ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an empirical finding: US voters are more "competent" than research into opinion formation once took them to be. Beginning with Gamson and Modigliani, research in public opinion and political psychology has taken what researchers call a "constructionist" or "constructivist" turn from a rational individualist to an environmental or contextual account of preference formation. Following the wave of academic theory that embraced "participatory" democracy in the wake of the Civil Rights, student and anti-war movements, normative scholars have proclaimed a "democratic rediscovery of representation". In 1967, Hanna Pitkin initiated a bolder break with the traditional dyadic model of representation than many of her successors managed. To characterize representation as mobilizing is to call attention to its creative effects and, thereby, to alter expectations about what it ought to do. Hence, this chapter opened with an apparent dilemma: the political environment that enables citizens to form representable preferences renders them susceptible to elite manipulation.
