Lights, Camera, Claim! The Performance of Representative Claims in Televised Citizen-Candidate Encounters

Across liberal democracies, live televised debates are increasingly becoming a fixture during election campaigns. These formats allow political candidates to interact directly with members of the public, answer their questions, and make a case for their candidacy. Amid concerns over a crisis of representation and increasing disconnect between electors and elected, these events have become key sites for candidates to signal responsiveness to voter concerns and to demonstrate their capacity to represent. Given the high viewing figures of such formats and voters’ increasing tendency to decide late in electoral campaigns (Hayes and Benegal 2025; Willocq 2019), these moments matter not only symbolically but substantively in shaping political representation today. In the literature on political representation, the ‘constructivist turn’ has shifted the focus from the representation of interests, and electoral reward or punishment to the dynamic and constant performance of representation by different actors in different settings (Diehl and Saward 2024; Severs 2012). Most research thus far has focused on analysing such ‘representative claims’ and their ‘makers’ (Saward 2006, 2010), but there is still a dearth of research on how these claims are performed in real-time, public-facing settings. This gap matters because representative claims are dependent on public recognition and evaluation, so excluding audience reception risks overlooking their fundamentally relational core. We address this lacuna by examining how political candidates perform and adjust different types of representative claims during televised, citizen-facing campaign appearances. Drawing on a new corpus of transcripts from live televised town-hall-style events held during election campaigns in Germany, the UK, and the USA over the last ten years, we employ a comparative, mixed-methods design: First, we combine qualitative and quantitative text analysis techniques to categorise representative claims (see de Wilde 2013; Guasti and Geissel 2019). We then quantitatively estimate the likelihood that a speaking opportunity contains a representative claim and, conditional on a claim being made, we model patterns of audience reaction and representatives’ subsequent responses. Constructing this sequential model of claim-making, audience response, and potential claim adjustment as a process enables us to capture the dynamics that shape the performance of representation in action. We show that representative claims are dynamic, situational performances shaped by audience presence, perceived legitimacy, and contextual constraints. Studying them in real-time, public-facing settings reveals patterns of strategic adaptation which highlight the contingent and interactive nature of representation. Our findings suggest variation in how populist and mainstream candidates adapt to audience feedback, with observable patterns along lines of party type, gender, and incumbency. We advance the literature on political representation by offering an empirical account of how the representative relationship unfolds in the under-theorised dimension of live performance and interaction. The paper also contributes to the literature on democratic backsliding by showing how populist actors’ claims to embody “the people” are strategically negotiated in unscripted, contested public settings. Finally, we open up new methodological pathways for studying the construction and contestation of representative claims in real time, encouraging further analysis of live political performances as vital sites of representation.