representation is good

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Rawan Elbaba, Student Reporting Labs Rawan Elbaba, Student Reporting Labs

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Why on-screen representation matters, according to these teens

Why does representation in pop culture matter?

For some young students, portrayals of minorities in the media not only affect how others see them, but it affects how they see themselves.

“I do think it’s powerful for people of a minority race to be represented in pop culture to really show a message that everybody has a place in this world,” said Alec Fields, a junior at Forest Hills High School in Pennsylvania.

Fields was one of 144 middle and high school students who were interviewed about seeing themselves reflected — or not — on the screen. PBS NewsHour turned to our Student Reporting Labs from across the country to hear what students had to say a topic that research shows still has room for growth.

The success of recent films like “Black Panther” and “Crazy Rich Asians” have — again — sent a message about the importance of representation of minorities, not only in Hollywood but in other aspects of pop culture as well.

Only two out of every 10 lead film actors (or 19.8 percent) were people of color in 2017, this year’s UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report found. Still, that’s a jump from the year before, when people of color accounted for 13.9 percent of lead roles. People of color have yet to reach proportional representation within the film industry, but there have been gains in specific areas, including film leads and overall cast diversity.

According to 2018 U.S. Census Bureau estimates , the nation’s population is nearly 40 percent non-white. By 2055, the country’s racial makeup is expected to change dramatically, the U.S. will not have one racial or ethnic majority group by 2055, the Pew Research Center estimated .

Some students said that not seeing yourself represented in elements of pop culture can affect mental health.

“It just makes you feel like, ‘Why don’t I see anybody like me?’ [It] kind of like brings your self-esteem down,” said Kimore Willis, a junior at Etiwanda High School in California.

Others said they often look to trends in pop culture when forming their own identities.

“We need to see people that look like ourselves and can say, ‘Oh, that looks like me!’ or ‘I identify with that,’” said Sonali Chhotalal, a junior at Cape May Technical High School in New Jersey.

Others, however, feel that Hollywood is overcompensating for their lack of diversity by depicting exaggerated and stereotypical characters.

Eric Wojtalewicz from Black River Falls High School in Wisconsin said that he sees a lot of gay characters that seem “over-the-top,” playing on old tropes. “I definitely think that not all gays are like that,” he said.

Kate Casper, a junior at T.C. Williams High School in Virginia, called Hollywood’s attempt at diversity “disingenuous.” Although there can never be enough diversity, Casper said, she feels that the entertainment industry is using diversity for economic benefit. “Diversity equals money in today’s world, which is cool, I guess,” she said, adding that “it’s cooler to have pure motives.”

The UCLA report agrees that diversity sells. It says that the median global box office has been the highest for films featuring casts that were more than 20-percent minority, making nearly $450 million in 2017.

Although public opinion may be divided about whether the entertainment industry is doing enough to represent all types of people, South Mountain High School student Dazhane Brown in Arizona said that feeling represented is “empowering.”

“If you see people who look like you and act like you and speak like you and come from the same place you come from … it serves as an inspiration,” Brown said.

PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs produced this story in an effort to highlight the importance of representation of minorities in popular culture. Students from 31 Labs across the country submitted these responses.

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Why Representation Matters and Why It’s Still Not Enough

Reflections on growing up brown, queer, and asian american..

Posted December 27, 2021 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

• Positive media representation can be helpful in increasing self-esteem for people of marginalized groups (especially youth).
• Interpersonal contact and exposure through media representation can assist in reducing stereotypes of underrepresented groups.
• Representation in educational curricula and social media can provide validation and support, especially for youth of marginalized groups.

Growing up as a Brown Asian American child of immigrants, I never really saw anyone who looked like me in the media. The TV shows and movies I watched mostly concentrated on blonde-haired, white, or light-skinned protagonists. They also normalized western and heterosexist ideals and behaviors, while hardly ever depicting things that reflected my everyday life. For example, it was equally odd and fascinating that people on TV didn’t eat rice at every meal; that their parents didn’t speak with accents; or that no one seemed to navigate a world of daily microaggressions . Despite these observations, I continued to absorb this mass media—internalizing messages of what my life should be like or what I should aspire to be like.

Because there were so few media images of people who looked like me, I distinctly remember the joy and validation that emerged when I did see those representations. Filipino American actors like Ernie Reyes, Nia Peeples, Dante Basco, and Tia Carrere looked like they could be my cousins. Each time they sporadically appeared in films and television series throughout my youth, their mere presence brought a sense of pride. However, because they never played Filipino characters (e.g., Carrere was Chinese American in Wayne's World ) or their racial identities remained unaddressed (e.g., Basco as Rufio in Hook ), I did not know for certain that they were Filipino American like me. And because the internet was not readily accessible (nor fully informational) until my late adolescence , I could not easily find out.

Through my Ethnic Studies classes as an undergraduate student (and my later research on Asian American and Filipino American experiences with microaggressions), I discovered that my perspectives were not that unique. Many Asian Americans and other people of color often struggle with their racial and ethnic identity development —with many citing how a lack of media representation negatively impacts their self-esteem and overall views of their racial or cultural groups. Scholars and community leaders have declared mottos like how it's "hard to be what you can’t see," asserting that people from marginalized groups do not pursue career or academic opportunities when they are not exposed to such possibilities. For example, when women (and women of color specifically) don’t see themselves represented in STEM fields , they may internalize that such careers are not made for them. When people of color don’t see themselves in the arts or in government positions, they likely learn similar messages too.

Complicating these messages are my intersectional identities as a queer person of color. In my teens, it was heartbreakingly lonely to witness everyday homophobia (especially unnecessary homophobic language) in almost all television programming. The few visual examples I saw of anyone LGBTQ involved mostly white, gay, cisgender people. While there was some comfort in seeing them navigate their coming out processes or overcome heterosexism on screen, their storylines often appeared unrealistic—at least in comparison to the nuanced homophobia I observed in my religious, immigrant family. In some ways, not seeing LGBTQ people of color in the media kept me in the closet for years.

How representation can help

Representation can serve as opportunities for minoritized people to find community support and validation. For example, recent studies have found that social media has given LGBTQ young people the outlets to connect with others—especially when the COVID-19 pandemic has limited in-person opportunities. Given the increased suicidal ideation, depression , and other mental health issues among LGBTQ youth amidst this global pandemic, visibility via social media can possibly save lives. Relatedly, taking Ethnic Studies courses can be valuable in helping students to develop a critical consciousness that is culturally relevant to their lives. In this way, representation can allow students of color to personally connect to school, potentially making their educational pursuits more meaningful.

Further, representation can be helpful in reducing negative stereotypes about other groups. Initially discussed by psychologist Dr. Gordon Allport as Intergroup Contact Theory, researchers believed that the more exposure or contact that people had to groups who were different from them, the less likely they would maintain prejudice . Literature has supported how positive LGBTQ media representation helped transform public opinions about LGBTQ people and their rights. In 2019, the Pew Research Center reported that the general US population significantly changed their views of same-sex marriage in just 15 years—with 60% of the population being opposed in 2004 to 61% in favor in 2019. While there are many other factors that likely influenced these perspective shifts, studies suggest that positive LGBTQ media depictions played a significant role.

For Asian Americans and other groups who have been historically underrepresented in the media, any visibility can feel like a win. For example, Gold House recently featured an article in Vanity Fair , highlighting the power of Asian American visibility in the media—citing blockbuster films like Crazy Rich Asians and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings . Asian American producers like Mindy Kaling of Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls demonstrate how influential creators of color can initiate their own projects and write their own storylines, in order to directly increase representation (and indirectly increase mental health and positive esteem for its audiences of color).

When representation is not enough

However, representation simply is not enough—especially when it is one-dimensional, superficial, or not actually representative. Some scholars describe how Asian American media depictions still tend to reinforce stereotypes, which may negatively impact identity development for Asian American youth. Asian American Studies is still needed to teach about oppression and to combat hate violence. Further, representation might also fail to reflect the true diversity of communities; historically, Brown Asian Americans have been underrepresented in Asian American media, resulting in marginalization within marginalized groups. For example, Filipino Americans—despite being the first Asian American group to settle in the US and one of the largest immigrant groups—remain underrepresented across many sectors, including academia, arts, and government.

Representation should never be the final goal; instead, it should merely be one step toward equity. Having a diverse cast on a television show is meaningless if those storylines promote harmful stereotypes or fail to address societal inequities. Being the “first” at anything is pointless if there aren’t efforts to address the systemic obstacles that prevent people from certain groups from succeeding in the first place.

