“公共”的再发现:意志论与利益论政治代表观的整合

在政治代表研究领域,意志论代表观与利益论代表观的分野存在已久,而一些试图调和二者之间矛盾的尝试则力有未逮。部分学者转向寻求民事代表研究中处理这一经典冲突的成功经验,包括代表行为前的契约、代表行为中的重复博弈与代表行为后的司法审判这三种成熟的策略。但将这些方法引入政治代表行为研究时却面对着种种无法逾越的障碍。通过对比民事活动与政治活动,我们可以发现这些障碍的根源:以往的政治代表研究者忽略了“公共”这一政治行为独有的抽象主体。公共的再发现使得政治代表的结构由二元主体转向三元主体,由一重代表转向三重代表,这为调和意志论与利益论之争提供了新的思路。

“The Public” Rediscovered: An Approach to Integrate Will Theory and Interest Theory of Political Representation

The divergence between will theory and interest theory in the field of political representation has been lasting for a long time, and a variety of attempts to reconcile this contradiction have failed. Some scholars turn to the successful strategies of dealing with this classic conflict in the civil representation research, i.e., contract before representation, repeated games in representation and judicial adjudication after representation. However, these approaches, when applied in the study of political representation, will provoke various insurmountable obstacles. By comparing civil activities with political ones, we can find that these obstacles are rooted in the fact that the previous political representation researchers have neglected the unique abstract agent in politics, “the public”. The rediscovery of “the public” transforms the monist mode of political representation into a triple one, with the dual agents in the former replaced by the ternary in the latter. This new structure of political representation paves the way to the integration of will theory and interest theory of political representation which have been in conflict ever since.