Creating Political Presence gives an excellent account of where the constructivist turn in representation is today. The volume examines how representation creates presence, the underlying assumption being that representation performatively constructs what it claims to represent. More specifically, the contributors to the volume examine how democratic representation creates agents who are capable of exercising agency, for instance, by holding representatives accountable.
The volume arises from several years of collaboration and workshops among the editors and contributors, and this is reflected in the high degree of coherence among the chapters. The contributors all subscribe to some version of the constructivist conception of political representation; there are numerous cross-references among the 13 chapters and to previous works by the contributors, above all to the work of Michael Saward. And a very helpful introduction and first chapter by the editors place the volume in the broader context of scholarship on political representation, including Hanna Pitkin’s seminal work.
In the editors’ introduction, Dario Castiglione and Johannes Pollak argue for disentangling democracy and representation in order to ask how they are related in different forms of democratic practice. It is only then, they argue, that we can ask how representation contributes—or not—to democracy. For the editors and the contributors, the key question is how political representation can be democratic or, put differently, how political representation can create democratic presence: “Is there a way in which political representation can facilitate democratic empowerment and inclusion by providing legitimate and effective channels through which the citizenry is given some form of presence (through voice and influence, or by recognition and a sympathetic hearing) in decision-making and in the administration of power?” (p. 4; emphasis in original).
In the first chapter, the editors argue that, insofar as democracy is a form of self-government, the question becomes how to make present the “self” of the people and individual citizens. Following Pitkin, they take representation as a practice that makes present what is absent; for instance, the will of the people within a political system, where representative institutions at once stand between and help foster and channel the will of the people and the decision-making structures of political institutions. In the end, they say little about how this may be done concretely; that is left to the other contributors to spell out. Having said that, and noting that the volume will also be of interest to scholars interested in the empirical study of representation, it is mainly a work of political and democratic theory.
Like many of the contributors, the editors appropriate Saward’s theory of the representative claim. Saward, in his contribution to this volume and elsewhere, treats representation as an event, emphasizing the process of representation rather than the end product. This leads Saward—and, following him, Castiglione and Pollak—to argue that there is no essence to the concept of representation. All we have are different uses of representation. This in turn leads Saward to argue that representation is a liminal concept: “liminality renders as fragile some efforts to fix and limit the concept’s meanings and range of reference” (p. 276). However, liminality does not mean that we cannot analyze practices of representation: “we can productively embrace representation’s liminality, developing fruitful analyses that track its changeable character” (p. 276; emphasis in original). The types and roles of representation are resources that representative claims draw on and ameliorate, and it is these representative claims that are the proper object for political scientists who wish to study representation.
Saward goes on to show how representation’s liminality affects distinctions such as those between elective and nonelective representatives and between institutional and noninstitutional representation. He uses Nadia Urbinati’s work as an example of an approach that draws the distinction between formal and informal representation too sharply. In her contribution to the volume, Urbinati distinguishes decision from judgment, arguing that representative democracy must combine them. She links decision to formal political institutions and judgment to claim-making by citizens. Although representative democracy needs both, it is also clear that there is a hierarchy between them: decision making is prioritized both descriptively and normatively. Only when representation is linked to institutions (including citizenship) that secure equality can representation be democratic empowerment, and Urbinati argues that the claims approach of someone like Saward has little to say about equality and, so, little to say about how to judge representative claims normatively (pp. 74–76).
All of the contributors address the normative question in one form or another. It is a question of how to judge representative claims and institutions, and it is a question most importantly of when representation is democratic. For instance, Urbinati makes equality the key to representative democracy; although she is more positive toward informal forms of representation, Laura Montanaro likewise argues that representation is democratic when constituencies are empowered to authorize or reject representative claims. Paula Diehl argues that populists “twist” representation away from the self-organization of the people by manipulating them into making them think that they want what the populist leader says they want. Samuel Hayat considers the ways in which different forms of representation may be inclusionary or exclusionary—or both. And Frank Ankersmit criticizes contemporary representative democracies as elective aristocracies.
Like many others, Pitkin made the quality of representation a matter of congruence between represented and representative, and the contributors to Creating Political Presence grapple with this in the context of a constructivist conception of representation: How can we think of representation as congruence if the represented is not independent of the representative claim? In her contribution, Lisa Disch argues that the question of how representatives can be congruent with and responsive to the represented is the wrong question. As we have seen, many of the contributors shift the question of congruence to a question of responsiveness, asking how the represented can have political agency so that they can respond to the representative claims made about them. This is also the case with Saward, who rejects “acontextual normative judgement” and instead proposes “actual acceptance” as the criterion for the democratic legitimacy of representative claims. Yet, he links acceptance to the “reasonably open and uncoerced choices by members of the appropriate constituency” (p. 288). In Disch’s terms, Saward here takes the role of the “first-order” perspective of the political theorist who judges representative politics from the outside. Although she does not account for the relation between the first-order perspective of the political theorist and “the citizen standpoint,” Disch argues that we must take the perspective of the latter when judging the democratic legitimacy of representative claims (p. 164). Doing so, she follows Saward, who introduced the idea of the citizen standpoint. But, where he, like the other contributors, wants to hold onto part of the first-order perspective, in which legitimacy does not depend on acceptance alone, Disch believes that the constructivist turn means turning away from legitimacy toward hegemony. For her, the central question concerns the system-wide conditions that both make agency possible and limit it, with a particular focus on closure and antipluralism. Yet this would suggest that, despite being the most consistently constructivist among the contributors, even Disch cannot entirely avoid the first-order perspective of deciding under what conditions acceptance counts as real acceptance.
Creating Political Presence is highly recommendable for scholars interested in the politics of representation. Most notably, it addresses the normative question of the democratic legitimacy of representation: if we cannot judge representation according to congruence or responsiveness, the question is whether constructivist approaches can address the normative question at all or if other resources are available for addressing it.
