The Resonance Effect: Politicization and the Politics of Strategic Representation

What drives politicization? Resonance with the contestation of others. In this paper, I develop a theory of politicization that contributes to constructivist accounts of political representation by explaining why actors come to represent others beyond their immediate constituencies. Building on Saward’s core insight that political representation is constituted through representative claims rather than fixed relationships, I argue that such claims are often motivated by strategic responses to the contestation of affected actors. My core claim is that actors who are not directly affected by policy decisions frequently take up, amplify, or reframe the problems of others in order to influence who can legitimately enter their own field of interaction (closure) or shape the monopolization of enforcement resources within it (control). I conceptualize this process as resonance: a strategic pursuit of closure or control in which actors advance representative claims on behalf of others to resolve political dilemmas they face themselves. Resonance thus helps explain when and why representative claims emerge, why they cut across established policy domains, and why certain claims gain visibility and traction while others do not. Building on Bartolini’s (2018) conception of political action as behavior motivated by the will to secure the compliance of others, I derive a set of ideal-typical situations in which resonating with actors from another field generates incentives for representation. The paper proposes resonance as an analytical tool for studying representation as a relational and dynamic process, connecting actors, claims, and institutional contexts. Empirically, it is applicable across EU policy fields and contributes to debates on the ethics, legitimacy, and systemic consequences of contemporary representative practices.