Our findings should not be taken to mean indirect democracy is preferable. Do we want
government to be so eager to accommodate the self-interest of constituents? Just because
politicians act in the interest of the people does not mean these actions are beneficial to the larger
polity. Pandering could easily result when representatives make decisions on behalf of
constituents. Our research is not going to identify the policies that the government should enact
or the individual interests that should be advanced. But it does allow us to say that people who
make decisions on behalf of someone else have a natural and empirically demonstrable
inclination to be solicitous of the interests of others—in fact, at least as solicitous of constituents’
interests as people are of their own interests when deciding for themselves.
Conventional assumptions and mid-level theory may be off-base in taking it as given that
representatives are motivated largely by, and best controlled by, concerns for their own self-
interest. We see evidence from our experiments that the interests of others are an equally
powerful force. Thanks to humans’ remarkably social nature, even without elections
representative democracy protects the interests of the represented. The only question is whether
it elevates the self-interest of constituents to a status it does not warrant—a status that, if direct
democracy were in place, the people themselves would not grant their own self-interest.
17
Convention