These reflexive relationships often go unnoticed, but they are essential to making political judgment work in complex, pluralistic, democratic societies. Representation functions to depersonalize claims and opinions, for example, which in turn allows citizens to mingle and associate without erasing the partisan spirit essential to free political competition. Representation serves to unify and connect citizens, while also pulling them out of the immediate present and projecting them into future-oriented perspectives. Representation, when intertwined with citizens’ reflexivity and participation, evokes and focuses the natality of politics, through which individuals transcend the immediacy of their interests, biographical experience, and social and cultural attachments, and enlarge their political judgment on their own and others’ opinions (Urbinati 2006; see Arendt 1989). Thus, even at its most divisive, in a democratic society representative institutions are never solely descriptive of social segmentations and identities. And at their best, they tend toward transcendence of the here and now in a process that is animated by a dialectic between what is and what can be or ought to
be (Przeworski 1991, p. 19; cf. Hegel 1967). Finally, of course, representation also enables citizens to survey and discipline power holders, not only through the direct mechanisms of voting but also through the gathering and exposure of information by groups and the media who claim (not always credibly) to act as representatives of the public.