Representation is the set of institutions through which a political community learns what its members need and want, then turns that direction into public action. The conditions below make that possible. None is sufficient alone; together they prevent representation from becoming a system in which one group substitutes its own preferences for everyone else's.

*Equal recognition.* Every participant's direction has to count in the recognition mechanism with equal structural weight. Equal weight is not a procedural nicety. Unequal weight is a structural substitution: the society being maintained has been changed from the one everyone inhabits to the one the advantaged subset prefers. Gerrymandered districts that dilute some votes and concentrate others, electoral arrangements that weight votes by geography, malapportioned chambers that give some voters multiples of others' representation, and campaign-finance arrangements that convert wealth into direction-setting power: none of these violate equality at the moment of casting. They violate it at the moment of design (Cohen 1989; Beitz 1989; Christiano 2008).

*Sufficient access.* Equal weight without sufficient access is participation theater. A vote that cannot be cast registers nothing, however formally equal its weight would be if cast. The right standard is sufficiency, not uniformity, because the barriers to participation are not uniform: mobility limitations, work-hour inflexibility, language access, distance from polling infrastructure, identification-access barriers. Uniform provision treats sameness as fairness and licenses every failure it does not happen to address. Sufficient access means whatever each person needs in order for their direction to actually be recognized (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2011).

*Continuous recognition.* Episodic election leaves the population's direction unread between elections. Continuous-recognition infrastructure (approval voting on proposals, direction-setting input, implementation review, sunset votes on policies that fail to deliver) operates always-on rather than periodically. The structural-necessity condition is not that any particular continuous-recognition technology be implemented but that the mechanism not be structured to leave direction unread for cycles long enough to allow extraction-tolerant policy to ossify between recognitions.

*Deliberative integration.* Raw direction-aggregation on complex policy without deliberative infrastructure underperforms deliberation-with-integration on every measurable margin. The representative's structural function is reading the population's recognized direction and integrating it into coherent proposals that work and that the population approves. The two halves of representation (continuous recognition by the population, deliberative integration by the representative) are not in tension; they are the structural form direction-recognition takes once both halves are in place (Habermas 1996; Fishkin 2018; Landemore 2020).

*Capture-resistance.* The recognition mechanism has to be structurally protected against being captured by any subset that would use the mechanism to recognize its own direction over the population's. The structural safeguards are not optional architectural features: distributed executive power, rotation of power, an independent judiciary, direct-democracy instruments, and transparency requirements. Each is a structural answer to the same question: how do we prevent the operators of the direction-recognition mechanism from using it to serve themselves? Switzerland's architecture is among the most developed current implementations: popular and cantonal majority for constitutional change, a seven-member Federal Council distributing executive authority across parties, popular votes up to four times per year, citizen-initiated constitutional changes by 100,000 signatures (EIU Democracy Index 2024).

*Information-environment coupling.* Representation quality and information-environment quality are constitutively coupled. A misinformed population cannot recognize direction accurately, however well its recognition mechanism is designed. The structural-necessity condition is that the information environment [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) takes up be maintained at a level adequate for recognized direction to be the population's actual direction rather than the population's manipulated direction. Representation reform without information-environment reform produces smaller effects than reformers anticipate.

*Incentive-alignment.* The people charged with maintaining public institutions should be compensated according to how well those institutions serve the population: whether the conditions of maximum possibility are met, thriving is broadly distributed, real wages rise, health and life expectancy improve, and civic participation remains strong. Their pay should not instead track activity volume, budget size, or proximity to power. Where compensation-growth follows the path that strengthens the conditions of participation, the incentive aligns with the function. Singapore's indexed-to-private-sector ministerial salaries are one direction; indexing to the median-subject welfare benchmark is the direction the framework derives.

Together, these seven conditions are what representation as direction-recognition structurally requires: no one of them dispensable, and only in combination do they deliver substantive direction-recognition. From those conditions, [§9.3.3](<9.3.3 What is Predicted.md>) generates its predictions.


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← [9.3.1 What is Disputed](<9.3.1 What is Disputed.md>) | [9.3.3 What is Predicted](<9.3.3 What is Predicted.md>) →
