“Two conceptualisations of political responsiveness. An intervention”

The concept of political responsiveness is frequently assumed to be of central importance to the assessment of the quality of representative democracy. It is surprising how rarely an accurate definition is made explicit, as if the meaning of the concept is readily apparent. On the contrary, it must be noted that the conceptualisation differs from discourse to discourse. The contribution on hand identifies two distinct conceptualisations of the concept of political responsiveness (a), works out their conceptual differences (b) and shows that the confusion of both can lead to misjudgements in the normative analysis of representative democracy (c).