Instead, representation should be intentional. People in power should aim for their content to reflect their audiences—especially if they know that doing so could assist in increasing people's self-esteem and wellness. People who have the opportunity to represent their identity groups in any sector may make conscious efforts to use their influence to teach (or remind) others that their communities exist. Finally, parents and teachers can be more intentional in ensuring that their children and students always feel seen and validated. By providing youth with visual representations of people they can relate to, they can potentially save future generations from a lifetime of feeling underrepresented or misunderstood.

Kevin Leo Yabut Nadal, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the City University of New York and the author of books including Microaggressions and Traumatic Stress .

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The importance of representation

When I write creatively, I write about white people. Not the same white person, sure: There’s the awkward misunderstood white person, or the rich white woman destined to solve crime or the hard working white man that robs a store at gunpoint. Sitting in a conference with my creative writing teacher, I told her I’m scared to write about things that I don’t know.

I fell in love with writing as I fell in love with books. I would read the Magic Tree House, Judy Bloom, Andrew Clements and Ann M. Martin during lunch, at recess, in my room when the lights were meant to be off. I told myself I would be a writer — that I could be a writer. On the covers of my second grade novels I’d draw a girl, using the peach shade crayon, and name her Grace. Or Lindsay or Abby or Charlotte. This is a girl I felt I knew. She was all around me, in my white school, in my white town. She was on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. She was on magazines and American Girl dolls. As I got older, this white wash became more apparent. Classical literature praises this peach-shade figment: Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, Anna Karenina. These adventurous yet respectful white women — I eventually branched out to white men — became my muse.

Representation in the media is a constant source of controversy. For decades, award shows like the Oscars and Grammys have consistently overlooked the work of black artists. Black Panther is proving to be one of the most influential movies of our time with its assertion of black power both in its plot and cast. Many other films and TV shows released in the past few years have sought to provide representation for minority groups in the media. Representation isn’t just a nice way to appease complaining minorities. The media is a reflection of who America is and isn’t. America isn’t just white, and it never has been. When America looks into a mirror, the reflection is white, Christian, financially well-off. The picturesque American citizen.

I, along with so many people of color, write about white people because that is the only face the media deems as a full character. The complexity awarded to white Americans in the media is not seen in minority characters. There is no drive to explore the sassy black sidekick when there’s the multi-faceted white person. There is no incentive to explore minority characters when they exist to further stereotypes. I assumed this was normal. Fiction is about channeling something ideal or fantastical. In my childhood, the ideal was always white. Black people were side characters or villains. They were thugs or drug lords. They were never the hero. The media is partially responsible in the process of constructing what blackness and whiteness are, and in America, the furthering of racial stereotypes only helps justify racist actions. The fight for adequate representation isn’t a new thing. Amazing people have been advocating for cultural diversity in the media since before I was born. But there is more work that needs to be done.

We are in such a place where fundamental American thought can be shifted. Right now, minorities are starting to be listened to. Minorities have been yelling for decades at a country that doesn’t acknowledge us as part of its cultural makeup. Now there are more movies, TV shows, podcasts, models, activists that are beginning to be appreciated and listened to. This is the time. Children don’t have to write about peach-colored girls. The foundations created finally have room for some footing. By pushing for representation, we can change the way America is seen by Americans. When media is white, the stories of the marginalized, of racism, unfair housing, income inequality are never told. The media is a way to bring stories to life. The complexities of different races are not realized by most Americans because they are not visible to most Americans. The media is a pivotal start in forcing Americans to confront the harsh truth of our current political dynamic. Our media is silencing the voices of millions.

Representation is a vicious cycle. We write about what we see and what we experience. When all we study is white and all we see is white, all we create is white. I applaud the great authors and thinkers that have managed to test these boundaries, to push our current media and literature out of balance. They inspire young writers like me to explore the unseen characters, the traditional sidekicks, the never forgotten villains. They also encourage us to find characters in our own identity. We are encouraged to write characters with our strength and weaknesses and flaws.

Everyday, the media reassures us that America is white. Minorities are sidekicks or the help, the American Dream is alive and well, and racism is dead. Representation in the media means that America can finally see itself in all its multicultural, multiracial, beautiful self. Representation in the media means that America sees more to minorities than stereotypes. Representation can make disadvantaged groups become real people.  

Contact Natachi Onwuamaegbu at natachi ‘at’ stanford.edu.

Natachi Onwuamaegbu is a freshman from Bethesda, Maryland. She is currently undecided but is leaning towards Political Science and English. Currently, Natachi is part of the Black Student Union and hopes to run a radio station on campus. When she's not wandering around campus, Natachi likes to sit in the sun, listen to music and overuse semi-colons.

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Representation Is at an All-Time High on Screen, but Still Inaccurate, Nielsen Report Says

By Mónica Marie Zorrilla

Mónica Marie Zorrilla

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Series like “ Reservation Dogs ,” “Gossip Girl,” “Run the World,” “Bling Empire,” “Rutherford Falls,” “The Wonder Years” and “The Sex Lives of College Girls” helped make 2021 a good year for diverse, on-screen representation . Those shows helped break barriers for AAPI, BIPOC and Native American visibility on television, as well as LGBTQ+ inclusion. Per Nielsen data for the 2021-2021 TV season, among the top 1,500 programs, 78% have some presence of racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation inclusivity. But, according to Nielsen’s new Diverse Intelligence Series report, those numbers don’t tell the entire story.

It’s not just the quantity of the representation on TV, but the quality of it that Hollywood needs to care about, the study notes. Currently 42.2% of the U.S. population is racially and ethnically diverse, and that number is only projected to grow in the decades to come. But no one group is a monolith, and when you look at the diversity of groups within the AAPI, BIPOC, Native American and LGBTQ+ communities, not everyone is represented in the same way.

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“If you simply look at that high percentage point, you might think the majority of identity groups are well-covered. But lack of representation and diversity in popular content is more nuanced,” said Stacie de Armas, SVP, Diverse Insights & Initiatives, in a statement announcing the report “Being Seen on Screen: The Importance of Quantity and Quality Representation on TV.”

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“Looking back at the media moments this year, diverse casts and stories have been in the headlines,” de Armas wrote. “Yet, according to Nielsen’s recent research, almost a quarter of people still feel that there is not enough content that adequately represents people from their identity group.”

Nielsen’s key metrics across reality, variety (scripted) and news programming include Share of Screen (SOS), which provides the composition of the top 10 recurring cast members in a program, and the Inclusion Opportunity Index, which compares the SOS of an identity group to their representation in population estimates. Nielsen also took into consideration the number of episodes a recurring cast member was present in, the number of viewing minutes a program has and the viewing audience by identity group classification.

According to the report, Black talent is above on-screen parity, but 58% of Black respondents noted that is still not enough. When crunching the numbers, Black women remain largely underrepresented in shows compared to Black men. The most representative dramas featuring Black women on-screen had, on average, 15% Black women writers in their credits, and that representation was usually positive, steering away from stereotypes and highlighting justice, power and glamor.

In addition, the report shows that South Asian SOS falls below parity, while East Asian representation is above parity on streaming at 2.8%, indicating that AAPI representation on-screen across broadcast, streamers and cable is not monolithic. Similarly, Hispanic and Latinx SOS is far more apparent on broadcast (22%)— particularly in Spanish-language programming —compared to cable at 3.5% and streaming at 8.5%; talent who identifies as Afro-Latinx over-index in genres such as action and adventure, comedy, music, horror and reality. Native American SOS was poor, approximating to less than 0.1% across broadcast and cable programming, and 0.4% on streaming platforms. That is far below parity compared to the population estimate of 1.4%.

The LGBTQ+ community had its highest representation on cable programming (7.5%), but broadcast and SVOD had less than 4%. However, based on Gracenote Video Descriptors in the report— keywords capturing the story and context across mood, theme and scenario— on-screen queer narratives and voices have been deemed authentic and meaningful, as evidenced by the top keywords present: thoughtful, goodness, personal story, conflict, challenging situation, cerebral, performers and creative settings. Other interesting findings based on Gracenote Video Descriptors include Latinas being associated with the keywords "TV reporters, athletes, teammates, victory and nieces," Black women being associated with the keywords "uplift, awareness, family bonds, competition, friendship" and White women were associated with "entertainers, conscience, morality, honesty and friendship."

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How can TV and movies get representation right? We asked 6 Hollywood diversity consultants.

