Transformations of Representative Democracy: Debating Crises in Parliament

Our paper focuses on plenary debates in parliament that deal with current crises such as climate crisis and flight and migration crisis, and it aims at assessing the implicit agendas of crisis processing in terms of democratic equality and representation. We start from a theoretical framework that conceptualises (1) parliament as the symbolic centre of representative democracy, (2) parliamentary rhetoric on different (political, societal and economic) crises as an expression of the way of dealing with the (alleged) crisis of representative democracy, and (3) analyses rhetorical shifts of understandings of democracy therein taking place as (potential) transformations of democracy. Hence, we argue that parliamentary debate analysis does not only facilitate the analysis of production and proliferation of solutions, but also allows to assess the transformation of democracy. Against this backdrop, we examine understandings of democracy in parliamentary crisis rhetoric, and we ask whether these transformations indicate democratic backsliding or democratization. A solution to the crisis narrative of climate change, for instance, can take the form of sovereignty that enforces a masculinist version of the autonomous (political and capitalist) subject, or alternatively, it may include demands of social movements and activists to overcome exploitative relations of production in a global scale. This paper builds on the theoretical and methodological framework we developed within a previous project on the development of democracy in Austria after 1945. It allows for researching different understandings of democracy by means of analysing constructions of the demos and representative claims.