The next step up from Delegates are Electors, full-time well-paid professionals who each aggregate 4,000 to 25,000 underlying voters from 50 to 200 Delegates. Few voters can talk to their Electors (more than very briefly and on rare occasions), but your Delegate can have some long conversations with them. If a lot of voters are saying the same thing to their Delegate, the Elector is liable to hear about it.
Representatives aggregate Electors, ultimately 300,000 to 3,000,000 underlying votes apiece. There are roughly a thousand of those in all Civilization, at any given time, with social status equivalent to an excellent CEO of a large company or a scientist who made an outstanding discovery inside their own field. Most people haven't heard of any particular one of them, but will be very impressed on hearing what they do for a living.
And above all this, the Nine Legislators of Civilization are those nine candidates who receive the most aggregate underlying votes from Representatives. They vote with power proportional to their underlying votes; but when a Legislator starts to have voting power exceeding twice that of the least powerful Legislator, their power begins to grow sublinearly. By this means is too much power prevented from concentrating into a single politician's hands.