Here’s what they said about writing characters that actually reflect America.

by Abbey White

In 2012, Kerry Washington, star of the Shonda Rhimes-created ABC political drama Scandal, became the first black woman to lead a network drama in nearly four decades. Two seasons later, the series became the first on a major broadcast network that “was created by a black woman, starring a black woman” and also directed by a black woman, when Ava DuVernay stepped in to helm an episode.

Fast-forward to 2016, when an episode of The CW’s post-apocalyptic drama The 100 featured a groundbreaking love scene between the show’s bisexual female lead Clarke (Eliza Taylor) and her lesbian love interest Lexa (Alycia Debnam Carey) — right before killing off Lexa. The plot bomb resonated so widely that it sparked a Hollywood pledge to stop needlessly killing LGBTQ characters and raised a larger discussion about who was dying onscreen .

With the help of social media, both shows and others like them are shifting discussions around “good representation” from a simple desire to a necessity. Who lives, who dies, and who tells the story — as Hamilton so succinctly put it — matters now perhaps more than it has ever before.

So who is helping Hollywood tell better, more diverse stories? How are they doing it? What is Hollywood currently getting right, and what is it still getting wrong? To find the answers, I spoke with diversity consultants, many from nonprofit media advocacy organizations, who, along with tasks like compiling data on minority representation, offer free training and research support to studios and networks.

Here’s what representatives from GLAAD (which focuses on LGBTQ representation), Color of Change (race), the Geena Davis Institute (gender), Define American (immigration), and RespectAbility (disability), as well as a religion expert, told me about the work of Hollywood diversity consulting and the state of representation onscreen.

Everyone wants good diversity, but “good” and “diversity” can look different to various identities

Rashad robinson, executive director, color of change.

We are looking for representations that are authentic, fair, and have humanity. Where black people are not the side script to larger stories and are not just seen through white eyes. There is a way in which we get the same types of representation over and over again, which kind of decreases the sensitivity and humanity that people receive because the media images we see of people can be so skewed.

Madeline Di Nonno, CEO, Geena Davis Institute

[Through our research,] we found that even though there were female characters, they were onscreen and speaking two to three times less. That gave us a whole other thing to talk to people. You can have a cast of 100 and 50 are female, but are you hearing them?

Elizabeth Grizzle Voorhees, entertainment media director, Define American

What most might consider good immigrant representation is characters that are hard-working, humble but high-achieving ... non-threatening to “the American way.” We find the “good immigrant versus bad immigrant” ... perpetuates the respectability politics forced upon many marginalized communities and suggests that only certain people are worthy of our humanity. [We need] reinforcement in mainstream culture that — at the end of the day — we ... have more in common than not.

Jennifer Mizrahi, CEO and president, RespectAbility

The two [current] gold standards are the TV show Speechless , which is scripted, and Born This Way , which is reality unscripted, and that’s because the leads are people with disabilities — played by people with disabilities — authentically portraying their lives.

We see it as a success if an amputee is playing a police officer in an episode of Law & Order and you never talk about that person’s disability. All you see is an incredible police officer.

Megan Reid, professor and religion consultant, Cal State Long Beach

[Some] shows do a good job of showing the faith part accurately, but that’s all we ever see. If it’s a show where religion is an essential plot, it would be helpful not just to see characters who struggle with their faith but how to make decisions about what to do in a multicultural environment.

Whether their services are offered or asked for, Hollywood diversity consultants aim to increase representation and inclusion at various levels of the industry

Zeke stokes, vice president of programs, glaad.

I can tell you in a very general way that if you are seeing LGBTQ inclusion on television, there is a very, very strong likelihood that GLAAD played a part in it at some point.

It may not be in an ongoing way with a production if it’s a long-developing arc or if an LGBTQ character or storyline is a basis for the show, but you can generally bet we were involved at the outset in helping them ensure that they weren’t falling into outdated tropes, that a character wasn’t just there to support everyone else’s storyline, that they have a well-developed storyline of their own and sort of a reason for being indispensable.

Madeline Di Nonno

[The Geena Davis Institute] has met with every major studio, network, cable company, and pretty much every division. We really focus on who is making financial decisions and who is making creative decisions.

Once something is in construction, we’re not involved unless someone has asked us to be an adviser. For example, YouTube Red has launched originals, and we were asked to be advisers on a show called Hyperlink , which is about young girls in STEM. We looked at the scripts, the dimensionality of the characters — are the characters balanced? Are they well-rounded? Are they stereotypes?

Jennifer Mizrahi

We are meeting with the networks and then reaching out to them and letting them know we are available. Big partners for us are the unions [like] the Casting Society of America’s Committee on Diversity, the Screen Writers Guild, and SAG-AFTRA.

Elizabeth Grizzle Voorhees

There are a variety of ways we engage, including casting for undocumented and documented immigrants non-scripted television programs and films, providing storylines, and on-set consultation and scene review during filming.

Rashad Robinson

The working relationship can be dependent on the entity that we’re dealing with. We do a series of salons throughout the year, where we bring together writers from a host of shows — writers from Being Mary Jane , Black-ish , and Homeland have been there. We spend hours sort of talking about different themes.

Who is asking for help may not always be who you expect

The majority of folks that reach out [to Color of Change] are not black, but it’s really about what the show is trying to achieve. Do folks feel like they’re talking to us under duress? Do they feel like they’re actually trying to get something right? Are folks trying to get a feeling for the general surface rather than trying to go deeper? Each situation is very different, and I would say there have been a number of white folks in Hollywood that have reached out with good intentions and interest in trying to deal with challenges that have existed in the past.

What we have seen [from RespectAbility’s] work in Hollywood is that there is a huge number of people working who have ADHD, dyslexia, and mental health disorders. Just like sometimes people on the autism spectrum can be better at math, science, and engineering than people not on the autism spectrum, it does seem that people who have mental health differences can be better sometimes at acting or comedy.

But those people don’t come out about it.

In many, many cases, they tell us when they speak with us, “Well, I’m living with X, but don’t tell anyone.” It’s really quite common that there are people working in Hollywood with hidden disabilities who are not publicly disclosing those disabilities.

Zeke Stokes

[GLAAD] works with a lot of straight creators who want to tell stories in a really authentic way, and ... the same is true for LGBTQ creators. If you’re a white gay male creator, you might not have the depth of personal experience to write a really authentic queer woman of color.

I think more and more the LGBTQ creators in Hollywood are realizing that there are so many LGBTQ points of view that if you’re not bringing in people that have certain experiences to help guide your creative process — either as a full-time part of the production or as a consultant — then you’re very apt to get it wrong.

The questions and challenges that Hollywood needs help with are not one size fits all

A lot of people come to [the Geena Davis Institute] for help with getting their projects greenlit. Some come to us for recommendations on financing, or they come to us for recommendations on things like female directors and writers. Many of the talent agencies don’t represent enough women writers and directors. We’re at a point where the really well-known female writers and directors are working, so it’s creatives who are maybe on the cusp that really need the support and need to be given a chance.

A lot of times people are well intentioned, but their lexicon is wrong. For example, [a script] might use the expression “wheelchair-bound,” which is just really bad to say. If someone uses a wheelchair it’s an element of freedom, because that’s how they get around. So we look at scripts and help with that lexicon.

[Color of Change] has a big report coming out this fall with UCLA on the diversity of writers’ rooms, and much of that report is about content. We’re looking at upward of 150 shows ... tracking back to three different themes. One is racism in the show and whether it’s individual or structural. Another is ways in which black people or black families feel like a problem rather than a solution. Then we’re looking at how the criminal justice system is often shown as infallible — so police officers, district attorneys, DNA evidence.

There are a lot of identities and issues outside those traditional sexual orientation and gender binaries that are suddenly in the public consciousness, and [GLAAD is] being called on to do work around that a lot. We’ve been living in this sort of transgender tipping point, so we get a lot of calls from creators and networks who want to get that narrative right.

Just in this past year or so, networks and creators have begun to tackle the realities of this next generation, which is, that they’re eschewing labels in a lot of respects. So we’re doing a lot of consulting around what that means and ... the impact of bad representation on that community.

[There] is definitely a huge effort to portray religious rituals correctly. Also an effort to make settings plausible ... [and for] more respectful portrayals of prayer leaders. Many networks are seeking to get right issues with regard to [religious] law and how it plays a part in people’s lives here and abroad.

What they have gotten wrong, but don’t normally ask for help about — and it’s a problem of perception: the lack of a plausible, nuanced range of the level of religiosity in portrayals of Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Sikhs, [and others].

We’re starting to see more of the linking of universal themes with the stories and experiences of immigrant families. Storylines that appear in TV and film often follow the headlines we are seeing in the news media, so specific topics like deportations and ICE raids have had high-interest levels recently, [too].

