ABSTRACT
In a representative democracy elections are arguably the most important medium through which the will of the people is expressed and thus the principal means by which to hold representatives accountable to the people on behalf of those whom they claim to rule. Genuine electoral accountability presupposes, of course, that the will of the people is formed autonomously from, independently of, the political processes that purport to express that will; if the will of the people were merely a creature of the those who govern, it would scarcely be possible to argue that those who govern are kept in check by or are responsive to that will. Democratic accountability requires an authentic popular will. Yet, as we have seen, the authenticity of the popular will is precisely what Joseph Schumpeter, for one, denied: he claimed that what we call the will of the people is oen “faked” or “manufactured” in ways that are “exactly analogous to the ways of commercial advertising.” us, as we also saw, he argues that in a representative democracy elections do not in fact guarantee that the representatives will be responsive to those they are supposed to represent.
