Political Representation: Subjects, Contents and Agents

This paper surveys political science literature in search of a proper conceptualization of political representation. The first section of the paper reviews most influential normative and theoretical understandings of political representation. The section concludes with a summary of general attributes of the concept of representation which ought to be taken into consideration in each study on representation. The second section reviews empirical studies of political representation with one main intention: to provide a synthesis of different empirical understandings of “who is being represented”, “what is being represented” and “who is the representative”. Instead of conclusion a novel model of the process of representation is presented at the end, which should be read as a conceptual map for future studies on political representation.