American Political Science Review Page 1 of 11 August 2011 doi:10.1017/S0003055411000190 The Concepts of Representation ANDREW REHFELD Washington University in St. Louis I n this reply to Jane Mansbridge’s “Clarifying the Concept of Representation” in this issue (American Political Science Review 2011). I argue that our main disagreements are conceptual, and are trace- able to the attempt to treat the concept of representation as a “single highly complex concept” as Hanna Pitkin once put it. Instead, I argue, it would be more useful to develop the various concepts that emphasize the underlying forms of representation. Against the view that empirical regularity should guide concept formation, I suggest that the failure to find instances of the cases I conceptualize is not itself a reason to reject them. Instead, I argue in favor of concepts that emphasize one side or other of a relationship, rather than treating both sides simultaneously, defending the view that “promissory” and “anticipatory” may usefully describe the activity of “representing” but ought to emphasize only one side of the representative–voter relationship. I also explain why adding substantive accounts of representation to any of Mansbridge’s modifying concepts dilutes their practical value. I conclude by indicating the importance of developing concepts that stretch beyond the democratic contexts that feature prominently in her response. I am grateful to Jane Mansbridge for her clarify- ing and generous response to my previous work. (Mansbridge 2011; Rehfeld 2009). I agree with her that political representation is complex and relational. I also agree that the traditional concepts that scholars have used are no longer adequate to the task. As she indicates in four of her five critiques, our disagreements are not so much about the nature of political represen- tation per se as about the concepts we use to study it. 1 These disagreements center on three issues: (i) the standards we use to guide concept design; (ii) how concepts can best model the relational nature of the forms of political representation; and (iii) whether we must build substantive views of representation into the concepts we use to study it. On each of these questions, I argue that a more parsimonious approach to concept formation would yield more useful results. Andrew Rehfeld is Associate Professor, Department of Political Sci- ence, Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130 (rehfeld@wustl.edu). I have benefited from the feedback of Co-editor Kirstie McClure, Jane Mansbridge and three anonymous reviewers for the APSR. For additional feedback I also thank Arash Abizadeh, Chad Flanders, Doug Hanes, Jacob Levy, Ian MacMullen, Nina Valiquette Moreau, Robert Sperling, Christina Tarnopolsky, and Ron Watson, along with participants in a graduate seminar at LUISS Guido Carli, Rome (November 2010), and the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique, Montreal (January 2011). Finally I am grateful for the generous support of Fulbright Canada, the De- partment of Political Science at McGill University, and its Research Group on Constitutional Studies. 1 In summary, the four are, first, that the “‘Burkean trustee” is an “inadequat[e] . . . analytical tool” (Mansbridge, 2011); second, that “conceptual tools should be chosen for their empirical utility” (ibid.); third, that I misconceived of “promissory and anticipatory represen- tation” as characteristics of individual representatives rather than a relational concept (ibid.); fourth, that the concept of “‘surrogate’ representation . . combines deliberation and aggregation.” (ibid.) The fifth critique (labeled number three in her introduction) takes up the relationship between the interests of the whole and the parts (ibid.), I will not have much to say about my oversight of Eulau and colleagues’ 1959 intervention (Eulau et al. 1959). Although Mans- bridge rather generously attributes it to the result of subfield spe- cialization, I am inclined to view it as simply an error of scholarship on my part. In any case, I am grateful to Mansbridge for drawing attention to it and explaining the relationship of both of our views in contrast to theirs. The conceptual disagreements between us speak to a larger issue that Henry Bertram Mayo prefigured 50 years ago when he suggested that the term “representa- tion” had become so complex and shifting as to cease to be useful (Mayo 1960). I believe that he was correct and that the study of representation, particularly among normative scholars, has continued to suffer from the attempt, as Hanna Pitkin put it, to show that the term “does have an identifiable meaning” and that it is a “sin- gle, highly complex concept” (Pitkin 1967, 8). Rather than formulating these debates in terms of one concept of representation, let alone the concept of representa- tion, as Pitkin put it, I believe it would be more use- ful to develop concepts of representation to study the broad array of phenomena that we often imprecisely classify as “representation.” These concepts would use- fully explore what a representative is and what activity we think is properly denoted by “representing,” and separately explain what it means for one thing, or activ- ity, to be “representative” of another. These concepts would further be developed by reference to a range of normative ideals of authority, accountability, consent, interests, responsiveness, recognition, sovereignty, and policy correspondence, to name just a few. There is simply no reason to presume that these very differ- ent ideas must share some common covering theme, or that the creation of a concept to do so would be of much use to normative and empirical scholarship, rather than serving merely to obfuscate and confuse. Indeed, the attempt to discern or create a single cover- ing concept of representation has lead to some of the deepest confusions surrounding this topic since Pitkin’s seminal work was first published over four decades ago. Despite the titles of our original articles, and even Mansbridge’s claim to be capturing the complexity of the concept itself, Mansbridge and I are not really at- tempting to “rethink representation.” We are, rather, trying to understand the nature of one particular as- pect of representation in a highly constrained arena: the relationship between those represented and their representatives in the activity of democratic law mak- ing, and democratic decision making more generally. 1