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

The ’crisis of representative democracy’ necessitates successful performances of political representation by democratic representatives to overcome political disengagement and the risk of democratic backsliding. However, although the literature agrees that political representation is performed by representatives and represented, and that the legitimacy of ’representative claims’ (Saward 2006, 2010) depends on their acceptance by an audience, too little attention has been paid to how audiences evaluate such claims. To close this gap, we draw on Michael Saward’s (2024) device of the ’Square’ to analyse the performance of representation in contexts where representative candidates for elected office and their ’would-be’ represented are physically co-present. Using a multimethod approach, we analyse 35 televised townhall-style shows ahead of three major national elections in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Preliminary findings from our qualitative analysis indicate that while citizens and candidates across all three countries draw on overlapping performative resources, there is significant cross-country variation in the degree to which citizens can contest, challenge, or respond to representative claims. These findings suggest that the predominant focus of the literature on who claims what on behalf of whom overlooks the performative conditions under which representative relationships are enacted which, in turn, determine whether representation is communicated at citizens or co-constituted with them.