Becoming Representative

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

What performances, practices or claims produce and fail to produce political representation today? In what spatial and temporal contexts? What are the potential gains for theoretical and empirical inquiry in exploring political representation in terms of emergence and dissipation rather than clear-cut present and absence?
Standard accounts of political representation across political science regard it as a formal or legal status achieved by due election. Being a representative is seen as a clear binary matter - a person either is or is not a representative. Recent research has suggested that representation ebbs and flows in more complex patterns (a trend captured well in a newly published collection, Creating Political Presence (2019) eds. Castiglione and Pollak). Representation on this view is a more volatile or unstable phenomenon, and displays more dynamic types or patterns in political life, than it is commonly thought. This line of thought has opened up a space to think about representation as a matter of degrees, the nature of which may reveal themselves in specific political contexts. One becomes over time, and by implication ceases to be over time, a representative in substantive terms. Similarly, one might be perceived as more or less descriptively representative over time. In both types of case, arguably, one is never completely (a) representative – and never entirely without the possibility of being (a) representative. Would-be representatives must present themselves (and be presented) effectively, and perform claims and roles, in an increasingly volatile and divisive politics, if they are to generate or sustain the status.
Featuring participants from four countries, this panel will explore a rich variety of perspectives on the idea of becoming representative – the dynamics, practices, discourses and other cultural factors that, in different contexts, have an impact upon who may claim effectively or legitimately to be (a) representative and how those claims may fare among different constituencies or audiences. The aim of the panel is to bring together and to expand work on an important but neglected aspect of the theory of political representation, in part by working across the boundaries of theory, practice and case studies.
Each paper offers fresh analysis of politically important, challenging themes in US and international political thinking. Aslam addresses historical injustices and activist claims, focusing on the importance of cracks in collective identification in the USA and the critical implications for political representation of Black Americans. The importance of seeing representation as embodied practice, and particularly the emergence of the ‘hyperreal body’ as critical to sustaining embodied representation in today’s media-saturated politics, is examined by Diehl. Nugent explores how relations between members of legislatures can generate new patterns of who can speak or stand for whom. Saward develops concepts and illustrations underpinning the idea and central role of becoming in our developing ideas of representation. These topics do not exhaust this domain of research, but they provide critical new perspectives on representation with regard to race, gender, and media. Taken together, the four papers traverse the formal and the informal, the historical and the contemporary, and structural, electoral and legislative domains.
Questions of method and approach are central to the panel’s deliberations. An important part of the background to this topic is the much-debated constructivist approach to representation that sees identities of representative and represented as mutually constitutive and fluid. So too is the renewed attention paid to non-electoral modes and spaces of representation, and the importance of processes over time through which representation (in varied contexts) becomes crystallized, diminished, or resisted. The importance of practice and performance will also be central methodological threads.
The panel’s focus bears direct relevance to the conference theme of ‘populism and privilege’. Its work places the very character and value of our received ideas of representation – and indeed, in some cases, of liberal representative government – in question in a number of uncompromising populist appeals such as those of Donald Trump in the US, the hard-line Brexiteers in the UK and the French Rassemblement national. All papers address visceral contemporary cases of shifting claims of representation and the resources deployed in them, including who can speak for marginalized interests or groups (and under what conditions).

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Three-fifths - Ali Aslam, Mount Holyoke College

• Becoming a Representative in Mass Media Democracy: The Politician's Third Body - Paula Diehl, Christian Albrechts University of Kiel

• "I'll Make a Male Ally Out of You": Women's Impact on Men in Parliaments - Mary Nugent, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

• Becoming Representative: Key Concepts and Roles - Michael Saward, University of Warwick

Chair

• Melissa S. Williams University of Toronto

Discussant

• Lisa J. Disch University of Michigan, Ann Arbor