Andrew Rehfeld is an Associate Professor, Director of Undergraduate Studies, and the Director of the Political Theory Workshop.

Rehfeld joined Washington University in 2001 after receiving an M.P.P. (Public Policy) and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. His work centers on the relationship between democracy and political representation. Rehfeld has additional interests in the political thought of the Hebrew Bible, and the relationship between political theory and the social sciences more generally. His first book, The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy and Institutional Design was published by Cambridge University Press (2005) and asked why we use territorial boundaries to determine how we get represented. It is also the subject of a symposium in the journal Polity (April 2008). 

Abstract
In this paper I claim that there is no particular ethics of political representation, that is, no particular ethics of what representatives should do on account of their being representatives. I argue that the purported ethical obligation of representatives, captured in the “trustee/delegate” distinction, obscures 3 subsidiary distinctions of aims, sources of judgment, and motivation critical to answering the question, “how should representatives vote on legislation?” When we put the problem in these terms, the central substantive question of what representatives should do reduces to the familiar conflict between democratic authority and substantive justice; that is, the conflict between doing what in some sense ought to be done in cases where those to whom it is done do not approve. But in the end, this turns into a problem for the exercise of power in general, whether using political representation or not. Treating the “trustee/delegate problem” as unique or even particular to political representation is thus a serious conceptual error.