The Difference Between "Representative" and "Representation"
Do any of these sound familiar? - "The people I represent..." - "Those are the people you voted for..." - "A government of the people, by the people, for the people..." All these are related, as well as many other quotations, to the idea of a representative government system, where the people have "proxy" agents which represent, typically, large groups of individual people. Those agents, colloquially "representatives", then make decisions which govern the lives of the people they nominally represent. The idea being that such a system has a few benefits: a smaller group of people negotiating on policy, the ability to have more informed policy makers, the ability to more quickly make decisions, etc. I'm not going to talk about how well those theories match the reality; that's another discussion. Rather, I'm going to address a per-peeve which has been bothering me recently: the difference between having a representative ...