This essay focuses on the constituents’ instructions. to representative, principal to agent, runs forward in linear fashion. By exacting a promise, the voter
ponsible to,” “answerable to,” “bound,” and even “bound by” those voters.2 In the “mandate” version of the model, the representative promises to follow the constituents’ instructions or expressed desires; in the “trustee” version the representative promises to further the constituency’s long-run interests and the interests of the nation as a whole. In promissory representation, the power relation from voter to representative, principal to agent, runs forward in linear fashion. By exacting a promise, the voter at Time 1 (the election) exercises power, or tries to exercise power, over the representative at Time 2 (the governing period): VT1 → RT2. Promissory representation thus uses the standard forward-looking concep.
The power relation follows the simplest version of a principal-agent model, 2 See, e.g., Pitkin [1967] 1972, 55ff. Traditional accountability theory incorporates two analytically separable strands, usually intertwined. In the first, accountability means only that the representative has an obligation to explain (“give an account of”) his or her past actions, regardless of the system of sanctioning (e.g., Behn 2001, 220 n. 12, and Guttman and Thompson 1996). The second focuses only on the capacity for imposing sanctions for past behavior (e.g. Manin, Przeworski, and Stokes 1999, 8–10). See Fearon 1999, 55, and Goodin 1999. This analysis employs the second meaning.
statically conceived, trying to exercise power over the rerepresentation. It has never described actual representation fully. This it has been and remains today one of the most important ways in which citizens influence political outcomes through their representatives.
ANTICIPATORY REPRESENTATION For more than a gen