Constructing Representative Exclusion – Disrepresentation in the European Parliament

Political representation constitutes a central pillar of the legitimacy of modern democracies. Exclusion from it is therefore often regarded as problematic. A substantial body of research has examined how political representatives exclude certain groups from political representation through omission and unresponsiveness. Far less attention has been paid to whether representatives may also play a more active role in the exclusion from political representation. Investigating whether political representatives actively exclude groups contributes to a deeper understanding of representative exclusion and, in turn, helps inform strategies for addressing it. Yet, this dimension remains largely unexplored. Building on Michael Saward’s framework of representative claims, I introduce the concept of disrepresentative claims to address this gap. These claims are assertions by political actors that they themselves do not represent a particular group, or that another actor should not represent a certain group. Understood in this way, such claims enable political actors to exclude the targeted group from the representation they provide or to aim at the exclusion of certain groups from political representation more broadly. I map disrepresentative claims empirically, using a combination of manual and automated qualitative content analysis of parliamentary speeches delivered in the European Parliament between 2009 and 2024. The European Parliament is a suitable case for the empirical analysis because it provides a setting in which disrepresentative claim-making by representatives from a wide range of different parties and national contexts can be examined. Employing regression models, I examine the factors that may explain the use of disrepresentative claims by political representatives. Among the explanatory variables considered are party type (populist versus non-populist), ideological positioning on the left-right spectrum, as well as proximity to elections. This paper thereby offers a new perspective on how representative exclusion takes shape and sheds light on the factors that may underpin it.