Very quickly, thank you very much. That question is very, very dear to my heart and central to my current work, as a matter of fact.
There is good reason why Edmund Burke, a few hundred years back, speaking to the electors of Bristol, actually argued something very similar to what you said. When you elect your representative, he should be free. He should be your agent, representing according to his wisdom of expertise what he thinks is best for the constituency.
You would think, and you should think, that should include the right to cross the floor, to leave a party if that can be defended on justifiable grounds to accord with the changing needs and preferences of the constituency.
The problem is that in the intervening more than 200 years, political parties have developed—functioning, modern political parties. When you have a functioning party system, that accountability, the linkage that you so eloquently described connecting the voter and the representative, gets complicated and becomes triangular, because all of a sudden you have a political party that also galvanizes interest, that also wants to capture the preferences and the interests of the voters, and that also has the representatives to become the representative. That direct connection becomes triangulated.
That's why countries and parliaments around the world, and more and more of them, are grappling with this issue.