Increasing intersectionality is a top priority

The point of view is: Infuse your content with a lot of female characters, and as you add, then think about the rainbow of what that could be. Could that person be someone with disabilities, could that person be someone of color, could that person be LGBTQ? Lots of times if creators have a limit on female characters, if they have only one female character, they tend to try to make her flawless. The problem comes in because there’s often just one.

If you look at the inclusion that’s happened on television over the last 20 years, from Will & Grace forward, while there has been a lot of LGBTQ inclusion, the vast majority of it, for way too long, was white men. That’s one of the things [GLAAD is] really working to change. We want to make sure that it’s not just diversity and inclusion, but we’re seeing diversity in inclusion. People of color, women, Muslims, immigrants — when you think of all these communities that have been marginalized, they all live within the LGBTQ community as well.

[RespectAbility] feels very strongly that people with physical disabilities should be represented in every crowd scene and they cannot only be white. In terms of the invisible disability — mental health, sensory, attention deficit — that can be put into a storyline. If you want to be authentic and tell authentic stories, they need to be as people are in humanity. Where’s the person who is a wheelchair user? Where’s the service dog? Where’s the person with Down syndrome? We have 56 million Americans with disabilities, so one out of five Americans. The disability experience is something many Americans live with.

Some Hollywood diversity consultants see their job as a challenging balance between education and accountability

There may be a variety of reasons that people reach out to [Color of Change], but a lot of this is about building relationships and trust and then having enough honesty on our part to say, “Just because we give you advice doesn’t mean we’re going to like the outcome.” It’s getting people to understand that the content they put out doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

GLAAD is the organization that literally started tracking the characters, the representation, the kinds of portrayals we were seeing, and reporting that publicly, so that the industry was being held responsible.

It’s one thing to know something, but to see it in writing and reported in the media I think awakens the industry to a different level of consciousness. So not only do they want to do better because it’s the right thing to do, but they want to do better because there can be consequences if they don’t.

Changes are happening, but not in the same way or at the same pace for everyone

[RespectAbility] just did a focus group in Hollywood, and these folks said when they’re casting, they now know that if they’re going to have four stars of a show, one needs to be nonwhite. But they are hesitant to have that person have a disability because they feel that it’s a stigma. But why can’t a person with a disability be a black person who has the most talent in the room? Disability means you can’t do Thing A, but it doesn’t mean you’re not the best in the world at Thing B. The stigma is [harming] employers’ willingness to hire people. Ninety-five percent of the time [that] there is a character with disabilities onscreen, they are played by an actor without that disability.

Many issues don’t come up as issues of religion until the story is actually about religion. Much of what else we see on television — actors and storylines — are about white, even black, Americans, and we just assume they’re from the Christian background.

Otherwise, [religion is] nearly always in the context of a violent incident. Why can so few people name a single incident on TV or film where a Muslim, Hindu, or several other devout practitioners of their faith laughs so hard he or she cries?

Honestly, there hasn’t been a huge shift yet with writers and executives wanting to portray a more diverse and accurate depiction of immigrants. What we have seen is a desire for more intersectionality, which naturally results in more diverse characters.

As we increase the quantity [of representations], it also raises the bar on quality and that requires content creators to be much more surgical. It’s one thing to be a straight white person who is creating a woman of color on their show, who finds a queer woman of color to talk to about this, but what are we doing as an industry to empower queer women of color to tell their own stories, to create their own content, to have access to writers’ rooms and a career path in the industry?

One of the shifts that I’ve seen is that with black showrunners ... there’s been a wider range of portrayal and a wider range of stories about the black experience. I still don’t think we see enough economically challenged people on television, and I feel like this has been a trend across race that we’ve seen. I think not having stories featuring people who are economically challenged adds to the lack of empathy that we have for the challenges people are having.

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Why Representation in Politics Actually Matters

At this week's presidential debate, both serious contenders left in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination made a historic pronouncement. Former Vice President Joe Biden committed to choosing a woman as his running mate, while Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said that, "in all likelihood," he would do the same. Online, where most of the discussion currently resides because of the global coronavirus outbreak , reaction to the candidates pledge was mixed. For some who hoped, after four years with an avowed misogynist in the Oval Office, that a woman would be the one to deliver the country from President Donald Trump, the promise was welcome , especially now that the contest has dwindled down to two old, white, straight men. Others saw the gesture as the hollow homogenization of over half the population — just one thing to consider amid other critical criteria upon which to evaluate a future presidential nominee.

But having women in politics — and more broadly, having representation across all identities of race, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status — has tangible effects on the health and functioning of democracy, political scientists told Teen Vogue . Indeed, the body of research showing the value of having women run for and attain political office is rich and growing.

The first argument for the equal inclusion of women, and all identities present in America, is basic fairness, says Kelly Dittmar, assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University–Camden and scholar at the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics. “If the system is meant to be a representative democracy, then it should be representative of the many populations it serves, and that includes women.”

Despite the significant gains in the 2018 midterms , women are still woefully underrepresented in American politics. As it stands , women occupy 127 of the 535 seats in the U.S. Congress, or 23.7% of power. For statewide executive offices and state legislatures, the share for women is only slightly better, hovering around 30%. The global average for women’s representation in government is 24.5%, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union , which places the U.S. 82nd of 189 countries on this metric.

“Having women and people of color in political office is beneficial because it’s a sign our political system is open and that everybody can participate no matter their position,” Christina Wolbrecht, professor of political science and director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy at Notre Dame University, told Teen Vogue . If equal democracy is a sign of democratic openness, then our paltry representation of women, and especially women of color , shows American democracy is not an accessible — or healthy — system.

For many, Warren’s exit spawned such a flood of frustration because it reinforced this exact idea, said Mirya Holman, associate professor of political science at Tulane University. “The way she dropped out with a lot of people being supportive , but that not translating into actual votes, reminds people the system is not actually all that open or welcoming to women,” Holman told Teen Vogue .

Setting fairness aside, women are vital to American politics because they bring symbolic power that comes with a cascade of benefits for democracy. Put simply, “It matters because you cannot be what you cannot see,” Jennifer Piscopo, associate professor of politics at Occidental College, told Teen Vogue . Increasing the number of women in political leadership makes it more likely young women and men will see women as both capable of and an equally natural fit for public leadership , Dittmar, the Rutgers professor, pointed out. “This starts to disrupt what has been a white male dominance in American politics, and that is especially true at the presidential level where no woman has served,” she added.

Symbolic representation also provides the crucial ingredient of trust needed for the successful relationship between the governors and governed in any democratic society. In 2016, Piscopo and her research partners Amanda Clayton of Vanderbilt University and Diana O’Brien of Indiana University ran a series of survey experiments asking Americans to read fictitious articles about state legislative committees with varying levels of gender balance that were evaluating sexual harassment policies. The findings showed a resounding rejection of all-male panels that decided to decrease penalties for sexual harassers, with respondents saying they were less likely to agree with the outcome, more likely to believe the process was unfair and the decision should be overturned, and less trustful of the overall results. “When the folks in office are more diverse and gender-balanced we see people have more trust in government and participate in politics more. The paradox is all these stereotypes make it hard for women to get into office in the first place,” Piscopo told Teen Vogue .

Recent research from Wolbrecht and fellow Notre Dame University professor David Cambell also confirms the relationship between representation and trust in government, especially among girls. Based on a national sample of 997 American teenagers, ages 15–18, administered in the fall of 2016 before the election, and then again in 2017, Wolbrecht and Cambell found a drastic decline in how girls, especially those identifying as Democrats, viewed the state of American democracy. In 2016, 37% of Democratic girls thought politics helped meet their needs. A year later that belief had dropped by 20 percentage points.

But when these same teens were interviewed again in 2018, Democratic girls’ trust in democracy rebounded back to 30%, a result Wolbrecht and Campbell credit to the historic number of women who ran in the 2018 midterm elections. Increased faith in politics was especially pronounced among Democratic girls who lived in places where one or more women ran for the U.S. House, Senate, or governor. On the other hand, the trust remained stagnant in areas where there were no women candidates.

This “role model effect” is important not only for trust in government, but also for another critical element of democracy: civic engagement. As Wolbrecht and Cambell write, young women tend to become more politically engaged when they see women engaging in visible, viable campaigns, a finding bolstered by research from Tiffany Barnes, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky. Using data from 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Barnes discovered a direct relationship between women’s representation and political engagement. “Having more women in office, and in visible political positions, is associated with more women engaging in activities like protest or talking about politics, and contacting a representative more frequently,” Barnes told Teen Vogue.

