Political Representation as Communicative Practice

It is uncontroversial that the quality of democracy is closely bound up with the quality of political representation. But what exactly is political representation and how should we study it? This paper develops a novel conceptual framework for studying political representation that makes the insights of recent theoretical work on representation usable for quantitative empirical research. The innovative theoretical literature we build on makes the case for changing our understanding of representation in two fundamental ways. First, it proposes to conceive representation in constructivist terms, as a practice that is shaped by both representatives and represented. Second, it treats communicative acts in which representatives address their intended constituents as the central category of analysis; political representation is thus conceived as an essentially communicative practice. This paper tries to demonstrate that quantitative research on representation can benefit immensely from taking these innovations seriously and provides the conceptual tools for doing so in a rigorous and systematic fashion. Building on an interactive-constructivist ontology, we reconceptualize the practice of political representation, translating theorists’ ideas into a framework for analysis that can be used by quantitative scholars. We introduce and discuss the two core components of political representation in our understanding: 1) representatives' communicative acts, and 2) citizens' evaluations of these acts. With regard to representatives' acts, we highlight the difference between speech acts and communicative acts without speech (e.g. images). With regard to citizens' evaluations, we build on normative arguments constructing the legitimacy of representation from citizens' acceptance of communicative acts and discuss to what extent citizens' evaluations of representation are based on fixed sources (e.g. fundamental values, group affiliations and political identities) or can be constructed by representatives themselves. Finally, the paper revisits six different dimensions of how representation can be analyzed (i.e., substantive, descriptive, surrogation, justification, personalization, and responsiveness) and it is shown, using concrete examples, how these dimensions can make themselves visible in representatives’ communicative acts.