Public Opinion, Political Representation, and Democratic Choice

I argue that this is the only adequate theory of political representation. Although this view of political representation is often discussed in the literature, it is less often given a mathematically precise form. Therefore, I present a formal model of such a balancing procedure, and this reveals several important formal requirements that a conception of public opinion must satisfy; most importantly, it must account for instability in the expression of public opinion, individual differences in opinion strength, and it must be representable along a cardinal scale.

Standard measures of public opinion do not satisfy these requirements. I argue that if such a model of public opinion cannot be formulated, then the liberal conception of political representation is incoherent. In chapters 4 and 5, I present a model of public opinion based upon Thurstonian scaling techniques that fulfills the necessary formal requirements.

Finally, in chapter 6, I discuss several important implications this model has for the measurement of public opinion, the use of public opinion by political representatives in policy deliberation, and other problems in social choice theory.