Representative Democracy and the Ideology of Immediacy: the distance between elites and citizens

Representative democracy is influenced by an ideology of immediacy that aims to distort its functioning. In fact, the desire for disintermediation has a double declination: temporal (reducing decision times) and spatial (reducing the distance between representatives and represented). First, the aim of this article is to analyze the characteristics of the second declination of immediacy. Secondly, it focuses on the reasons why representative democracy is structurally influenced by tendencies towards mediation and disintermediation; thirdly, it explores the logic of political representation which is based on the balance between proximity and distinction; and, finally, it highlights the importance of democratic distance as a theoretical element to rethink the relationship between elites and democracy.