The Imperative mandate is a political system in which representatives are required to enact policies in accordance with orders or instructions received from the voters. Failure to follow these instructions may result in the representative being dismissed or recalled.Who’s Afraid of the Imperative Mandate?
Massimiliano Tomba, ''Critical Times', 1(1), 2018

History

The imperative mandate goes back to the Middle Ages. It was disregarded by the French National Assembly of 1789,Constitutional Culture and Democratic Rule (Murphy Institute Studies in Political Economy)
by

John Ferejohn John Arthur Ferejohn (born June 6, 1944) is an American legal scholar and political scientist. He is the Samuel Tilden Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, where he has been a full-time faculty member since 2009. He previously se ...

Jack N. Rakove Jack Norman Rakove (born June 4, 1947) is an American historian, author and professor at Stanford University. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner. Biography Rakove was born in Chicago to Political Science Professor Milton L. Rakove (1918–1983) an ...

, and

Jonathan Riley Jonathan Riley is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. S ...

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press in the world. It is also the King's Printer. Cambr ...

, 2010, / but then it was briefly embraced by the revolutionary assemblies in Paris in 1793. It was embraced in the

Paris Commune The Paris Commune (french: Commune de Paris, ) was a revolutionary government that seized power in Paris, the capital of France, from 18 March to 28 May 1871. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the French National Guard had defende ...

and by the

Council Communism Council communism is a current of communist thought that emerged in the 1920s. Inspired by the November Revolution, council communism was opposed to state socialism and advocated workers' councils and council democracy. Strong in German ...

movement, as well as by

Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1 ...

in " The State and Revolution" and by the

Zapatistas Zapatista(s) may refer to: * Liberation Army of the South, formed 1910s, a Mexican insurgent group involved in the Mexican Revolution * Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), formed 1983, a Mexican indigenous armed revolutionary group based ...

Mexico Mexico ( Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guate ...

Prohibition

Most representative democracies follow a system of a free mandate, where once elected a representative may enact any policy free from any orders. Many of these countries specifically prohibit the imperative mandate as incompatible with democracy. It was also rejected in the American Revolution, following the modern representative system but some U.S. States in their constitutions know the '' recall''. In any case, there are recent episodes of erosion of the ban.

France

The elimination of an imperative mandate was one of the constitutional effects of the

French Revolution The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are conside ...

of 1789. The

French Constitution of 1791 The French Constitution of 1791 (french: Constitution française du 3 septembre 1791) was the first written constitution in France, created after the collapse of the absolute monarchy of the . One of the basic precepts of the French Revolution ...

specifically prohibited the practice: This view represented a shift in the attributing sovereignty to the people as a whole through their representatives where it was previously attributed solely in the

monarch A monarch is a head of stateWebster's II New College DictionarMonarch Houghton Mifflin. Boston. 2001. p. 707. Life tenure, for life or until abdication, and therefore the head of state of a monarchy. A monarch may exercise the highest authority ...

. As described by

Ernesto Galli della Loggia Ernesto, form of the name Ernest in several Romance languages, may refer to: * ''Ernesto'' (novel) (1953), an unfinished autobiographical novel by Umberto Saba, published posthumously in 1975 ** ''Ernesto'' (film), a 1979 Italian drama loosely ba ...

: "Every single person elected by the people, every parliamentarian, is the representative of the nation-people as a whole, and therefore the depositary of its entire sovereign will (...) They must necessarily represent, equally symbolically, the whole people, the electoral body in its entirety. In continental European representative democracies there is a ban on the mperativemandate ".Ernesto Galli della Loggia, ''Vincolo di mandato: gli eletti e le idee confuse'',

Corriere della Sera The ''Corriere della Sera'' (; en, "Evening Courier") is an Italian daily newspaper published in Milan with an average daily circulation of 410,242 copies in December 2015. First published on 5 March 1876, ''Corriere della Sera'' is one of I ...

, 28 September 2019

References

External links

Report on the imperative mandate and similar practices

Venice Commission The Venice Commission, officially European Commission for Democracy through Law, is an advisory body of the Council of Europe, composed of independent experts in the field of constitutional law. It was created in 1990 after the fall of the Berl ...

, 2009
Who’s Afraid of the Imperative Mandate?
Massimiliano Tomba, ''Critical Times', 1(1), 2018
pdf
Elections Policy Democracy Political philosophy {{poli-philo-stub

History

Prohibition

France

See also

References

External links