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Whose preferences determine the direction of government policy? Is it the political centre, formally known as the median or mean voter, or is government policy more responsive to socio-economic elites? This paper examines political representation in the United Kingdom on the left-right scale. Politicians face a trade-off between policy and electoral incentives. The observed policy behaviour of the British government is therefore posited as a weighted average between these conflicting interests. In contrast to previous studies this paper posits an important role for political competition in the study of unequal representation. Representation can be expected to be biased towards groups with higher incomes during safe Conservative governments. Instead, when a safe Labour government has control over the direction of policy, policy outputs are more likely to be responsive to the preferences of groups with lower incomes. Under an electorally vulnerable governing party, regardless of its ideological colour, observed policy behaviour will be skewed towards the preferences of middle incomes, or, analogously, the mean voter. These propositions are tested and affirmed with longitudinal policy- and opinion-data from 1973-2006.

This article develops a theoretical model of political representation under the single‐member district system. I establish the existence of equilibria in which legislative voting of each legislator depends only on her preference and her electorate's preference and voters sanction badly behaved incumbents and retain well‐behaved ones based solely on their own representatives' roll‐call records. In equilibrium, voters achieve a partial representation with respect to representatives' behavior in each district. However, with respect to representation of the social majority, my findings are indeterminate. On the one hand, there exists an equilibrium in which the majority‐preferred alternative is the outcome guaranteed, except in very special circumstances. On the other hand, this equilibrium is not generally the unique equilibrium, and, for some parameter values, there is an equilibrium in which the majority‐preferred alternative is less likely than the alternative preferred only by the minority to be the outcome.

Evidence suggests that increasing the descriptive representation of groups improves their substantive representation. What underpins this link? Many writing on the subject stop short of arguing explicitly that it is 'shared experience' within groups. I argue that we should embrace the potential conceptual and empirical benefits of framing representation through experience. To do this, we should think of experience specifically in terms of the epistemic content and capacities gained through subjective experience. These can allow individuals to think about the world in distinct ways. I reframe the idea that experiences might be shared within groups and ameliorate concerns that that the concept is essentialist, drawing out the political relevance of my argument. This has the strategic implication that we should be unafraid to argue in favour of political presence on the basis of (shared) experience, and the empirical implication that future research should consider subjective experience more closely.

This dissertation considers the relationship between the opinions voters have on issues and the positions politicians take on them. The first chapter makes a methodological intervention into existing literature, showing that to understand these relationships we must examine one issue at a time, not boil down the preferences of voters and politicians to summaries of their ideologies. It then considers some implications of this distinction. The second chapter elaborates one of these implications, the implications of polarization for representation. This chapter argues for a different set of implications than is typically drawn. The final chapter then adopts this approach to bring a new perspective to a neglected question: how do politicians see their constituents? By investigating this question in individual issues, the final chapter illustrates the utility of the approach and raises new questions for scholars to consider.

If I were to sum up the revolution that has occurred in the humanities (and increasingly in the social sciences) in the past two decades, it would be to say that what was before seen as substance is now seen as representation. One could expand on that statement in several ways:what was before seen as nature or reason is now seen as convention or artifact; what was before a logic of necessity is now a highly contingent,even random relation of terms whose connections obey no necessary order; what was before a ground or foundation from which reasonable derivatives could be deduced and applied to different situations is now itself the effect of contextual situations and systems of signification;what was before rationalist axiomatics is now rhetorical agonistics. At stake here, of course, is a very old battle; we have been hearing about it for at least 2500 years, ever since people first began to feel the need for written laws and interpreters, philosophers and judges. With those developments came a sense that the terms in which social order--and with it, as always, social power-would be defined somehow had a bearing on the terms in which that world would be represented in the dominant forms of social knowledge. From the start, how we represented the world to ourselves had something to do with how we came together in societies, how we forced other people to do our labor for us, how we dealt with those who disagreed with our particular conception of what it meant to be part of our society. If a certain difference in representation would always have something to do with social change, the elevation to dominance of certain very powerful representations would also always have something to do with how societies immunized themselves against social change. In this Article I will suggest some ways in which the philosophical revolution of recent decades, which is usually associated with post words like post-structuralism and postmodernism, might help us think about the way societies are held in place by regimes of ...