Anonymity in political representation: building a theory

我的研究项目涉及匿名代表的概念（即政治候选人对选民的可识别性程度-或缺乏可识别性），旨在回答以下研究问题：“执行不同形式的匿名代表（通过体制改革和/或法律的约束）对候选人和选举过程的质量有什么潜在影响？“利用政治理论的方法，以及对民主制度设计的研究，我们的目标是测试作为民主理想的公开性和透明度的局限性，并询问民主和匿名是否可以超越投票箱中有限的匿名实施，以及匿名是否有利于审议和民主代表。这些问题是由我们周围随处可见的政治发展所引发的，比如政治的日益“个性化”和“亲密”意识形态的传播，这可能威胁到民主审查的可能性。到目前为止，讨论匿名性及其对民主社会政治影响的学术文献几乎完全集中在普通公民和选民的匿名性上，将政治候选人的公众地位视为不可改变的常数。然而，政治候选人的公共性质与公民中的一种普遍信念相矛盾，即选民不应投票给候选人，而应投票给他们所代表的政治思想和项目，或至多投票给候选人作为特定少数群体或社会类别成员的地位。许多实证研究指出，选民的选择在很大程度上受到候选人的个人和非政治特征的影响，如魅力、地位、外表、面孔、声音和肢体语言。这些可以对选民的行为产生足够大的影响，从而左右选举。这种情况发生在一个政治环境中，在这个环境中，能力的重要性比过去小，候选人的反社会特征，如低水平的宜人性和情绪稳定性与选举成功呈正相关。尽管候选人的公共地位在同行评议的文献中很少受到质疑，但公共领域的学者通常很少关注匿名性，更少关注政治代表背景下的匿名性。鉴于缺乏明确解决匿名政治代表的奖学金，我计划进行的研究是探索性的。我的第一步将是创建一个类型学，将各种形式的匿名与不同的选举过程联系起来。由于匿名性和可识别性存在于一个连续体中，代表的匿名性并不一定意味着选民无法获得关于候选人的所有信息。例如，在公开演讲和政治辩论的背景下，匿名代表可能意味着当候选人公开讲话时，他们的脸被隐藏（视觉匿名），他们所说的话与他们作为政党候选人的身份有关，而他们的个人身份被隐藏（个人匿名），或者他们的真实的名字不为人知（匿名）。在投票箱，这可能意味着选民投票支持候选人的政治声明，而不是候选人本身，没有一个标签，使声明和候选人之间的联系明确的选民。也可以通过法律的要求各政党在选举之后而不是之前选出其最杰出的候选人来实现代表权的平等。在方法上，我将采取规范的方法（分析各种匿名的代表类型的可取性，可行性和合法性的标准下）和比较。后者将包括分析个性化媒体出现之前和之后的历史案例。

My research project concerns the notion of anonymity of representation (i.e. the degree of identifiability - or lack thereof - of a political candidate to voters) and aims to answer the following research question: "What are the potential effects of the enforcement of different forms of anonymity of representation (through institutional reforms and/or legal constraints) on the quality of candidates and electoral processes?" Drawing on the methods of political theory, and studies of democratic institutional design, the goal is to test the limits of openness and transparency as democratic ideals and to ask whether democracy and anonymity can be bed-fellows beyond the limited implementation of anonymity at the ballot boxes, and whether anonymity can benefit both deliberation and democratic representation. These are questions motivated by political developments seen everywhere around us, like the growing "personalisation" of politics and the dissemination of an ideology of "intimacy" which might threaten the very possibility of democratic scrutiny. So far, the academic literature that addresses anonymity and its effects on politics in democratic societies has focused almost exclusively on the anonymity of common citizens and voters, taking the public status of political candidates as an unchangeable constant. The public nature of political candidates, however, is in tension with the widespread belief, among citizens, that voters should vote not for candidates but rather for the political ideas and projects they represent, or at most for the candidates' status as members of a particular minority or social category. Numerous empirical studies point to the fact that voters' choice is greatly influenced by personal, non-political traits of candidates such as charisma, status, appearance, face, voice and body language. These can have a sufficiently high impact on voters' behaviour to sway elections. This occurs in a political environment in which competence matters less than in the past and candidates' antisocial traits such as low levels of agreeableness and emotional stability are positively correlated with electoral success. Notwithstanding, the public status of candidates is rarely challenged in peer-reviewed literature, scholars of the public sphere have generally paid little attention to anonymity, and even less to anonymity in the context of political representation. Given the lack of scholarship explicitly addressing anonymity in political representation, the research I plan to carry out is exploratory in nature. My first step will be to create a typology that crosses the various forms of anonymity with different electoral processes. Since anonymity and identifiability exist in a continuum, anonymity of representation does notnecessarily mean that all information about candidates is inaccessible to voters. For example, in the context of public speeches and political debates, anonymity of representation could mean that when a candidate talks publicly, their face is concealed (visual anonymity), that what they say is associated with their identity as party candidates while their individual identity is kept hidden (personal anonymity), or that their real name is not known (pseudonymity). At the ballot boxes, it could mean that voters vote for a candidate's political statements instead of for the candidate themselves, without a label that makes the connection between statements and candidate explicit to voters. Anonymity of representation could also be implemented through a legal requirement for parties to select their most prominent candidates after and not before elections. Methodologically, I will take both a normative approach (analysing various anonymity of representation types under the criteria of desirability, feasibility and legitimacy) and a comparative one. The latter will include the analysis of historical cases before and after the advent of personalising media.