Re-thinking "Re-presentation".

Scholars in a range of subfields within political science are reaching consensus on the idea that representation in a democracy is best understood not in terms of accurate correspondence between pre-existing citizen preferences and subsequent government decision but rather as a constructive process that shapes the very same preferences and perspectives that are represented (see Jacobs and Shapiro, 2000; Laclau 1996; Popkin 1991; Sniderman et al 1991; Zaller 1992). This finding poses a problem for the directionality that Hanna Pitkin built into political representation when she insisted that "as the 're' in 'representation' seems to suggest, and as I have argued in rejecting the fascist theory of representation, the represented must be somehow logically prior; the representative must be responsive to him rather than the other way around" (1967, 140). The profound insight of Pitkin's still-definitive work was her claim that political representation is produced not by a (mythical) intersubjective exchange between a political representative and his or her constituents but by the dynamics of the representative system as a whole. This paper brings Pitkin's work into dialogue with contemporary empirical research on representation to explore what happens when we factor into the system of representation the various aspects-punditry, citizen representation, opinion polling-that confound this directionality. Does mass democracy inevitably shade into "fascist" manipulation as Pitkin suggested? I work with these empirical studies to initiative a re-thinking of Pitkin's avowedly "etymological" understanding of representation, and to open up new possibilities for political mobilization and political dissent (1967, 8). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]