Guillermo O'Donnell believed he had discovered in delegative democracies a new “species” of the genus democracy. But a long tradition of theorists of representative government would find much that is familiar in the Latin American scenarios he observed. The scenario – voters seem to elect a government to carry out some policies, governments don't seem to follow voters' wishes, and voters turn against them – is not at all foreign to representative governments that O'Donnell would be unlikely to call delegative democracies. In the first preceding epigraph, a British Member of Parliament railed against William Gladstone, a fellow Liberal, because of his government's immediate postelection change of course (on the question of Irish home rule.) The Marquess of Hartington's criticisms would be repeated, a century later, by critics of Latin American policy switchers.

Just how important mandates are to democracy has been a topic of perpetual disagreement. The abandonment of campaign promises, many claim, is not a perversion of representative democracy but part of its normal functioning.