Abstract
Parties and unions are grounded on the concept of representation.However, historically political representation has not always been expressed by them. Indeed, the experience of the first parliaments shows that the rule was the binding of the mandate. Basically, the representative's activity was limited to an oral exposure of the content of the cahiers de doléances prepared by the constituency that elected him.During the French Revolution the binding mandate was an issue to discuss. During the drafting of the Constitution of 1793, Robespierre questioned the liability of representatives and public officials towards the “sovereign people” with his famous speech “On the constitution and representative government”.The Jacobins immediately realized that once the political autonomy of the representatives has been guaranteed, the accountability of the mandate was lacking and consequently the political essence of the connection between the representative and the represented should be enhanced. Following Rousseau's theories, Robespierre argued that popular sovereignity could not be represented: "The domain of the people only lasts a day" and, in any case, "its delegates are corruptible". This awareness causes the fall of the illusion that the will of the absent (the represented) can find immediate expression in those who are present (the representative). This leads to the necessary debate on how to maintain communication between voters and elected officials. Even more than two hundred years later, these criticisms have not lost their relevance and, as then, methods of participation and control of the representatives by the governed must still be provided in many legal systems. This abstract analyzes the idea proposed by the Five Star Movement, that is a political party represented in both the Italian Parliament and in the European Parliament. This idea would consider the prohibition of the binding mandate as the key for a possible choice to face the irresponsibility of MPs in political life against laxity and corruption.