The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (231 page)

 
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Seeking to capitalize on the scarcity value of a good or service. The term was coined by Anne Krueger , 1974, for an activity classically described by Gordon Tullock in 1967. Economic rent may be informally defined as the extra earnings a factor of production (land, labour, or capital) may secure from scarcity. This scarcity may be artificially created by governments, for instance when they give a firm, a cartel, or a union the monopoly right to supply their factor of production. Tullock pointed out that it is worth while for those seeking such monopolies to bid anything up to the full scarcity value of the monopoly in an attempt to get it. Suppose, for instance, that a government will give just one airline the monopoly right to operate between two cities. Everyone knows that the winner of this licence will be able to charge a premium price for the whole duration of the licence. Each airline is therefore willing to spend anything up to the whole value of this premium in lobbying and bribing the government to try to get the licence. Thus the whole value of the monopoly would be dissipated in what Jagdish Bhagwati has labelled ‘directly unproductive activities’. In the perspective of these writers, most lobbying is extremely wasteful.

 
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In Parliament, after a committee has examined legislation, it ‘reports’ the bill back to the house, when further amendments can be proposed. See also
bill
.

 
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One of the core concepts of politics, but elusive because it is used with incompatible meanings in different contexts. The verb ‘to represent’ originally referred to the arts. To act a play was literally to ‘re-present’ its characters through the actors. This usage survives in phrases like ‘you represented to me that …’. Then from the sixteenth century it came also to mean ‘to act for, by a deputed right’. Usually it implied one person acting for one other, as with a lawyer representing a client, or an ambassador representing a monarch. But it could also refer to one (legal) person acting on behalf of a group of people, as in the first and still the most influential discussion in political theory, chapter 16 of
Hobbes's
Leviathan
. Hobbes's Sovereign need not be literally one person—any assembly with an odd number of members may be the Sovereign. But he treats it throughout as a single legal person representing a group of clients, each pair of whom have made a pact to hand their rights of nature over to the Sovereign. From this it was an easy step, first taken during the English Civil War, to the third and now commonest usage: ‘to be accredited deputy or substitute for … in a legislative or deliberative assembly; to be a member of Parliament for’ (
Oxford English Dictionary
, ‘represent’ senses 1 and 8; ‘representation’ senses 1, 7, and 8). Representation as picture leads to the ‘microcosm’ conception. During the American Revolution, John
Adams
said that the legislature ‘should be an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large, as it should think, feel, reason, and act like them’. This conception lies behind the phrase ‘statistically representative’. Technically, a sample is representative of a population if each member of the population had an equal probability of being chosen for the sample. Informally, it is representative if the sample includes the same proportion of each relevant subgroup as the population from which it is drawn ( see
survey research
). In political discussion, relevant subgroups are usually groups of a certain age, sex, class, and/or racial division.
The principal-agent conception (‘acting on behalf of’) has a clear meaning when one person acts on behalf of one other. The agent acts in the principal's interests, with a degree of leeway that varies from case to case. How much leeway political representatives ought to have is one of the hallowed debates of political theory ( see
Burke
;
virtual representation
). The interpretation of the principal-agent conception when one agent acts for many principals, as in the case of a legislator, is less clear. An electoral district may have interests, but only individuals can express interests. How is the legislator to decide whom to represent when his or her constituents disagree? One answer is that the legislator represents the majority of those who voted; but that is not necessarily true, unless a majoritarian electoral system such as
alternative vote
was used. It is frequently untrue in
plurality
electoral systems.
The microcosm and principal-agent conceptions may conflict. If MPs are a microcosm of the electorate in every relevant respect, but fail to do what the voters want, they are representative in the first sense but not the second; and conversely if they do what the voters want without being statistically representative of them. Microcosm conceptions of representation are associated with
proportional representation
, and principal-agent conceptions with majoritarianism. The PR school looks at the composition of a parliament; majoritarians look at its decisions.
Another dimension of fair representation concerns boundaries, districting, and the meaning of ‘one vote, one value’. In the United States, since the landmark decision in
Baker v. Carr
(1962), the courts have enforced exact mathematical equality of Congressional district populations, but have engaged in a futile struggle to obtain the proportionately correct number of ‘majority-minority’ districts—that is, districts where Afro-Americans or Hispanic Americans form the majority of the district population. By contrast, the United Kingdom tolerates, with almost no public discussion, variations in constituency electorates from 22,784 to 99,838 (1992 figures). Thus two regimes both regarded as representative democracies can rely on widely differing concepts of representation.

 
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Generally interpreted to refer to a form of government where a legislature with significant decision-making powers is freely elected. It is also sometimes argued that representatives should reflect the social and gender composition of the electorate.
WG