On a substantive policy level, the evidence shows women’s legislative effectiveness is greater than men’s. And although the backgrounds of women are far from monolithic, women overall bring different, valuable perspectives to the currently male-dominated process, Dittmar said. “We value the experience of someone who has had military experience or lived abroad, so, why wouldn’t we value the distinct experience women have in society?”

Want more from Teen Vogue ? Check this out: Elizabeth Warren Never Stood a Chance

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representation

Definition of representation

Examples of representation in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'representation.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing representation

• proportional representation
• self - representation

Dictionary Entries Near representation

representant

representationalism

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“Representation.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/representation. Accessed 9 Sep. 2024.

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The power of political representation

Lisa Jane Disch, Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)

• Critical Exchange
• Open access
• Published: 16 December 2023
• Volume 23 , pages 456–484, ( 2024 )

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• Lawrence Hamilton 1 , 2 ,
• Monica Brito Vieira 3 ,
• Lisa Disch 4 ,
• Lasse Thomassen 5 &
• Nadia Urbinati 6  

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This Critical Exchange takes up a conversation David Plotke inaugurated twenty-five years ago with this simple statement: ‘Representation is democracy’ ( 1997 ). This sentence announced a unique and powerful reframing that ‘transformed what was commonly believed to be an oxymoron into an equivalence’, as Mónica Brito Vieira so aptly and eloquently described it ( 2017 , p. 6). Rather than promote representation from the typical standpoint of republicanism, Plotke took up a vantage point informed by and grateful for the successes of twentieth-century democratic movements. By extending voice and rights to the formerly marginalized and replacing ‘direct personal domination’ and favoritism with abstract rules and procedures, he argued, democratic movements made ‘politics more complex and less direct’ (Plotke., 1997 , p. 24). Increased complexity gave representation ‘a central positive role in democratic politics’, making it an outcome and ally of democracy rather than ‘an unfortunate compromise between an ideal of direct democracy and messy modern realities’ (Plotke, 1997 , p. 24).

That same year, Iris Marion Young also questioned the privilege accorded to ‘direct democracy’, arguing that directness betrays ideals of equality, mutuality, and accountability wherever face-to-face gatherings cede power to ‘arrogant loud mouths whom no one chose to represent them’ (Young, 1997 , p. 353). Her words affirmed Jane J. Mansbridge’s classic study, published twenty years earlier, which documented how town hall governance brings out deep-seated habits of deference to gender- and race-based hierarchies ( 1980 ). These works proved harbingers of what Nadia Urbinati termed the ‘democratic rediscovery of representation’ that took hold in the early 2000s and challenged the ‘standard model’ of representative politics (Urbinati, 2006 , p. 5; Castiglione & Warren, 2019 , p. 22).

The standard model focuses on elections. It conceives of democratic representation as a principal-agent relationship that is territorially based, located within constitutionally sanctioned institutions of political decision-making, and the source for ‘a simple means and measure of political equality’: the vote (Castiglione & Warren, 2019 , p. 21). Accordingly, representative institutions are democratic insofar as they ensure responsiveness to the ‘interests and opinions of the people constituted by territorial membership’ (Castiglione & Warren, 2019 , p. 21). Due to the proliferation of transnational and subnational practices of representation and the generation of economic and ecological externalities that confound territorial boundaries, twenty-first-century globalization created a ‘disjunction’ between model and practice that provided one catalyst for the turn toward representation in democratic theory (Urbinati & Warren, 2008 , p. 388).

New forms of political action gave scholars an even more powerful catalyst. Various experiments defied the traditional opposition between participatory and representative governance: ‘citizen juries, consensus conferences, planning cells’ (Brown, 2006 , p. 203); ‘accountable autonomy’ in community policing and school budgeting (Fung, 2004 , p. 6); sortition (Sintomer, 2011 , 2023 ). Scholars proposed new categories to conceptualize this activity—’informal’, ‘lay’, and ‘self-appointed’ representation (Montanaro, 2012 , 2017 ; Warren, 2008 ). Scholars also transformed the practice of democratic theory, plumbing historical instances where representative and democratic practices conjoined (Hayat) and working the intersection between normative and empirical research (Hawkesworth, 2003 ; Mansbridge, 2003 , 2009 ; Sabl, 2015 ).

The ‘representative turn’ stood out for its proponents’ ‘willingness to question the polarity of representation and democracy’ (Brito Vieira, 2017 , p. 5). They emphasized that representative functions can be fulfilled by a broad variety of non-electoral political actors including social movements, organizations, individual citizens, and influential media figures. They also maintained that political representation ‘does not simply allow the social to be translated into the political, but also facilitates the formation of political groups and identities’ (Urbinati, 2006 , p. 37; Brito Vieira and Runciman, 2008 ; Brito Vieira, 2009 ; Schwartz, 1998 ; Thomassen, 2019 ; Young, 1997 ). Above all, their work made it clear that Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s classic definition of representation as the ‘making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact’ needed amending (Pitkin, 1967 , pp. 8, 9; emphasis original). These theorists, proponents of a ‘constructivist’ variant on the representative turn, emphasized making the represented and its interests over making them present (Disch, 2011 ; Hayward, 2009 ).

Michael Saward’s conceptualization of representation as claims-making provided an especially influential framework for analyzing this ‘performativity’ in both the speech act sense (as constitutive) and the theatrical sense (as performance) (Saward, 2014 , p. 725). He trained analysts’ attention on the work that would-be representatives do to ‘make representations’ of their constituents, by soliciting the ‘latter to recognize themselves’ in the portraits created by claims, policies, and other acts of representation (Saward, 2014 , p. 726; 2006 , 2010 ). He and others explored ‘representation’s aesthetic and cultural character’ (Saward, 2014 , p. 726) in the thought of Thomas Hobbes (Brito Vieira, 2009 ), in ‘enactments’ of race and gender through Congressional welfare reform (Hawkesworth, 2003 ), and in an array of staged public appearances (Salmon, 2010 ; Finlayson, 2021 ; Spary, 2021 ). Shirin Rai developed a ‘political performance framework’ that breaks political performances into their ‘component parts’ to identify the ‘materiality of performance’ and to analyze ‘why and how some performances mark a rupture in the everyday reproduction of social relations’ while others reproduce those relations (Rai, 2015 , pp. 1180, 1181). Laura Montanaro specified the category of ‘self-appointed’ representatives—charismatic individuals and organized advocacy groups who claim to speak for constituencies and are recognized as doing so even though they are neither elected nor appointed—and proposed normative criteria for assessing when they serve democracy and when they do not ( 2017 ).

This new work focused an urgent concern: ‘if representative politics is performative, how can we ensure that it is also democratic?’ (Thomassen in this Critical Exchange). By recognizing that political representation happens outside constitutionally sanctioned liberal democratic institutions and acknowledging its performativity, this work neutralized traditional election-based yardsticks for assessing its democratic legitimacy: authorization by and responsiveness to a geographically specified constituency.

It also provoked astute objections. Sophia Näsström observes an ambiguity about this work’s ‘diagnostic or normative’ aims ( 2011 , p. 502). Noting the pronounced asymmetries of voice in the non-electoral domain of global politics that favor the wealthy, she cautions that the emphasis on non-electoral representation may ‘serve as a warning of what may lie ahead, as a call for democratic theorists to rethink numerical equality beyond election’, or provide a ‘subtle’ means of acclimating people to the ‘idea that there may be acceptable forms of global representative government without democracy’ ( 2011 , p. 508). Jennifer Rubenstein similarly objects that the activities of global non-governmental organizations are not and do not claim to be acts of representation; they are exercises of power that should be analyzed as such rather than through a ‘representation lens’ ( 2007 , p. 208). Andrew Rehfeld ( 2017 ) pointedly observed that for all the new attention to representation, scholars failed to ask the simplest of questions: What is a representative and how does one come to be one?

Lisa Disch’s Making Constituencies emerges from the representative turn in democratic theory and is inspired by a specific problem: What are empirical researchers to make of the fact that they can affirm citizens’ capacity for preference-formation only at the cost of revealing their susceptibility to the self-seeking rhetoric of competing elites? This question originates from a reconsideration of early survey research that called traditional yardsticks of representative democracy into question long before democratic theorists made the turn. In 1964, Philip Converse famously debunked both responsiveness and accountability, arguing that voters offer little in the way of consistent beliefs or coherent ideologies for representatives to respond to and that they pay too little attention to politics to hold their representatives to account. Today, empirical scholars find that individuals in mass democracies do form political opinions, preferences, and identities but in response to political contexts rather than prior to them (see, for example, Carmines & Kuklinski, 1990 ; Lupia, 1992 , 1994 ; Druckman, 2001 ).

