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

Recent scholarship has significantly advanced our understanding of political representation as a dynamic and relational process including a range of elected and non-elected representative actors (e.g., Celis and Childs 2024; Disch 2015; Saward and Diehl 2024; Severs 2012). However, remarkably little is known about what constitutes the ‘good representation’ of groups that are not only structurally marginalised but also physically absent from the political arena. If democratic legitimacy is grounded in political equality, then the failure of representative systems to account for those who are absent risks perpetuating and normalising political exclusion. Centring the perspective of individuals made absent from key sites of political participation and representation therefore offers a demanding benchmark for distinguishing between the good, the bad, and the blameworthy representative. This paper addresses this issue through the case of care-experienced young adult women (aged 18-25) in the UK criminal justice system. This group occupies a position of intersectional precarity, shaped by gendered and racialised inequality, formal disenfranchisement, as well as the context of increasing prison privatisation and the state’s role as the ‘corporate parent’ of children in care. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with women with lived experience of both the care and criminal justice systems, as well as elected, and non-elected representative claims-makers, the paper employs Grounded Theory Analysis to develop a triangulated account of what makes ‘good representation’. Findings show that without institutionalised requirements for lived-experience representatives in parliament, non-elected actors, such as charitable organisations, step in as 'affected representatives' (Celis and Childs 2024). Contributions by these claim-makers reveal a fragile, fragmented, and uneven organisational ecology. Lived-experience participants and non-elected representative actors both understand their involvement in representation as arising from a persistent democratic deficit in the institutions of political power. Drawing on cumulative experiences of marginalisation across the care system, the criminal justice system, and post-custodial life, participants with lived experience explicitly distinguish between ‘ideal’ and ‘realistic’ representation, and articulate a pervasive expectation that politics will remain indifferent to their inclusion. Crucially, ‘good representatives’ are identified not as those who “speak for” the most vulnerable (cf. Siow 2023), but as those who collaboratively “work with” lived-experience representatives, providing institutional backing or deliberately stepping back, as needed. These findings qualify the recent claim that non-elected actors can fulfil the requirements of the 'preferable representative' (Dovi 2002) for marginalised groups (Christoffersen, Siow and Fowler 2025) by showing how reliance on organisations to compensate for a lack of representation raises questions of fairness and democratic legitimacy. Secondly, they highlight intentional absence as a strategic representative practice to enable the visibility and claim-making capacity of individuals with lived experience. Finally, they reveal the distinct hybrid role of lived-experience representatives who mediate between institutions and peers, articulate representative claims, and simultaneously remain subjects of political representation, and whose repeated experiences of political disregard impact not only their evaluation of existing representation, but also their expectations of what it can realistically deliver. The paper concludes with some reflections on the methodological challenges of researching multiply excluded groups.