In his Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln spoke about the preservation of a
“government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.” While definitions of democracy
are abundant, this is one way of conceptualizing this type of governmental system. Thus,
democracies, in being “for the people” inherently involve collective decisions made with the
interests of citizens at hand. In other words, they involve representation (Dahl 1989; Key 1961),
particularly by the legislative branch. Yet, there is considerable debate over what representation
means and how it is best accomplished.
For example, legislators’ may be judged on the basis of their provision of services for
their constituents and/or their success in directing pork-barrel projects to their districts (e.g.
Eulau and Karps 1977). These activities are typically deemed important parts of legislators’ jobs
by constituents (Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina 1987) and can be tied to legislators’ electoral
success (Krasno 1994; Stein and Bickers 1995). In addition to this service/allocational notion of
representation, other scholars note that legislators may be considered symbols of their
constituents (e.g. Pitkin 1967). As symbols, representation by legislators means that they reflect
the sociodemographic characteristics of the public. Thus, a legislature is descriptively
representative with regard to race when the percentage of African-American members is the
same as the percentage of that group in the population.
At the same time that alternative conceptions of representation exist and may be
important to consider and evaluate, traditional theorizing on representation focuses on policy
issues. As Pitkin (1967) refers to it in her seminal work, this may be regarded as legislators
“acting for” their constituents. Yet, even if one considers representation only in terms of policy
issues, there is still room for disagreement. Just as descriptive representation often entails
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Convention