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14 Hague J. on Rule L. 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/hagjuote14 and id is 1 raw text is: Hague Journal on the Rule of Law (2022) 14:1-25 https:Ildoi.org/l 0.1007/s40803-021-00163-5 ARTICLE Rule of Law and Political Representation Donald Bello Hutt' Accepted: 16 October 2021 / Published online: 2 November 2021 © The Author(s) 2021 Abstract How do the rule of law and political representation relate to each other? I answer this question, hitherto neglected by rule-of-law scholars, taking my cue from Joseph Raz's revision of his conception of the rule of law and by relying on a distinction between preferences and interests, which pervades discussions of political represen- tation. I argue that political representatives' attention to their constituents' prefer- ences, and not just their interests, is a necessary feature of a conception of represen- tation that expresses a robust allegiance to the rule of law. More specifically, that such allegiance is better honoured when representatives are responsive to prefer- ences warranted by public interests. I offer two groups of rule-of-law reasons for that claim. First, because respect for preferences by representatives facilitates the conditions for the law to be obeyed. Second, respect for those preferences through the justification of the representatives' collective decisions allows for accountability and for non-arbitrary creation and application of the law. I finish addressing a three- fold objection to my reliance on preferences as objects that representatives should consider when making their decisions. Keywords Rule of law - Representation - Preferences - Public interests Constitutionalism 1 Introduction We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it. The quip, attributed to a former Prime Minister of Luxembourg, suggests that the duties of representatives and what their electors prefer are two different things. Consider one of those duties: representatives must respect the rule of law. Nothing controversial about that. However, this also implies that politicians could E Donald Bello Hutt donald.bello@uva.es Assistant Professor, Moral and Political Philosophy, Philosophy Department, University of Valladolid, Plaza del campus s/n, 47011 Valladolid, Spain 2 Research Collaborator, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium 9 Springer 0 ASSER