Making Constituencies emphasizes that empirical researchers offer distinct accounts of political learning processes that reach significantly different conclusions regarding the viability of representative democracy. One account holds that humans adapt their opinions and preferences to antagonistic group affiliations which they are psychologically disposed to form (Achen & Bartels, 2016 ; Iyengar et al., 2012 ). The other posts a political divide emerging in response to increasing polarization among political elites (Abrams & Fiorina, 2012 ; Levendusky, 2009 ). These accounts bear on the widely cited phenomenon of ‘sorting’, popularly known as the antagonistic division into partisan camps that pundits lament for rendering mass democracies increasingly ungovernable. The first account depoliticizes sorting by depicting it as a fact or state grounded in human psychology; the second treats it as a portrait of the political landscape—a representation. Rather than reflect a deep-seated partisan cleavage, talk of sorting, studies of sorting, and strategies designed to exploit it participate in constituting that antagonistic divide.

Despite the influence of the psychological account, empirical research frequently supports the political explanation. Recall the intractable partisan differences that were said to have influenced states’ pandemic-related regulations regarding masks and quarantine in the United States and people’s responses to those regulations. Sorting influenced how people understood and experienced the pandemic. Residents of blue [i.e. Democrat] states and/or counties blamed red-state [i.e. Republican] policy and the reckless actions of red-state residents for accelerating both the spread of the pandemic and the propagation of new variants.

Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report ( 2023 ) re-examines this narrative, highlighting the ‘great untold story’ that it was ‘common’ during the first months of the pandemic ‘to find selfless cooperation, people sharing best practices and regularly supporting one another across state lines and all political persuasions’ ( 2023 , p. 150). Only as the pandemic wore on, and the 2020 presidential election approached, did policy and behavior with respect to masking, social-distancing, and—ultimately—vaccine mandates exhibit partisan antagonism. The authors emphasize:

…there is a common view that politics, a ‘[r]ed response’ and a ‘blue response’, were the main obstacle to protecting citizens, not competence and policy failures. We found, instead, that it was more the other way around. Incompetence and policy failures, including the failure of federal executive leadership, produced bad outcomes, flying blind, and resorting to blunt instruments. Those failures and tensions fed toxic politics that further divided the country in a crisis rather than bringing it together ( 2023 , p. 151).

Spotlighting this key paragraph, David Wallace-Wells observes that ‘the partisanship of our pandemic response was not a pre-existing condition…[but] was, at least partly, a result of that response’ ( 2023 ). Applied to the pandemic, the sorting narrative entrenched the condition that its subscribers lament—a country cleaved by antagonistic partisanship and unable to cooperate to achieve clear public goods.

I wrote Making Constituencies to better align our ideals of representative democracy with empirical findings about how it works in practice. This required displacing representative democracy from its (mythical) ground in the ‘bedrock’ of voter preferences—the constructivist turn (Disch, 2011 ). The intuition driving the book is that the constructivist turn has the potential to shore up rather than undermine mass democracy. If representative democracy is at its best when representatives of all kinds—elected officials, opinion-shapers, advocacy groups, and more—build creative and unlikely coalitions, perhaps the turn to constructivism inspires optimism about those agents’ ability to do just that. The generative and perceptive essays that follow offer a wealth of insight into where democratic theory is moving today, particularly in western democracies. They also persuade me that my book gave too little consideration to an important element of this vision: political judgment and the political conditions that foster and distort it in mass publics.

An excellent introduction to a great absent

The constructivist conception of political representation allows Disch to advance two very important arguments, which are the pillars of this excellent book: the vindication of critical realism, and its distinction from what I would call ‘simplistic’ realism. The former inspires a theoretical and practical attitude that is supportive of democracy, while the latter fosters a pessimistic and skeptical, if not overtly critical, attitude toward it. This dualism leads us directly to the topics that have divided scholars of democracy since time immemorial: the role of competence and, indeed, of the competent in political decision-making, and a negative assessment of the role of political parties. While Disch comprehensively covers the former, she leaves out the latter.

Political theorists are well acquainted with Disch’s work, which over the years has become a valuable contribution to the theory of representation as ‘claim-making’—a constructivist approach that corrects the formalist reading and connects representation with participation rather than only voting and institutions. The enormous implications of the constructivist turn have not yet been fully appreciated. They concern the understanding of politics, the role of conflict as constitutive of democratic politics and political freedom, and the inclination of democratic theory toward critical realism. Critical realism is a guide to decoding the factors that determine the formation of citizens’ reasons for their political choices, without falling into moralism and pedagogical paternalism, or alternatively justifying the status quo.

Representation entails the construction of constituencies. The latter give unity to the claims and problems that bring us into the political arena, shape the linguistic frame that conveys to others our reasons and goals—they represent us to our fellow citizens and the audience. Organizational strategies are essential to the making of the several roles and actors that comprise the collective work of representation, which is in all respects a process of participation through which citizens construct their political identities (movements and parties) and goals, and seek and acquire the power to determine the direction of the government of their society; in doing all of that citizens construct ties among each other and side for or against other constituencies. Representation is the name of a form of participation, whose Latin root means two things at once: taking sides and taking part.

Disch brilliantly sketches the process through which this conception of representation emerged: a long journey that began with Pitkin’s seminal 1967 book, which took representation out of the corner to which behaviorist and elitist theories of democracy had confined it, albeit at the cost of emphasizing its formalistic character. ‘Pitkin modified interest representation in several radical ways. She redefined democratic representation from an interpersonal relationship to an anonymous and impersonal’ or formal system process (p. 38). While elitist theory emphasized the individual-to-individual relationship (between the represented and the representatives) and the role of individual preferences and interests—a perspective that is still predominant in political science—Pitkin unpacked representation in relation to the form of the mandate and ascribed relevance to the moment of ‘acting for’. This choice opened the way to issues of advocacy and leadership, and fatally to those of manipulation and ideological constructions. However, although Pitkin did not make the representative claim bi-directional, and insisted on the formalist moment to detract from the plebiscitary or demagogic strategy, she nevertheless opened the way for the active role of citizens, both as respondents and as creators of leaders. Mansbridge refined that trajectory in relation to the deliberative system, proposing the idea of anticipatory representation linked to and in fact promoted by retrospective voting. Disch writes that this move pushed Mansbridge ‘into the constituency paradox’ and into the tension between ‘manipulation’ and ‘education’ that characterizes representative democracy. Disch’s critical work is situated within this ‘paradox’ but with a view to its solution, foregoing the need to identify ‘criteria for distinguishing between persuasion and manipulations’ (p. 45).

Based on the constructivist turn, Disch mounts an assault on contemporary realists, notably Christopher H. Achen, Larry M. Bartel and Jason Brennan, who in fact are anything but realists insofar as they judge citizens’ decisions (election results) on the basis of an idea of ‘competent’ decision-making that claims authority over citizens’ judgment and decision. But, Disch suggests, understanding how and why citizens voted for this or that candidate is not the same as staging a court of law to pass a verdict on them. Contemporary realists rely on a psychological approach in analyzing preferences and beliefs; this individualistic poll-based method leads them to conclude that ignorance is the structural flaw that elections generate, a flaw that can only be contained but never erased. The prescription is predictable: democracy is to be saved from itself by narrowing the role of suffrage in two ways: expanding the role of the competent (Achen and Bartel) or limiting the right to vote to those who pass an exam (Brennan).

These realists argue that the psychological need of individuals to bond with a group is like an instinctive force toward belonging, a kind of ‘primordialism’. It could be said that the more competent and intellectually sharp we are, the more we can reason apart from a group or an instinctive need to belong. The more rational we are, the more individualistic we are, and the more competent we are as citizens—a condition that is of the few, not the many. According to these realists, therefore, any grouping is a sign of ignorance and intellectual laziness. They draw on Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde, who wrote before democracy raised the fear of the (blind, irrational, emotional and reactive) masses that demagogues conquer. The distrust of contemporary realists mimics Robert Michels’ point that individual citizens need to associate to resolve their weakness, with the paradoxical consequence that association brings them into the arms of an oligarchy and makes them dependent on partisan views.

