Imperative Mandate

Under an imperative mandate a delegate is bound by the will of the organisation or voters who sent him and can be removed for departing from their line. The Soviet jurist V. F. Kotok named three elements: the voters' instructions (nakazy), the delegate's periodic report on carrying them out, and the voters' right to recall a delegate who has lost their confidence before the end of his term. Its opposite, the free mandate, is the rule in most Western representative democracies, as in Article 38 of the German Basic Law, under which deputies are "not bound by orders or instructions".

The imperative mandate was the norm in the assemblies of the estates: deputies to the French Estates-General received instructions from their constituents, and the nuncios of the Polish nobles' Sejm were bound by the instructions of their local dietines. Rousseau held in The Social Contract that sovereignty cannot be represented, so that the people's deputies are not its representatives but merely its commissioners. The French Revolution, however, turned the Estates-General into a National Assembly representing the whole nation and discarded the imperative mandate; the Constitution of 1791 declared that representatives elected in the departments represent not their department but the whole nation and that no mandate can be conferred on them. The revolutionary assemblies of Paris briefly embraced it again in 1793. Article 27 of the present French Constitution of 1958 still states: "Any imperative mandate is null and void."

In its appeal to the electors of 22 March 1871 the Central Committee of the National Guard declared that members of the municipal assembly, constantly controlled, watched and discussed by opinion, were revocable, accountable and responsible. In The Civil War in France Marx wrote that the Commune's councillors, the police, the magistrates and all public servants were responsible and revocable at any time, and that in the Commune's sketch of national organisation the rural communities were to send delegates to district assemblies and these to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate at any time revocable and bound by the mandat impératif (formal instructions) of his constituents. In his 1891 introduction Engels added that, on top of its two expedients of filling every post by universal suffrage with permanent recall and paying only workers' wages, the Commune also bound delegates to representative bodies by imperative mandates. According to German Wikipedia, the Third Republic built after the Commune's suppression wrote a ban on the imperative mandate into its constitutional laws, and the ban passed into many later constitutions.

In Russia Bolshevik activists developed the idea in the revolution of 1905: the draft rules for a strike committee and Soviet of Workers' Deputies put forward by the Tver committee of the RSDLP made delegates accountable to their electors and required new elections when a delegate lost their confidence. On 21 November (4 December) 1917 Lenin reported on the right of recall to the All-Russia Central Executive Committee: the bourgeoisie, he said, had allowed the right to elect representatives but intentionally withheld the right of recall, the right of actual control, while the truly popular nature of the Soviets showed in the fact that every peasant sends his representatives to the Soviet and is entitled to recall them. The State and Revolution likewise named the election and recall at any time of all officials as a core measure of the Commune. Recall provisions entered the constitutions of the Soviet Union and other socialist states, but in practice they were hardly ever used, Hungary in 1989 being an exception. The council communist Pannekoek saw strike committees of delegates revocable at any moment as the prototype of workers' councils.