Look Who’s Watching. The Audience in Political Representation.

Recent work on political representation has effectively extended our understanding of representation practices – to include also non-elected representatives – and has introduced a grammar of representation that provides new levels of analytical purchase (e.g. Saward 2006; 2020). Audiences are an elementary part of this new grammar but remain largely overlooked in empirical analysis. Studies predominantly focus on claim-makers, their staged performances, and the content of representative claims. This paper seeks to clarify what is revealed and elided by scholarly tendencies to put the analytical spotlight on claim-makers. Central to the paper’s discussion is a press conference delivered by Gwendolyn Rutten, chairwoman of the Flemish liberal party, on the evening of its electoral defeat in May 2019. Video footage allows for comparing the on-stage performance of politicians with the audience’s reaction. The availability of video material on the party’s Facebook page facilitates the formation of a second, online audience that exceeds the limitations of the live event. Their critical reading back of claims radically alters the meaning of the live performance and degrades it to a self-congratulatory performance by ‘out-of-touch’ political elites. The finding that representation, as a relationship, depends on a ‘coming to understanding’ (Weigand 2019) shared between claim-maker and audience calls into question the linearity underpinning the contemporary grammar of political representation, and signals the need for closer theorization of audiences as co-producers of representation; as opposed to being simply the recipients of representative claims.