Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College in New York and author of the Recall Elections Blog, told ThinkProgress that one of the big philosophical debates about republican democracy has long been the question of whether elected officials are “trustees we are electing for their knowledge and wisdom” or “a representative who is the best person to put out their to advance our point of view.” The recall, he observes, “is a thumb on the scale of the representative model