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The following overview concerns the concept of political theory and how “representation” is interpreted.

Hanna Pitkin compares the concept of political representation to “a rather complicated, convoluted, three-dimensional structure in the middle of a dark enclosure”. Political theorists provide “flash-bulb photographs of the structure taken from different angles”. More specifically, political theorists have provided four main views of the concept of representation. Unfortunately, Pitkin never explains how these different views of political representation fit together. At times, she implies that the concept of representation is unified. At other times, she emphasises the conflicts between these different views, e.g., how descriptive representation is opposed to accountability. Drawing on her flash-bulb metaphor, Pitkin argues that one must know the context in which the concept of representation is placed in order to determine its meaning. Apparently, the views of representation can expand or unduly constrain our understanding of representation depending on how the ways in which the term is used in contemporary politics.

The passage refers to the flash-bulb metaphor in order to illustrate that the views of political representation are:

A. varied mental images.
B. copies of other views.
C. kaleidoscopic.
D. illusory.