Surely the best measure of whether a politician speaks for the people is whether he or she is elected. I disagree. With electoral systems in which a candidate

Surely the best measure of whether a politician speaks for the people is whether he or she is elected. I disagree. With electoral systems in which a candidate can win with ten percent of the vote (because nobody else scored more than ten percent), or where a party can win 12% of the vote and end up with 0.15% of the seats (as a specific example from recent western history), a politician being elected is simply not a measure of speaking for the people.