The Good Representative

"The Good Representative is a real service not just to the scholarly community but to general readers and ordinary citizens. Dovi puts forth clear criteria for judging those who aspire to speak in our name and defends them with vigor and clarity but always in just the civil and inclusive tone that she calls for in politicians. This is a comprehensive and careful work of synthesis, pulling together material from ethics, political science, and democratic theory that is not often mastered by one author, but it is something more: a work of true originality that will make even those who think they they know all the arguments about representation think again."
—Andrew Sabl, Harvard University

"The Good Representative is an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on political representation, and one that speaks directly to a wide range of debates within democratic theory and professional ethics as well. Relying on an original application of Aristotelian functionalism to political representation, Dovi argues that good representatives should be fair minded, build trust, and serve as good gatekeepers. Doing so, they will realize three key values of civic equality, self governance and inclusion. In addition to providing guidelines for good representatives, Dovi's argument has the added virtue of providing guidance for democratic citizens as well. Provocative and subtle, theoretically sophisticated yet well grounded in contemporary politics, Dovi's argument deserves to reach a wide audience concerned with both the academic and practical state of democracy and political representation today. It is a critical argument for critical times."
—Andrew Rehfeld, Wasington University in St Louis