The second thing that stands out in the recent renewal of interest in representation is the
declining confidence in a politics of mandates. This too has been mainly an issue on the political
left, where it used to be commonplace to contrast the accountability of the binding mandate to the
wayward elitism of politicians claiming the right to make decisions by themselves. Those on the
right rarely took the representative element in representative democracy so seriously. But for
those on the left, it has seemed self-evident that accountability to party mandates is more
democratic than allowing people to strike out on their own: that representatives elected on behalf
of a particular party should regard themselves as bound by the policies of that party; and that they
have no right to abandon policies to which they just happen to be personally opposed. When
representatives are not bound by the policies or manifestos on which they were elected, there
seems little point describing what they do as representation. Either there is some notion of party
mandates or there is no representation at all.