Rethinking Political Representation as Relational Practice: The Case of Care-Experienced Young Adult Women in the UK Criminal Justice System

The ‘constructivist turn’ in the literature on political representation has become almost synonymous with conceptualisations of representation as a dynamic practice of making and evaluating ‘representative claims’ (Saward 2006; 2010) between representatives and represented (Disch, van de Sande and Urbinati 2019; Guasti and Geissel 2019). At the same time, there is a lack of empirical research bringing both sides of the representative relationship into dialogue. To address this gap, this paper investigates the quality of the political representation of care-experienced young adult women in the UK criminal justice system by qualitatively analysing a series of semi-structured interviews with elected representatives, non-elected representatives, and women with lived experience of both the care and criminal justice system. Combining insights from these three stakeholder groups provides a multi-angled perspective on the theory and practice of ‘good’ representation. Care-experienced young adult women in the criminal justice system face systemic disadvantage and are intersectionally marginalised. Ethnically and religiously marginalised young women are most overrepresented in both social care and the justice system (Fitzpatrick et al. 2023; 2024). Despite representing a tiny minority of the population, their political and social exclusion makes this group an illustrative case for exploring how democratic legitimacy can be improved through the inclusive representation of those who are politically absent and cannot easily represent themselves (Kinski 2025). Recent scholarship suggests that in addition to elected representatives, non-elected actors such as non-governmental organisations can satisfy the requirements of the ‘preferable representative’ (Dovi 2002) for marginalised groups (Christoffersen, Siow and Fowler 2025). The findings of this paper support the idea that collaborating with non-elected representatives can enhance the perceived legitimacy of elected representatives’ claims, but they also point to a distinctly relational model of democratic representation in which elected and non-elected representatives work with lived-experience actors as equal partners. This research thus provides empirical evidence for how ‘strong mutual relationships’ (Dovi 2002, p. 741) between representatives and represented can be operationalised in practice.