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, Jack N. Rakove, and Jonathan Riley,

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 A university press is an academic publishing hou ...

, 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 defended ...

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 Germany a ...

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 19 ...

in "

The State and Revolution ''The State and Revolution'' (1917) is a book by Vladimir Lenin describing the role of the state in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution to establish the dicta ...

" and by the

Zapatistas Zapatista(s) may refer to: * Liberation Army of the South The Liberation Army of the South ( es, Ejército Libertador del Sur, ELS) was a guerrilla force led for most of its existence by Emiliano Zapata that took part in the Mexican Revolut ...

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 Guatema ...

Prohibition

Most

representative democracies Representative democracy, also known as indirect democracy, is a type of democracy where elected people represent a group of people, in contrast to direct democracy. Nearly all modern Western-style democracies function as some type of represe ...

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 Recall may refer to: * Recall (bugle call), a signal to stop * Recall (information retrieval), a statistical measure * ''ReCALL'' (journal), an academic journal about computer-assisted language learning * Recall (memory) * ''Recall'' (Overwatch ...

''. 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 considere ...

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: "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 It ...

, 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 Berlin ...

, 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