Insufficient Representation

Not Enough Representation: The Disconnect between Congress and Its Citizens examines how representative the United States Congress is among different demographic groups and how representational issues affect Americans’ perception of Congress, potentially threatening its legitimacy. The opening chapter analyzes political representation from the perspective of the nature of the relationship between voters and legislators, addressing why Congress is so demographically unrepresentative. The book will then focuses on outcome—the representativeness of the legislature in terms of its members’ demographic backgrounds. Congress, simply put, is not demographically representative of the American public. There are significant gaps between Congress and the American public on the basis of race, gender, religion, wealth and generation. Since members of Congress do not adequately represent the diversity in their electorate, this suggests that Congress in turn does not make polices that advocate for the citizenry as a whole. The book first examines the nature of the relationship between citizens and legislators before analyzing demographic groups in the general population and comparing their preferences to how Congressional members of that demographic group legislate. In the process, the book ties representation to many of the hot-button issues that polarize both the American public and Congress. Congress is not descriptively representative of the U.S. population. Many groups of Americans have historically been, and continue to be, underrepresented in Congress. More than ever before, this underrepresentation is troublesome to a substantial number of Americans—and problematic for American democracy.

This is a long and closely argued discussion about improving democracy as a means of representation of the masses. Mr Mill argues that with the democratic system currently employed in England, there is unfairness due to the flawed nature of the way voting for representatives is carried out. He advocates a new method described by a person called Mr Hare.

The book presents debates around the concept of representation and how these ideas apply to representation for selected disadvantaged groups in India. It discusses empirical concerns and examines political representation of these disadvantaged groups in post-independence India. The experience of political representation of SCs, STs: the method of election, role of political parties in providing representation, role played by these groups in parliamentary institutions, and the extent of their participation. A second, significant area the volume attempts to cover is representation of the Muslim minority in parliament and state assemblies and understanding the reasons for their under-representation since independence, and more particularly in recent years.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Multimedia Content Representation, Classification and Security, MRCS 2006. The book presents 100 revised papers together with 4 invited lectures. Coverage includes biometric recognition, multimedia content security, steganography, watermarking, authentication, classification for biometric recognition, digital watermarking, content analysis and representation, 3D object retrieval and classification, representation, analysis and retrieval in cultural heritage, content representation, indexing and retrieval, and more.