To better account for the myriad ways that citizens and civil society organisations pursue their interests in today's democratic environment, authors Gisela Zaremberg, Valeria Guarneros-Meza and Adrián Gurza Lavalle develop a theoretical framework anchored around the concept of ‘political intermediation’. They seek to move the current debate beyond its narrow focus on electoral processes and union organising. This book is a welcome addition to the literature because it provides a broader theoretical framework to better assess the multitude of ways that citizens engage the state, policymaking processes and the competitive aspects of representative democracy.
The book makes several interesting contributions, including a concise theoretical rationale regarding why it is necessary to move beyond the concept of representation, the introduction of a ‘representation circuit’, a pivot toward the concept of political intermediation, and, finally, the ‘Cube of Political Intermediation’ (see further below). I briefly review these three areas.
The authors begin by drawing on the classic work on representation (principally Hanna Pitkin's The Concept of Representation, University of California Press, 1972) to show that it is useful in the arena of electoral politics because it focuses on the relationship between political parties, campaigns, elections and citizen/voters. The vote is, of course, a vital activity in representative democracy, but the authors begin with the premise that a focus on elections masks the myriad ways that citizens engage in politics. Rather than abandoning the concept of representation, they seek to move beyond it to better theorise about how citizens and leaders (e.g. community activists) engage with each other and with the broader political environment.
The authors build their argument by first introducing the idea of the representation circuit, whereby they emphasise four components – force, project, word, people – that are intended to illuminate how people and organisations influence the broader political environment. The authors’ intent is to create a new vocabulary to explain how citizens utilise the ‘representation circuit’ to press their demands. This lays the groundwork for the authors to introduce the concept of political intermediation, but they will need to develop it much more fully if they want this to become a widely used framework.
The authors develop this concept, which they define as ‘that which refers to both “being in the middle” and “acting as means to”’ (p. 12). They are trying to better understand the role of the community leader, of social movement activists, or of clientelistic brokers. They identify three crucial sub-components that affect the relationship between the ‘intermediated’ and the ‘intermediary’ (p. 13): authority (p. 14), accountability (p. 15), and types of political conflict where this negotiation takes place (p. 17).
With regard to ‘authority’, this is a particularly thorny theoretical issue because there are no clear mechanisms that establish the ‘authority’ that the intermediary claims and that the intermediated gives to him or her. For example, when a social movement leader speaks at a public meeting or when she holds a private meeting with an elected official, what is the basis of authority that she claims? How might we know if she really has the support that she claims to have? The concept of intermediation draws attention to continual efforts that must be made to create, maintain and renew the relationship between citizens (the ‘intermediated’) and their leader (the intermediary).
With regard to accountability, the authors seek to better establish the relationship between the intermediated and the intermediary, suggesting that the former has the means to influence and control the latter. This is an attempt to rescue the concept of accountability from its traditional uses (horizontal, vertical and social accountability), and apply it to the field of civil society engagement. In some cases, we can imagine that the intermediary will have wide latitude to act on behalf of the group. In other contexts, we can imagine that the leaders would be constrained by specific rules and understandings, which would increase the influence of the intermediated over the intermediary's actions.
The third subcomponent focuses on the decision-making processes through which more substantive claims are made. When there are no clear rules, an antagonistic process is more likely to be present, thus leading to conflicts between the intermediated, the intermediaries, and, on the other side, political and economic elites. But, when clear rules are put in place, there is something more similar to deliberative decision-making that involves a wide range of parties.
The book's final contribution is the coining of the ‘Cube of Political Intermediation’ (p. 19). The authors seek to show how the three factors (authority, accountability, types of engagement) interact to produce different outcomes. In an ideal type of democratic engagement, we can imagine that the mediated relationships (i) would have clear lines of authority and responsibility between citizens and leaders, which would constrain the acts of leaders; (ii) that there would be ongoing dialogue among citizens and leaders, which increases accountability; and (iii) that there would be a clear set of rules that produce political exchanges that are not antagonistic. Conversely, un-democratic exchanges are more likely to be based on more opaque relationships among leaders and followers, and a limited public dialogue about agendas and private deal-making. These two ideal types show the usefulness of this new theoretical approach because it can help to account for political activity ranging from citizens’ deep engagement in deliberative public venues to clientelistic exchanges between citizens and party bosses.
The case study chapters cover a lot of ground, which demonstrates how this new theoretical framework can be usefully applied to the conduct of research. The authors of these case studies draw on Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, Venezuela and Uruguay to show how the Cube of Political Intermediation can help to explain a wide range of cases. As we might expect, each chapter emphasises a different part of the Cube, which helps elucidate the breadth of its potential coverage. However, it was difficult for any single author to incorporate all three dimensions of the Cube, which highlights the difficulty of this type of multi-pronged analysis.
In sum, the concept of political intermediation and the development of the Cube of Intermediation provides a useful addition to classic debates in democratic studies, political science and sociology. The authors have made a strong case for how this conceptual framework moves beyond the constraints of representative. I have two reservations. First, I am uncertain how this framework fits into much of the academic work on civil society over the past 30 years. A broader theoretical development that more explicitly draws from existing work on civil society and social movements would improve the potential impact of this approach. Second, I am concerned that the multiple angles of the Cube will make it difficult for researchers to develop a clear, concise methodology to put it into action. Nevertheless, overall, this book offers a compelling approach to the more systematic understanding of how, when and where citizens and civil society leaders engage with each other as well as of how they engage with political, social and economic powerholders.
