Mapping the representative claim

Representation by Development Organizations: Evidence From India and Implications for Inclusive Development

“…In their concept of discursive representation, Dryzek and Niemeyer (2008) emphasized the advancement of inclusiveness through bringing all relevant discourses into governance. In Saward’s (2010) influential theory on representative claims-making, representatives, the represented, and representation are constituted through a claims-making process by actors seeking to represent others; the represented then acknowledge or reject these claims.…”

“…First, in contexts with institutions of representative democracy, nonelectoral representation can challenge exclusions reinforced by electoral representation, advancing inclusive development. Theorists have highlighted how electoral representation’s structural limitations restrict the range of representative resources, perspectives, and voices, resulting in exclusions (Mansbridge, 2003; Phillips, 1995; Saward, 2010; Young, 2002). Nonelectoral representation, shaped by constituencies’ and audiences’ interests and actions, can advance the inclusion of silenced or marginalized groups and their interests.…”

The “Constructivist Turn” in Democratic Representation: A Normative Dead‐End?

“…He argues that "political figures [are] the makers of representative claims," and that political representation is not a status (or "fact") "produced through elections" but, rather, is the "product of a performance" involving "a multi-sided process of claim-making and the reception and judgment of claims." 2 The first of these may seem innocuous. Of course political representatives make claims-about the principles for which they stand, about the values and interests of their constituencies, about the meaning of events and the stakes of conflicts.…”

“…It has brought to the fore that political representation "operate[s] aesthetically, to evoke the represented," that it "asserts, clarifies, and renders culturally available new ways of thinking about nature, about future generations, about women and their interests and perspectives." 9 So understood, representation has the potential to alter the "partition of the sensible"-our modes of perceiving the political and social order, the roles we imagine taking up, and the share of the common that we feel entitled to demand. 10 By this constructivist approach, Saward renders representation a more interesting and more radically democratic activity than anything that occurs within the confines of voting booths and legislatures.…”

“…It is a vantage point of some contemporary empirical research whose results further the critical analysis of representative claims in "the democrat's way." 109 The third peculiarity of the general definitiontheorizing the role of the "audience"-foregrounds the performative aspect of representation in the theatrical sense. 110 It emphasizes, that is, that acts of representation understood as claims "can only work, or even exist, if audiences acknowledge them in some way, and are able to absorb, reject, or accept them, or otherwise engage with them."…”