Self-Appointed Representatives: The Belgian Citizen Platform for Refugee Support

In the current context of distrust and disenchantment towards representative democracy, citizens are seeking new channels to hold their representatives accountable. New forms of contestation are increasingly being understood as evidence that electoral mechanisms of authorization are failing and signal the need for a closer relationship between citizens and the state, outside moments of elections (Urbinati and Warren 2008; Rosanvallon and Goldhammer, 2008). In particular, scholars have described how Internet and social media – and other ‘e-democracy’ channels – have become instrumental in bringing about new forms of political participation and contestation (e.g., Kneuer 2016, Ceron and Memoli 2015, Zhang et al. 2009). Less attention, however, has been attributed to the ways in which digital media and techniques also provide new means for political representation. This paper attempts to fill this gap by looking into the specific case of a citizen-led social media group: the Belgian “Citizens’ Platform for Refugee Support”. Created in 2014 to enable citizens to help refugees in concrete ways such as hosting them in their homes, the platform is increasingly presenting itself as a non-electoral representative. Its most recent campaign (#inmyname), is explicitly seeking to hold the Belgian State Secretary for Asylum and Migration accountable for his ‘failed representation’, while advancing – in the name of the people – an alternative stance on migration policies. This case is particularly interesting as it allows us to examine the role of social media in transforming individual acts of political participation into new forms of non-electoral representation. This qualitative study centered on interviews with both the founders and participants of the platform will provide use with valuable insights on the importance of digital technologies for the emergence of a new ‘representative’ democracy.