Abstract

This article has several related aims. The first is to provide a general overview of the various conceptions of political representation, identifying the key components of these conceptions. The second is to highlight key debates about political representation and its components and thereby showcase how changing political realities have generated new and competing conceptions of political representation. Notably, many new conceptions concern forms of political representation that occur outside of familiar formal and institutional contexts, in which representation is thought to be a relationship between an elected representative and a determinate constituency. By accommodating other contexts of representation and expanding the meaning of different components of representation, new descriptive conceptions of what political representation is and normative conceptions of what political representatives should be doing have emerged. These new conceptions also offer different ways of envisioning the relationship between normative and descriptive accounts of representation. The final aim is to identify areas of future research.