If representative roles are structured in part by institutional rules and inducements, they are also structured by the ethical duties of public office. Representatives are elected to do certain jobs, and their jobs come with obligations. The question of representative roles was famously conceived by Burke (1968), who argued that representatives should serve as trustees of the interests of those who elected them—“virtual representatives”—rather than serving as delegates. Representatives should not be bound by the preferences of constituents; they should use their autonomous judgment within the context of deliberative bodies to represent the public interest.
The notion that representatives are trustees is widely understood as a quasiaristocratic understanding of representation:the best judgment of elites replaces the judgment of the people. This understanding of the delegate-trustee distinction crowds all “democratic” meanings of representation into the delegate model. The formulation drains the meaning from “democracy” and tells us nothing about how constituents’ interests are converted into decisions within the context of a representative institution. That is, the concept of delegation provides no explanation of decision making and thus fails to provides an account of democratic rule. Pitkin (1967) offered more nuance when she noted that representatives cannot simply reflect their constituents’ interests—in part because interests are often unformed (thus, it is unclear what