Retrospective Voting and Political Representation

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.