With large numbers of voters and issues, direct democracy is impossible. Even in polities sufficiently small so that all individuals can actually come together to debate and decide issues – say, a polity of 500 – it is impossible for all individuals to present their own views, even rather briefly, on every issue. Thus the “chairman's problem” is to select individuals to represent the various positions most members of the polity are likely to hold (de Jouvenal, 1961). When the polity is too large to assemble together, representatives must be selected by some means.

The public choice literature has focused on three aspects of representative democracy: the behavior of representatives both during the campaign to be elected and while in office; the behavior of voters in choosing representatives; and the characteristics of the outcomes under representative democracy. The public choice approach assumes that representatives, like voters, are rational economic actors bent on maximizing their utilities. Although it is natural to assume that voters' utilities are functions of the baskets of public goods and services they consume, the “natural assumption” concerning what maximizes a representative's utility is not as easily made.