Political and Epistemic Mediation: 'complex sovereignty' and representative democracy

This article investigates the complex balance between political mediation and epistemic mediation within representative democracy. The proposed path develops starting from the concept of “complex sovereignty”, which has a long and articulated history behind it but is also used in the most recent analyses of political authority. The aim is to make this concept more complex by trying to include not only the dynamics of political mediation but also epistemic ones through the pluralization of the concept of people and time, as well as of the concept of competence. In the last part of the article, the arguments put forward will be discussed within a more general theoretical scheme that identifies complexity as the distinctive feature of democracy