What happens to conventional understandings about democratic representation when responsibility for policy formulation moves to new “governance networks”? Carolyn Hendriks explores this question in the current issue of Governance (22.4).  Examining participants in networks engaged in Dutch energy reform, Hendriks finds a “complex mix” of understandings about roles, which often “have little to do with conventional democratic understandings.”  Network participants, she says, “were mostly autonomous elites whose ‘democratic work’ is reduced to promoting symbolic messages when politically necessary.”  Read the article: The democratic soup: Mixed meanings of political representation in governance networks.