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The micro-mega rule says that for representation of small parties, it helps to have large assembly sizes, large district magnitudes, and large quotas or large gaps between divisors in seat allocation formulas. Conversely, large parties would prefer small assemblies, magnitudes and quotas — but only if they are absolutely certain to stay large. Worldwide tendency has been to play it safe and move toward more inclusive representation. The number of parties increases with increasing ‘seat product’ — the number of seats in the assembly times the number of seats in the average district — unless the seats are allocated by plurality in multi-seat districts.

This chapter reprises the argument that representation—of women or of other historically under-represented groups—is a multistage, conflictual, and contingent process. It returns to and assesses the three propositions based on what the studies included in this volume tell us regarding their implications. Findings indicate that representation of women's interests can promote greater representation of women, or backlash; that it is important for groups pursuing representation of their interests to have advocates in the right government venues, and that their descriptive representatives also have incentives to act for the group; and that answers to the question of “who provides representation” depend on the definition of interests adopted by the researcher. The chapter also concludes that representation may be context and venue specific. The chapter calls for future research and offers some tentative hypotheses in three broad areas to move forward our understanding of representation of historically under-represented groups: study of inclusive versus exclusive representation; enhanced theorizing and empirical studies of political opportunity structures and of diversity within groups; and the dynamics of representation.

This chapter explores some of the normative implications of the constructivist turn in the theory and practice of representative democracy, taking as its point of departure the constructivist framework of representative claims set by Michael Saward. Saward’s account succeeds from a descriptive point of view, but does not provide us with normative criteria to evaluate whether a given representative claim is democratic. This chapter finds in the standard account of representation by Hanna Pitkin a conception of representation as composition, which provides a strong democratic criterion to evaluate representation. It distinguishes between two ideal-typical conceptions of representation compatible with constructivism: representation as imposition, developed most notably by Pierre Bourdieu, in which the represented get their social identities from their representative; and representation as proposition, in which the represented acquire in the process of representation not just their identity but also some agency to judge it – a view of representation that is at the core of pragmatic sociology. The conclusion suggests possible criteria for representation as proposition and propose inclusiveness as a democratic criterion that can form the basis of an alternate ideal of representation, inclusive representation.