From the changing significance of national borders and the crises of party politics to fast-paced innovations in information technology and the despair over »post-truth politics«, democratic representation today faces unprecedented challenges on many fronts. In this context, the past twenty years have seen a revival of academic debates around democratic representation, which increasingly point towards the need for a new normative account of representation – something that could be of vital help in advancing public debate and sculping policy responses to many of democracies’ most pressing challenges. To date, however, the literature has yet to yield such an account. One important impediment to the development of a new normative account of representation, I suggest, is a continued tendency within the current literature to fall back on overly simplistic assumptions about the status of representatives as holders of power. Building on Rainer Forst’s notion of noumenal power, I propose to investigate the specific ways in which democratic representatives both exert and are subject to power in the fulfilment of their function. In particular, I will carry out a descriptive and normative analysis of power dynamics in the four relationships and relative spaces of justfication, that are constutive, I argue, of all instances of democratic representation: the relationship between the representative and their group/party/faction/movement; between the representative and the general public; between the representative and representatives of other groups; the relationship of the representative to themselves. In doing so, my research will illuminate new possible paths out of the so-called »normative dead end« in theories of representation. (Clementina Gentile Fusillo)