This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com. Up to 10% of the population are left-handed. So should 10% of our political

representatives also be left-handed? That seems ludicrous. There are

however calls for legislatures in democracies to mirror the population in other ways,

to have roughly 50% women, for example.

So is there something significantly different about gender or race that might justify a quota when it would be absurd for left-handers.

Does the gender or race of our elected officials matter or is all that matters their views and competence?

After all a progressive male may be more supportive of, say, child care

than a reactionary female.

Anne Phillips is professor of political and gender theory at the London School of Economics.

Anne Phillips, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Very glad to be here.

We're going to focus on political representation.

I wonder if we could just clarify at the outset what we mean by political representation.

Well, in any democracy in the world today, the number of citizens is too large to have anything

that you might call a participatory democracy in which we all get together and make our decisions as a group.

So in all democracies nowadays we have a system of political representation in which we select the people who are to represent

us in making decisions on our behalf.

The difficulty that then arises is how do we ensure that our representatives are

accountable, but also in our representatives are accountable?

But also, in what sense are they truly representative?

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