual-based justification for proportional representation, which is often neglected in favor of group-based justifications that are based on fairness to groups of voters and parties.I argue that the Chamberlin-Courant system does not in fact guarantee fairness to the individual voter because it does not take sufficient account of the fact that the satisfactoriness of a representative for an individual may vary per issue.For instance, Anna may represent me best on environmental issues, but Betta may represent me best on economic issues.I then propose an alternative-the multidimensional system-that takes this into account.In contrast to recent literature in social choice theory, which focuses primarily on questions about the computational complexity of these rules (for example, Jain and Talmon 2020), I am concerned with the question of whether these rules satisfy normative democratic conditions.I also emphasize that a system of proportional representation is more than a committee selection YU / PHD THESIS SUMMARY