IN his famous speech to the electors of Bristol at the conclusion of the poll (when he was elected to Parliament as a member for Bristol) Edmund Burke expressed his now famous “trustee” view of representation.  

Burke writes: “Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole – where not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. 

“You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament.”

Representative democracy is often poetically described as government “of the people, by the people, for the people”, it is not only “the people” who are represented: political parties, ideologies, states, business, unions, the environmental movement – to name but a few – are also represented. 

Furthermore, even the very notion of “the people” is amorphous as a representative cannot possibly represent the full diversity of “the people” and all their divergent and conflicting interests.

These complexities actually relate to the actors rather than the institutions. 

That is, the practice of being a representative and the act of representing is less straightforward than the institutions of political representation, as the institutional norms are clearly defined. In this regard, 

HW Blom defines representation “as a set of procedures or rules that select people to formulate and legislate the public interest in an accountable way … representation is the accountable aggregation of interests”.
 
In their role of ensuring public accountability, elected representatives need to agree on what accountability means and the standards reasonable to expect. 

Accountability is the obligation to answer for the discharge of responsibilities.  We can think of public accountability as the obligation to answer publicly for the discharge of responsibilities that affect the public in important ways.
 
In the reporting example we know best – published financial statements – “affect the public in important ways” means the accounting concept of materiality, or significance of reported information to a reader. 

If a set of financial statements is wrong, incomplete, or otherwise misleading, would knowing the real situation make a difference to the decisions of an investor using the statements? 

In the public sector, we need public answering for the discharge of responsibilities when the answering can be expected to make a difference to people’s judgments.

In the public sector, accountability reporting is needed for a wide range of responsibilities, not just financial stewardship.
 
To hold to account, we need to distinguish responsibility from accountability. Responsibility means the obligation to act. Accountability means the obligation to answer for one’s actions.
 
In one short sentence, Malaysian elected representatives need to be responsible and be accountable and valiantly clamour for the Auditor-General’s 1MDB Report!

* Hakimi Abdul Jabar reads The Malaysian Insight.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.