Working With, Not Speaking For: Empirical Perspectives on the Good Representation of the Marginalised and Absent

Suzanne Dovi's (2007) account of the 'good representative' remains one of the most influential normative arguments in the literature on political representation, but it has not, as far as I can ascertain, been empirically tested. This article applies Dovi's virtue of 'good gatekeeping' to the political representation of care-experienced young adult women in the UK criminal justice system; a group that is both intersectionally marginalised and, in Dovi's terms, 'dispossessed.' Drawing on twenty-two interviews with elected representatives, non-elected representative actors, and women with lived experience in care and the criminal justice system, it advances two amendments to Dovi's account. First, under conditions of structural exclusion from the democratic community, good democratic representation depends on the mutual collaboration between elected and nonelected representatives, particularly 'affected' representatives closest to the represented. Second, Dovi's requirement that good representatives 'create space' must be extended beyond inclusion in formal political institutions to representatives engaging with the represented where they are. Focusing on formal political institutions alone risks participatory measures which create merely an illusion of inclusion, and it ignores the affective dimension of the performative labour required of 'affective representatives' to participate in these institutions. The article thus contributes to the literature on political representation by testing the virtue of 'good gatekeeping' against the perspective of the represented themselves.