This simplistic realism is certainly not conducive to representative democracy. As Disch shows, it is the child of behaviorism and a negative conception of politics. It has a pessimistic attitude that is difficult to substantiate, even if very pronounced. Simplistic realism identifies citizenship with voting, and representation with recording individual preferences, and reads preferences as emotional reactions to a world that ordinary citizens have no means of knowing or are not interested in knowing. How can we address this ideological construct that claims to be an objective account of reality?

The most important contribution of Disch’s book lies in offering an answer to this question. Disch responds to realist critics, not by rejecting realism but by reinterpreting it. She argues, very persuasively, that realism is not identifiable with the empirical investigation of individual opinions that assigns a central role to researchers and assumes that citizens are simply reactive; an approach, as we have seen, that draws on crowd psychology. The interdisciplinary approach proposed by the critical realism Disch advocates assumes that political judgments (the reasons for citizens’ decisions) occur within a structural social context. Citizens develop their representative claims and, thus, their electoral choices within reflections on a range of considerations of governmental choices, social and economic conditions, and confrontations between different parts of society. Therefore, we should not blame the ignorance of citizens but the presumption of political scientists, who reduce political judgment to a matter of individual psychological reactions that discard ex ante social relations.

Disch masterfully sketches two realisms by opposing to the one exemplified by Achen, Bartel and Brennan a realism exemplified by Katherine J. Cramer and Suzanne Mettler. The latter is the child of a socio-economic structural analysis of the environment in which people form their beliefs, develop their reasons for making decisions, and eventually organize. For simplistic realism, politics has the defect of being a domain in which opinions are manipulated and preferences are simply wrong, because they often are irrational responses to a reality that eludes citizens. For critical realism, politics is the complex art of interpretation and action, a kind of knowledge that aims at ‘effectuality’ and is pragmatically action-oriented. To understand how citizens opine and decide, we must rely on various disciplines and interrogate the relationship between institutions, leaders, and constituencies.

Based on critical realism, Disch takes an important step outside the demarcation drawn by Mansbridge between manipulation and education, partisan politics and reasonable deliberation. Disch goes to the source of political scientists’ distrust of power. ‘To accept that political speech moves people as much or more than it educates them is to acknowledge the irreducible “ambiguities” of manipulation as a concept’ (p. 94), because indeed the result might be that any form of consensus-seeking persuasion is a form of manipulation. Yet if this were the case what would be the role of elections, party pluralism, and conflict to achieve consensus and govern?

The train of ideas that leads Disch to place the theory of democracy within critical realism is represented by some prominent figures: Elmer E. Schattschneider (for his theory of the contagiousness of conflict and the tension between vested interests and political interests), Robert Goodin (for his critique of the fear of manipulation as a fear of ‘competitive political rhetoric’), Claude Lefort (for bringing the theory of power back to its Machiavellian roots as ‘empty space’ and the choral and individual work of contestation in free (democratic) societies), and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (for bringing antagonism and hegemonic articulation of claims into representative politics). These are Disch’s coordinates for thinking democracy as a place of ‘plurality’ and struggle against hierarchy, thus rejecting plurality as made up of groups ‘out there’. Disch argues that, ‘Thinking democracy means thinking of it as plural in this precise sense’ (p. 140).

I fully share Disch’s views about critical realism and pluralism. Her argument is strong, persuasive, and very important. However, I think her position needs a complement to address two issues that are absent in her critical realism. The first issue pertains to ‘antagonism’ as ‘sharp conflict’ that ‘forces decisions on fundamental, often zero-sum issues’ (p. 139). The examples Disch proposes are foundational ‘yes’ or ‘no’ issues as the basic thresholds of democracy: issues of slavery or equal rights, for instance. This kind of ‘zero sum’ antagonism does not, however, seem to qualify ordinary party politics (not even in a two-party system). Not all politics can be antagonistic in this foundational sense if democratic conflict is to be distinguished from civil war. Does Disch distinguish between foundational antagonism and ordinary conflict politics?

This question brings me to the second issue, namely the role of political parties. It is odd that a book based on Schattschneider’s theory of politics and conflict does not have an entry in its index on ‘party’, ‘parties’, or ‘political parties’ and does not mention Schattschneider’s 1942 book Party Government , a pivotal anti-Schumpeterian work. Disch prefers to refer to movements, which at times she seems to use synonymously with parties, in order to make the case for representative constructivism. But of course, movements and parties are not the same. Unless we ascribe hegemonic or equivalence work to a single leader (a demagogue or a populist), we should consider the pivotal role of a collective organizer and organized body like the ‘political party’. This was the ‘collective Prince’ that Antonio Gramsci had in mind when he opposed the hegemonic agency of collective leadership against the politics of domination by individual leadership. Disch’s book is about ‘making constituencies’, which is a collective enterprise. Among the makers of this enterprise are parties, even if they are an object of contempt when they aim to be something more than machines for selecting and campaigning for candidates. Yet this is a Schumpeterian reading with which Disch’s critical realism cannot be content.

Nadia Urbinati

Making representation matter

We are experiencing a ‘representative turn’ in democratic theory. Despite important advances in understanding representation at the level of ‘high’ theory (Saward, 2010 , and Brito Vieira, 2017 ) and empirical political science (Guasti & Geissel, 2019 ), there have been very few attempts to theorize from the real world of political representation on the ground. Until now.

Lisa Disch’s Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy ( 2021 ) does just this, and very neatly. It is a short book full of ideas and crisp, convincing moves. Its mix of the theoretical and the empirical enables Disch to ground her theoretical arguments and helps the reader grasp the complexities of mobilizing her novel account of representation. Disch has a very important point to make, and she makes it well, engaging a remarkable variety of literatures and perspectives.

This is a book about representation in democracy or representative democracy. More specifically, the book is ‘a crusade against competence’ (p. 137) that ‘asks you to change the way you think about political representation’ (p. 1). What links representation and competence? As Disch argues, although politics is ultimately all about interests, conflict, and power, classic accounts of representation rest on an ‘interest-first’ model in which constituencies form around things they want and elected representatives respond to their demands. In other words, they assume that interests (and associated group affiliations) exist prior to the dynamics of representation, and that the job of the representative is about responding to expressed interests. This assumption informs how ordinary citizens assess their representatives: they judge them better or worse depending on how responsive they are to their preferences. This framing forms part of a larger history and discourse about representative democracy. As Disch shows in chapters 1 to 5 (especially in chapter 3), since the middle of the twentieth century this has led a swath of supposedly ‘realist’ thinkers especially, but not only, in American political science and journalism to become pessimistic about democracy.

On this kind of responsiveness model of representation, where the representative is assumed to be not much more than the citizens’ delegate, it is all too easy to explain the vagaries of democracy, and why some groups may even seem to vote for candidates opposed to furthering their own interests, via the idea of citizen incompetence. If the representative process is viewed in these simplistic terms, this not only underplays the role of the representative in shaping interests but also makes the unrealistic assumption that interests are fixed and prior to representation. Therefore, if citizens fail to elect those who are responsive to or act in their interests, they must in some way be incompetent: unable to identify their interests, easily manipulated, sticking to the groups with which they associate and affiliate, and not thinking independently about what is in their interest.

The next logical step for these more pessimistic thinkers is to argue that democracy itself is irredeemably flawed because it fails to enable citizens to identify their interests and then hold their representatives to account in terms of their responsiveness to these interests. Moreover, these mistakes are not confined to anti-democratic or ‘elite’ democratic theorists. They apply even to those who correctly point out that most elected representatives do not serve lower income (or even middle income) interests but elite interests held by those that fund or support their parties, campaigns, and lives. Because corruption is endemic, representative democracy, in this view, is inherently flawed (Vergara, 2022 )—unless, of course, this entire argumentative edifice is shown to rest on a delusion or a form of wishful thinking (Geuss, 2015 ) regarding the nature of representation and representative democracy.

Before discussing how Disch helps us escape this unhelpful way of understanding representation, it is worth noting that she also reveals a related problem, namely, the tendency of most normative political theory that has predominated in the west for sixty years to begin from the individual, despite the evident facts of our relational, embedded and interdependent lives. While there are ethically sound reasons for such individualism, Disch keeps groups front and center of political understanding. However, she disputes the idea that groups and group identities are fixed and pre-political. As Disch notes throughout her book, social scientists and citizens commonly think of politically significant group identities as determined by economic or other social interests and regard these groups as forming relatively spontaneously whenever these interests are at stake. This view takes discrete groups as basic constituents of social life and the main source of social conflict.

