The broader implication of this judicial example is that the ways in which constitutions assign responsibility and structure accountability affect representatives’ capacities for judgment. Elections establish the nonindependence of the representative from the represented in principle, although in practice, representative institutions require enough autonomy to carry out their political functions, which will require bodies that can engage in deliberative political judgments (Bybee 1998). Accordingly, most constitutions forbid imperative mandate. But because political representation can only exist in the juridical form of a mandate that is not legally bounded, some other form of mandate is needed to check representatives, which is why almost all democratic constitutions delimit the responsibility of the representatives.