ECPR Joint Sessions, Edinburgh 2003

Workshop 14, Political Representation Final report

This workshop was set up to encourage engagement between researchers working on quite different aspects of political representation. It was built on the conviction that the time was ripe for rethinking the concept, and that fresh perspectives across traditional intellectual boundaries would be essential to that task. The workshop succeeded well in exploiting these opportunities and beginning a series of new and promising conversations. Symbolic, electoral, deliberative, network, cultural and other modes of representation were debated; legislatures and committees and civil forums, the street and the recording studio were discussed and compared (and applauded and decried) as sites of representation. We considered theoretical models and specific instances and events from electoral alignments in Ireland to Zapatista politics in Chiapas, Mexico, and the meanings of voting in South African townships. The workshop was widely felt to be a success in opening up new theoretical and empirical possibilities, and for establishing a new network of scholarly cooperation among participants drawn from twelve different countries. There were no conclusions, but plenty of questions one, contested list of questions we took away from the workshop were these:

1. When we interrogate one aspect of representation, what other aspects do we have to silence in order to do our work (e.g. those conducting voting studies must silence doubts about the unity of the subject)?

2. Can material and symbolic modes of political representation be analyzed together? Should they be so analyzed? Are they inevitably intertwined? 3. How much do elections really matter in creating legitimate, democratic representation? 4. How and why do nonelected representatives claim and gain democratic legitimacy? 5. Do the imperfections and inconsistencies in any system of representation practice always falls short of the theory render representative politics in any sense mythical, and does it matter? 6. Does context rule? Can anything sensible be said about representational practices and ideas beyond concrete contexts? 7. Can networks, as well as assemblies, be accountable democratically, and if so how? Can they represent? 8. How sho uld representative assemblies be composed? If there is no ideal composition, can practices (such as deliberation) overcome technical or generic problems of membership? 9. What matters about chains of representation that citizens form the first link, that they are at several links, or is it the number of links overall? 10. What are the roles of the representative, and does anyone really play them? Should we add mediator and champion to delegate and trustee?

With a disparate set of participants bringing to the table quite different assumptions, we debated tensions within political science and political theory approaches to representation. For example, there was some criticism that theoretical work did not pay enough attention to empirical studies, so that theorists assumptions about (e.g.)

representatives responsiveness to constituents were not always robust. The idea of the politics of presence was questioned for its not necessarily being gable to represent the sheer diversity of the contemporary demos. Consensus models of democracy were taken to task on the grounds that their democratic claims are perhaps not as strong as it is often supposed, especially when pertinent questions are asked about accountability. At more local levels, especially in the UK, two papers showed us the complexity and diversity of claims to be representative, and how these play in particular contexts; and these dovetailed with a more theoretical paper which explored the nature of the representative claim. One provocative is sue raised in a number of papers was the status of elections to democratic representation do we have an election fixation? Do elections confer consent at any rate?

Other papers were of a more anthropological bent. We examined how different (political) cultures expect different behaviours from their representatives, in terms of separation and likeness for instance. Discussion of discourse analysis of recent experience of gender quota laws in Switzerland and France focussed in particular on how we could get at discourses which enabled and constrained certain views of representation. Developments in the European Union prompted discussion about the addition of direct or interest group representation to territorial representation, along with an increasing professionalisation of representation at the EU level. At the other end of the scale, one paper used Scandinavian data to show that citizens are increasingly focusing their political interests outside the traditional political sphere, asking whe ther citizens are seeking new channels for political representation in our more global age. The discussion here centred on the concept of individualized collective action and the general critical globalization movement.

In sum, we raised some provocative questions, many of them both important and unusual in the study of political representation. Through a range of approaches and cases we underlines the increasing importance of the understanding of a complex practice representation if we are to grasp key political developments in Europe and elsewhere.

Michael Saward Open University (workshop director)