Imperative mandate

History

The imperative mandate goes back to the Middle Ages. It was disregarded by the French National Assembly of 1789, but then it was briefly embraced by the revolutionary assemblies in Paris in 1793. It was embraced in the Paris Commune and by the Council Communism movement, as well as by Vladimir Lenin in "The State and Revolution" and by the Zapatistas in Mexico.

Prohibition

Most representative democracies 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.

France

The elimination of an imperative mandate was one of the constitutional effects of the French Revolution of 1789.

The French Constitution of 1791 specifically prohibited the practice: "The representatives elected in the departments will not be representatives of a particular department, but of the whole nation, and no mandate can be conferred on them"|source = French Constitution of 1791, art. 7, section III, chapter I, title III.}} 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. 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 [imperative] mandate ".

References

References

1. [https://ctjournal.org/index.php/criticaltimes/article/view/15/10 Who’s Afraid of the Imperative Mandate?] {{Webarchive. link. (2018-06-12 , Massimiliano Tomba, ''Critical Times'', 1(1), 2018)
2. 052179370X/{{ISBN. 978-0521793704
3. 0521893771/{{ISBN. 978-0521893770
4. "The State and Revolution - Chapter 3".
5. [[Venice Commission]]. (2009). "Report on the Imperative Mandate and Similar Practices".
6. On how the Anglo-Saxon system considers, as a business of Parliament, the undue claim that the mandate is imperative, v. Erskine May’s ''Treatise on The Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament'', edited by Sir C. Gordon, London, Butterworths 1989 (20th ed.), p. 128, which describes the case that in 1974 led to a letter of apology from the [[trade unions]], who had summoned some parliamentarians, their members, for explanations on a vote given to the [[House of Commons of the United Kingdom]]: the letter stopped a complaint of Parliament for intimidation against the freedom of self-determination of the parliamentarian.
7. Ernesto Galli della Loggia, ''Vincolo di mandato: gli eletti e le idee confuse'', [[Corriere della Sera]], 28 September 2019