Ernesto Screpanti
DEPS, USiena
Abstract
In a representative democracy, members of parliament should be accountable to the voters who elected them. For this to be actually the case, the latter require an instrument of deterrence, a mechanism of control over opportunistic representatives, for example the right to recall them at any moment. However, two obstacles, one ideological and one practical, hinder legal recognition of this right. The first is due to the doctrine by which members of parliament legislate in the public interest, and therefore should not be constrained by a mandate binding them to their particular voters. The second consists in the fact that voting secrecy hinders the identification of which voters elected any one member of parliament. In this article, leveraging the potential offered by modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), I propose a model for an electoral system that dissolves the first problem and resolves the second. According to my model, electoral platforms constitute the formal instructions by which members of parliament are held accountable, and an electronic vote makes it possible to associate each member of parliament with his or her voters while still guaranteeing voting secrecy. Voters are then able to evaluate the decisions made by their representative and may recall them when they fail to comply with instructions
Keywords
Election law, civil law, e-democracy, right of recall
Jel codes
K15, K16, K 38
