Michael Saward

The Representative Claim

Recent work on the idea of political representation has challenged effectively orthodox accounts of constituency and interests. However, discussions of representation need to focus more on its dynamics prior to further work on its forms. To that end, the idea of the representative claim is advanced and defended. Focusing on the representative claim helps us to: link aesthetic and cultural representation with political representation; grasp the importance of performance to representation; take non-electoral representation seriously; and to underline the contingency and contestability of all forms of representation. The article draws upon a range of sources and ideas to sketch a new, broader and more complex picture of the representative claim which — despite the complexity — helps us to reconnect representation theory to pressing real-world challenges.

Democratic innovation : deliberation, representation and association

About the book: Democratic Innovation is an original look at the political future of democracy, exploring the latest ideas aimed at renewing popular power. Featuring new writings by leading European, American and Australian democratic theorists, this book explores the following themes: * the importance of public deliberation in democracies * how effective representation for all might be acheived * the role that voluntary associations can play in democratic governance

Framing the Good Citizen

This article interrogates the norms of good citizenship invoked in and across different social domains, using the example of citizenship education in the UK as one field in which good citizenship is constituted. It is possible to make visible the political struggle inherent in the mechanisms of framing the good citizen by unpacking the differences between citizenship as acts, status and virtues. This is a necessary step in assessing good citizenship claims in the absence of moral and political absolutes. We deploy a two-tiered account of Butlers theory of performativity to examine how ordinary citizenship acts are preceded by elite rhetorical framing. We conclude that citizenship, like democracy, is always enacted in particular contexts in which positioning, method and motives play an important part.

In search of the hollow crown

The first volume in a series of comparative studies within the ESRCs Whitehall Programme focuses on core executives in five parliamentary democracies comparing the Westminster model as in Australia, Canada and Britain with the continental democracies of Germany and the Netherlands showing how political leadership is shackled by a vast array of constraints, from globalisation to internal fragmentation and rationalisation, making a heroic model of decisive political leadership hard to sustain.

Making Representations: Modes and Strategies of Political Parties

This article critically addresses the varied ways in which political parties can be said to represent. Three important ideal-typical modes of party representation are outlined: the popular, the statal, and the reflexive. Arguments are offered for countering the common view that, for example, popular modes are the most democratic, and statal modes the least democratic. Statal modes in particular are often taken to be an indicator of a decline in parties’ representative functions; however, shifting modes of party representation often have more to do with strategic choices and contextual pressures than democratic ideals. No one ideal-typical mode is intrinsically more democratic than others. Further, there is evidence that a new mode of party representation, the reflexive, may be emerging; parties may be transforming into something they never were in order to continue to do the things they have always sought to do. Whether democracy is unthinkable save for political parties is no longer the question we need to ask. Rather, we need to ask: what kinds of representative democracy are thinkable? And what forms of party claims, if any, are appropriate to them?

Shape-Shifting Representation

Shape-shifting representation is common in practice but largely shunned in theoretical and empirical analysis. This article resurrects, defines, and explores shape-shifting and closely linked concepts and practices such as shape-retaining. It generates new concepts of representative positioning and patterning in order to aid our understanding, and makes the case for placing this critical phenomenon front and center in the analysis of political representation. It examines crucial empirical and normative implications for our understanding of representation, including the argument that shape-shifting representation is not intrinsically undesirable. Developing the theory of shape-shifting representation can prompt a new level of analytical purchase on the challenge of explaining and evaluating representations vitality and complexity.

THE SUBJECT OF REPRESENTATION

Who does, and who can, represent women? How and where do they do it? What are we to make of competing claims to represent women? Is a higher number of women in parliaments the key to better representing women’s interests? These are some of the key questions tackled by the articles in this special issue of Representation on the substantive representation of women. And it quickly becomes evident that to tackle these questions one must also confront in turn the fundamental questions that lie behind them, above all ‘What does it mean for one person or group to represent another?’. The idea and practice of political representation has, of course, long been subject of debate, in the UK and well beyond. This journal has played its role in charting and contributing to these debates, not least in the area of electoral systems and the styles of representation they produce. In recent years, a new set of controversies has arisen around representation. Varied aspects of ‘globalisation’ have led commentators to question how representation can or should work on regional or global levels (Held 1995; Dryzek 2006). Environmentalists have questioned the ability of our existing representative systems to encompass the interests of ‘nature’, future generations of people, and non-human animals (Dobson 1996). And political parties, supposedly the key vehicles of representation, have lost members and support, as large numbers of people in many countries and regions turn to social movements, or away from mainstream politics, in seeking to ‘have their views represented’ (van Biezen 2003; Mair 2006). Among academic observers and political actors there is a widespread sense that we are facing a crisis of representation. Perhaps not surprisingly, a sense of crisis, or at least renewed concern, about the adequacy of our existing machinery of political representation is also proving to be a time of creative thinking about what representation may mean, and where we can find it. This special issue both shows how that creative thinking has occurred with respect to the critical issue of the representation of women, and seeks to make its own original contribution to the analysis of representation in general, and of women in particular. The emphasis in the articles that follow is on the idea of representation, but the discussion is rooted in cases and examples from the European Union in particular, but also from other regions such as Latin America. Indeed, one message arising from these articles is that we need to look at the theory and the practice of representation as part of a single process, if we are to capture ‘what is going on in political representation’ (a phrase that guided contributions to the European Consortium for Political Research workshop in Helsinki in 2007, directed by Karen Celis and Sarah Childs, on the substantive representation of women which gave rise to this special issue). At the heart of each of these contributions is questioning and argument about the subject of representation, in two senses—(1) what is it about? and (2) who does it? Take the first of these. What political and indeed other (e.g. artistic or cultural) phenomena should we look at when we think about political representation? Commonly, we think of

Reconstructing democracy : current thinking and new directions

Todays Democratic Theory Offers Sketches Of Tomorrows democratic polity. How innovative, and how compelling, are the visions it offers us? This article explores possible democratic futures by scanning a selection of todays key democratic innovations – cosmopolitan, deliberative, ‘politics of presence’, ecological, associative and party-based direct models – in the light of a set of six central issues useful for examining the core aspects of democratic theories. It concludes by suggesting a way forward in which insights from diverse innovations might helpfully be accommodated within an overarching framework. Overall, it represents a deliberate attempt at a birds eye view of the subject; the aim is to be suggestive rather than definitive. The scope of the analysis is broad but quite strictly qualified in the following ways: the six innovative ideas scrutinized arise from, and largely address, countries of the rich North rather than the developing South; they do not exhaust the range of current innovations in democratic theory; and they are based largely on English-language sources.

Slow theory: taking time over transnational democratic representation

The possibility for transnational democratic representation is a huge topic. This article is restricted to exploring two unconventional aspects. The first concerns ‘the representative claim’, extending one critical part of previous analysis of the assessment of such claims, especially by largely unelected transnational actors. The second, which strongly conditions the account of the first, concerns ‘slow theory’ as the way to approach building democratic models and, in particular, to approach transnational democratic representation.

The wider canvas : representation and democracy in state and society

The future of democracy will hinge in part on what practices we think of as representative, and how they might be, or become, democratic. Claims and practices of diverse actors, from NGOs to celebrity activists to spiritual leaders, and new devices of governance such as participatory budgets and citizens juries, are challenging received ideas of democratic representation. Elected national legislatures remain vital parts of this picture, as the contributions of Wessels and Beetham in this volume (chapters four and six) make clear. But there is a practical broadening and diversifying of representative claims and practices that has an impact on our very ideas of democratic representation. The core task of this chapter is to scan and interrogate key tensions that extending the idea of representation brings into focus.