Political representation

Political representation is the activity of making citizens "present" in public policy-making processes when political actors act in the best interest of citizens according to Hanna Pitkin's Concept of Representation (1967).

This definition of political representation is consistent with a wide variety of views on what representing implies and what the duties of representatives are. For example, representing may imply acting on the expressed wishes of citizens, but it may alternatively imply acting according to what the representatives themselves judge is in the best interests of citizens.

And representatives may be viewed as individuals who have been authorized to act on the behalf of others, or may alternatively be viewed as those who will be held to account by those they are representing. Political representation can happen along different units such as social groups and area, and there are different types of representation such as substantive representation and descriptive representation.

Under the accountability view, a representative is an individual who will be held to account. Representatives are held accountable if citizens can judge whether the representative is acting in their best interest and sanction the representative accordingly. The descriptive and symbolic views of political representation describe the ways in which political representatives "stand for" the people they represent. Descriptive representatives "stand for" to the extent that they resemble, in their descriptive characteristics (e.g. race, gender, class etc.), the people they represent. On the other hand, symbolic representatives "stand for" the people they represent as long as those people believe in or accept them as their representative. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin argues that these views of political representation give an inadequate account of political representation because they lack an account both of how representatives "act for" the represented and the normative criteria for judging representative's actions. Hence, Pitkin proposes a substantive view of representation. In this view of political representation, representation is defined as substantive "acting for", by representatives, the interests of the people they represent.

In contrast, Jane Mansbridge has identified four views of democratic political representation: promissory, anticipatory, surrogate and gyroscopic. Mansbridge argues that each of these views provides an account of both how democratic political representatives "act for" the people they represent and the normative criteria for assessing the actions of representatives. Promissory representation is a form of representation in which representatives are chosen and assessed based on the promises they make to the people they represent during election campaigns. For Mansbridge, promissory representation, preoccupied with how representatives are chosen (authorized) and held to account through elections, is the traditional view of democratic political representation. Anticipatory, surrogate and gyroscopic representation, on the other hand, are more modern views that have emerged from the work of empirical political scientists. Anticipatory representatives take actions that they believe voters (the represented) will reward in the next election. Surrogate representation occurs when representatives "act for" the interest of people outside their constituencies. Finally, in gyroscopic representation, representatives use their own judgements to determine how and for what they should act for on behalf of the people they represent.

Under Andrew Rehfeld's general theory of representation, a person is considered a representative as long as the particular group they represent judges them as such. In any case of political representation, there are representatives, the represented, a selection agent, a relevant audience and rules by which the relevant judge whether a person is a representative. Representatives are those who are selected by a selection agent from a larger set of qualified individuals who are then judged to representatives by a relevant audience using particular rules of judgement. The rules by which a relevant audience judges whether a person is a representative can be either democratic or non-democratic. In a case where the selection agent, relevant audience and the represented are the same and the rules of judgment are democratic (e.g. elections), the familiar democratic case of political representation arises and where they are not, undemocratic cases arise.

This is the preferred (and very common) method for democratic countries, where elected representatives will be chosen by similarly-sized groups of voters defined by single-member districts. This is expressed commonly by the term "one person, one vote" in the US, and is commonly used to apply to equality between the many single-member districts that divide the country. The votes-to-seat ratio is commonly based on local census records of population. However even where districts are very equal in size, under the first-past-the-post electoral system, elected members receive wide variation of votes cast, due to varying number of voters within the population, varying voter turn-out rate, and varying percentage of votes cast that are necessary to win a plurality, from district to district.

The associated shortened term "rep-by-pop" is used in Canada, where it means that each province is given the number of seats in the House of Commons that is equal to its portion of Canada's population. Where the election system used is not proportional as to parties, such as first-past-the-post voting, the House of Commons may still exhibit degree of disproportionality as to party representation, even if each province has its fair share of seats.