ABSTRACT
The last five chapters have described the legislator-constituent relationship in Sri Lanka. This chapter attempts to pull the themes of those five chapters together and offer some suggestions about the nature of representation in Sri Lanka. It elaborates on four significant findings of this study. The first of these is that there are two dimensions to representation in Sri Lanka and that these dimensions tend to correspond to different components of the legislator's job. One dimension is what will be called a "standing for" dimension, which tends to correspond to the law-making component of the job, while the second dimension will be called the "acting for" dimension and corresponds to the constituency service and development work components of a Sri Lankan MP's job. These are discussed in more depth later in this chapter. When legislators "stand for" their constituents there is a tendency for the issues that they deal with to be of national importance and thus this dimension corresponds roughly to the congruence model of representation discussed in Chapter 1. When legislators "act for" their constituents on constituency service and development work, they establish a relationship that will be described as an on-going process with the legislator processing constituent demands. This dimension differs quite radically from the other and from the literature on representation in the United States. The second and third findings concern the significance of the MPs' stress on constituency service and development work. The second finding deals with the importance of this stress as a part of Third World policy needs while the third finding concerns the importance of this stress on constituency needs on Sri Lanka's relatively successful experiment with democracy. The fourth finding deals with the influence that the electoral system may exert on representation. Before discussing these four findings, several important points from the last five chapters are summarized in order to provide a background for the arguments made later in this chapter.
