Reclaiming Representation in Global Perspective

Abstract

In Western Europe, in democratic emerging countries such as Brazil and India, but also in authoritarian China, new actors are entering into the arena of representation. They challenge electoral representation through denunciations of misrepresentation and develop new proposals for alternative or complementary ways of representing citizens. In the Global South, the colonial and post-colonial predicament has generated unique experiments in both electoral and non-electoral political representation: experiments with the representation of social groups and local participatory devices, inclusion of marginalized groups, experiments with formal electoral representation at the grassroots level, new non-electoral forms of bottom-up representation.