The legitimacy of representative government is under scrutiny from various angles. One criticism concerns how representative and equal it is. This criticism is concerned with how well parliament, and the executive represent the wishes of everyone and how far this representation is equal. While ‘representation’ and ‘equality’ are complex plural notions we can still see how representative democracy can fail even partial versions of these concepts. The attack on some of the central features of equal representation include the fairness of different voting systems; the fairness of ‘one person one vote’ (OPOV); the manipulability and actual manipulation of elections. In this paper we argue that part of the problem is that some people have too great and expectation of what any system of government can provide. However, even given reasonable expectations representative government can fail to be equal or representative. We argue that politics – like social life itself – can be seen as a ‘game’, by which we mean people use strategies by which to live their lives. Strategies do not have to be malign; nor do they have to be self-interested. They can be used for both moral and immoral purposes. We define two sorts of gaming pertinent to electoral politics: institutional gaming and behavioural gaming. We then assess how when institutional and behavioural gaming are malign and threaten democratic legitimacy, and when they are benign, indeed part of what democracy actually entails.
