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The trustee/delegate problem purportedly expresses how closely a representative's votes in the legislature should correspond to their constituents' preferences. In this article, I argue that the usual formulation of this debate collapses three distinctions-aims, source of judgment, and responsiveness-and thus obscures the underlying complexity of the phenomenon. Given its tripartite formulation, the collapse of these distinctions into a binary "trustee/delegate" formulation obscures a more complex political landscape with eight-rather than two-ideal types. Furthermore, once unpacked, we can see that the distinctions operate entirely independent of the location of authority, leading to the seemingly paradoxical instructed trustees and independent delegates. I also claim that the three distinctions apply to any decision maker, and thus, the attribution of this problem as distinctive of democratic political representation is an important overstatement. The article thus contributes to a more general theory of political representation that can be applied in nonelectoral and nondemocratic contexts increasingly relevant to global politics.
"We will never be able to understand what sort of thing we are talking about unless we understand first just what it is."
-Cicero, On the Commonwealth (1999, 17)
Any comprehensive account of democracy will specify how closely the laws of a nation should correspond to the preferences of the citizens governed by them.1 No one expects there to be an exact correspondence between the two, and deviations may be justified for familiar reasons: citizens often have no formed views on what the law should be; their preferences may be incoherent at the individual or collective levels, their preferences may not conform to their true interests and will change over time, or their preferences may be trumped by more important principles of justice (including, but not limited to, the protection of minority rights). As long as these deviations do not become the norm (in which the law routinely fails to correspond to citizen preferences), they fit well within broad conceptions of democracy. But the presumption of democracy is that there be a close correspondence between the laws of a nation and the preferences of citizens who are ruled by them. Thus it is that we must always justify and explain cases in which law deviates from citizen preferences, whereas no such prima facie justification is required in cases when law...