ABSTRACT
Over 30 years ago these words opened the seminal study of representational roles by Heinz Eulau and his associates, prompting in successive decades innumerable studies seeking replication in a variety of countries,2 and these words still provide an impetus for the study of representational roles in the 1990s. Over the years, however, the emphasis within this sentence has increasingly been directed away from the ‘function’ towards the ‘problem’ of representation. In this analytical odyssey, the initial conception of representative roles along bipolar lines of ‘style’ (‘trusteemandate’) and ‘focus’ (‘nation-district’) has attracted much criticism, not least from one of its original proponents.3 As the complexity of modern legislative representation, both as an analytical construct and as empirical reality, came to be acknowledged, so further western studies sought ‘to understand how [representatives] make choices when conflicts arise on policy questions’.4 The centrality of
representation, both as a concept and as political practice, has thus been widely acknowledged in studies of western parliamentary democracies.
