Stirring the swill: A comparative inquiry into political representation jurisprudence

The political legitimacy of representative democracy is, at least in part, dependent upon the nature of the relationship of political representation. American, Canadian, and Australian jurisprudential supervision of the construction of electoral boundaries can be regarded as an attempt to facilitate the most appropriate ideal for that relationship--Hanna Pitkin's notion of substantive political representation. This area of political representation jurisprudence has, however, been criticized for its failure to adequately theorize and effectuate such a substantive notion. In particular, Lani Guinier has exposed the artificial constraint of the single-member, territorial, districting remedy favoured by the courts. In sympathy with Guinier's critique, this thesis examines and reconstructs the principles of political representation jurisprudence as they relate to the construction of electoral boundaries. This reconstruction identifies three fundamental maladies with which such junsprudence should be concerned: malapportionment, malrepresentation, and malparticipation. Finally, it is argued that, when understood in this way, political representation can move beyond its artificial constraint without (contrary to Guinier) jettisoning the ideal of substantive political representation.