I don't know the answer, but short terms in office and competitive districts are a way of minimizing the conflict: let the official vote his conscience, so long as the voters can weigh their reprentative's good and bad points after a brief period and choose whether to retain him. If you have to wait six years before you can get rid of the person you elected, he'd better be more faithful to your wishes. Long terms tend to prevent Senators from bearing the full responsibility of their actions (but Congressmen are in such gerrymandered districts that they can get away with a lot, too).
If the governor has the lawful power to grant pardons, then is it not assumed that he is expected to exercise that power, as he sees fit, much in the same way that we expect our representatives to exercise their powers, as they see fit?
"Edmund Burke argued that the only thing a representative owed his constituents was his own best judgment."
To which I would ad, he owes a clear honest representation of his position on salient issues of the day, eg, a governor on capital punishment. If he supports it, he owes it to his state to say so. Then he owes it to them to govern accordingly, if elected.
On the mark as to Burke, with a nice detail about Profiles being "attributed" to JFK. If I recall correctly, Ted Sorenson actually wrote Profiles and Nation of Immigrants, while Arthur Krock wrote While England Slept.
The idea that a representative must act upon the will of the people is absurd. That he ought be immune to it is equally ridiculous.
On the one, it is impossible to say what that public mood may be at any given time. To chase it is to chase a butterfly: if you actually catch it you'll kill it. Most importantly, any given mood may or may not accord to existing statutory and, more importantly, fundamental law.
Burke's beautiful exposition aside, it seems to me that both as a practical matter and one of principle the representative owes the voter nothing except, as Dustin Hawkins says, that which the voters wield over him: the next election. Forgive me, DH, if I misread cynicism into your post -- that's the way I read it -- but I don't see this as twisted or in any way wrong. It is the proper mechanism for reward or punishment of the representative's conscience or vote-baiting, whichever he may choose.
In this sense, and as we saw in the final days of x42, the lame-duck presents a problem to representative democracy in that the voters have no leverage over the lame duck, at least so far as the lame duck cares or dares to piss 'em off. It goes both ways, for, as in 2000, the voters may wish to punish bad behavior, or, as in '96, they may wish to reward the outgoing President by voting in his chosen legacy. On the whole, I think the two-term limit is beneficial in the presidency, and it is certainly consistent with the ideal that the presidency is an office and not a man. Elsewhere, I'm not for term limits, precisely because they cut that representational thread.
The problem with the lame duck is precisely that he no longer represents any interest but his own. X, you may know that I loathe the "stewardship" theory, which is pretty much what Burke is arguing for in the passage presented here. Popular government must be the public will moderated by fundamental law, and among those important divisions of power built into our fundamental law are the simultaneous empowerment and balance of interests and that division by time, the public will as periodically expressed in the 2, 4, and 6-year renewal of the various national elected offices.