This view is also common amongst democratic theorists trained in social science. Pluralist and participatory theories of democracy are just two examples. They assume an existing (if sometimes dormant) group or constituency that simply requires mobilization (or rather targeting). They imply that groups form around shared interests to demand laws and policies that serve those interests. By contrast, Disch sees groups not as foundations or starting points of politics but as ‘constituency effects’—outcomes rather than origins of acts of political representation. Following Brubaker ( 2004 , p. 11), Disch thinks that race exemplifies this. She writes:

Brubaker recommends that we think about ‘groups’ as we think about race. We may accept the fact that ‘racial idioms, ideologies, narratives, categories and systems of classification… are real and consequential, especially when they are embedded in powerful organizations’, but this acceptance in no way obligates us to ‘posit the existence of races’. Just as ‘race’—when conceived as a real difference or natural basis for hierarchy—gives little analytical purchase on white supremacy, ‘group’ affords little analytical purchase on the phenomena of identity, loyalty, and mobilization that primordialists use it to explain. Groups hold together not by any essential property shared among their members, but by virtue of representations of divisions and difference that position them in the social field (pp. 21, 22).

For Disch, whether we are talking about groups mobilized around class, race, or gender, it is important to see that groups and group identities are always mobilized or fashioned. In her terms, ‘acts of political representation solicit groups and constitute interests’ (p. 19). Thus, Disch suggests a new term to capture or ‘register’ the power of representation to divide the social field: ‘constituency effects’ (p. 18). She catalogues a range of direct and indirect constituency effects to show how mobilization by representatives does not merely register social cleavages but forges them.

Faithful to Laclau and Mouffe’s account of radical democracy and plurality, Disch argues that plurality and conflict are vital for this idea of representation constituting groups (ch. 7). This brings us back to, what I take to be, the central triangulation of ideas at work here: interests, groups and related mechanisms of representation.

There is little doubt that the French Revolution marks a new beginning for our understanding of representation. Elsewhere I have defended the remarkable theoretical novelty of the Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès’s account of representation, especially in his ‘What is the Third Estate?’ (Hamilton, 2014 ). Disch reveals an additional component of his moves that links him to Laclau and Mouffe’s point about ‘representation cutting new divisions into the irreducible plurality of the social’. Sieyès aimed not just to enfranchise more of the French people but to radically reform the whole representative structure by changing how we conceive of representation. In his proposal to transform the Estates General into the National Assembly, Sieyès proposed a radical repudiation of the traditional notion of the binding mandate. In a context where existing institutions and theories were concerned with limiting representation by securing it to social interests, the Tennis Court Oath proclaimed a ‘revolution of the deputies against the condition of their election’: representatives, Sieyes argued and the Oath proclaimed, would no longer be mere delegates, which constrained them to express the explicitly stated wills and needs of their constituencies. They liberated themselves from this straitjacket to take up a dual role ‘as both sovereign representatives of the nation and makers of the social order’ (p. 127).

Claude Lefort ( 1988 ) claimed that this opened a new mode of political representation: by establishing the National Assembly, the revolutionaries threw off their shackles that bound representatives to reflect and reproduce a hierarchical order. They thus freed acts of representation—speeches, pamphlets, protests, bills—to rally popular political force in the face of existing conventions and towards the expansion of liberty. Sieyès not only aimed thus to persuade the most educated and upwardly mobile part of French society to disidentify with the privileged classes and align their sympathies downwards but opened up the possibility of new forms of representation beyond the restricted delegate model. This ‘rhetoric of social revolution’ opened a new cleavage, a new ordering, a new arena of conflict, involving the ‘identification and denunciation of a class enemy’. In John Dunn’s words, with reference to this period, ‘democracy was a reaction, above all, not to monarchy, let alone tyranny, but to another relatively concrete social category…—the nobility or aristocracy … Democrat was a label in and for political combat; and what that combat was directed against was aristocrats, or at the very least aristocracy’ (cited in Przeworski, 2009 , p. 283). Sieyès thus mounted an exemplary ‘representative claim’—in Laclau and Mouffe’s terminology, he launched a hegemonic bid. This new form of conflict between classes or groups brought about modern democracy as we know it.

This is what binds Sieyès to Laclau and Mouffe. As Lasse Thomassen has argued, ‘the hegemonic relation is essentially a relation of representation, where the representation is not the representation of an original presence but what brings about the represented—in short, a relation of articulation’ ( 2005 , p. 106, cited in Disch, p. 123). As is well known, Laclau and Mouffe do not use hegemony in its everyday sense of reducing politics to a struggle for domination between opposing political forces (Howarth, 2004 , p. 256, cited at p. 124). Rather, hegemony names the battle whereby political representatives (elected and unelected, formal and informal) ‘compete to activate new social divisions, provoke unaccustomed conflicts, and engage disaffected people in unexpected alliances—all with the aim of taking power’ (pp. 124, 125).

This is the crux for Laclau and Mouffe as well as for Disch. These processes involve antagonism not in the sense of disagreement, conflict, or unending hostility but as resistance in a social relationship that had previously reached equilibrium generated by a ‘confrontation between groups’ (Laclau, 1990 , p. 6, cited in Disch, p. 130). As Disch shows, Laclau and Mouffe describe a social field both unlike the mid-twentieth century pluralists’ complex terrain of competing social groups and the reduction to dichotomous class struggle wbich Marx hoped for (and the same can be said for the renewed plebian/elite divide espoused by contemporary left neo-Machiavellians). ‘Worker’, ‘woman’, ‘rural people, ‘Black’, ‘male’ or ‘female’: even as these categories seem to mark self-evidently different groups, Laclau and Mouffe argue that it is political division which has made them so, not demographic characteristics and certainly not essential properties. ‘Economic or historical logics do not create political actors… Representatives do more than stand for the interests of groups populated by “Black”, “White”, “rural”, etc., they constitute those groups by cutting divisions into the “irreducible plurality of the social”‘ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985 , p. 139, cited in Disch, pp. 130, 131). This is then linked to a process of creating alliances that are not formed between pre-constituted groups whose interests and identities coincide but by what Laclau and Mouffe call ‘articulation’: the creation of a graft or link from one struggle to the next by asserting an ‘equivalence’ that alters what they identify and what they might fight for (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985 , pp. 23, 63, cited in Disch, p. 131). Disch lists how a wide range of feminisms have articulated with arguments around biological essentialism and ‘separate spheres’ at one extreme to Marxism at the other. Like Laclau and Mouffe, she lauds rights as having had an ‘irradiating’ effect on many struggle-movements in the twentieth century, from Black people’s struggles for civil and political rights, to feminist struggles for reproductive and economic rights, to struggles by gay, lesbian and transgender persons. Yet, like Laclau and Mouffe, she notes that rights have worked both ways, as a ‘subversive power’ which serves emancipatory and not-so-emancipatory ends alike. In fact, ‘the neoliberal Right seized that subversive power to as great or greater effect than had the radical democratic Left’ (p. 132).

Even if we grant Disch the deserts of her mobilization account of representation, it remains hard to see how processes of forging cleavages work in practice towards goals of freedom and equality that are so central to her and others’ accounts of the progressive role of democratic representation. She claims that ‘Political representatives in democratic societies—elected officials, social movements, opinion shapers, and advocates of all kinds—do not represent in the typical substitutionist, mimetic understanding of the term. They engage in articulation, the stitching together of collectivities or groups by way of a “metaphorical transposition” of one struggle to another’ (p. 132). Having made this claim, the example she then mobilizes—the long-term detrimental effects of the triumph of free-labor republicanism arguments over labor-movement antislavery positions in the struggle to abolish slavery in the United States (leaving us the legacy of equating freedom with contract and the ‘right to work’ and the resultant decimation of unions)—is a perfect example of this problem. Both discourses claimed to be freedom enhancing, but the one that was ultimately successful used the language of rights and has had deleterious effects on worker power. Given Disch’s view of the dynamics of representation, how can she be sure the outcomes she supports will be progressive? If, as she argues, ‘[p]references form and group identifications take shape in response to cues and appeals from political parties, from opinion-shapers, from advocacy organizations, for candidates and office-holders—and more’ (p. 137), how can she be certain that cleavage and conflict will lead to increased freedom rather than apathy, elite domination, and waning political agency for the least powerful? She admits that she cannot: ‘[t]o believe in the power and possibility of countermobilization among sporadically inattentive people—people like myself, who follow more cues than we give— that comes down to faith’ (p. 140).

I want to suggest that we can ask more of our representatives by sticking faithfully to a more performative account of representation and avoiding the strict claims-making structure proposed by Disch and other constructivists. There are two related problems with these kinds of constructivist accounts, which are inherent in how representation is conceived. First, everything seems, ultimately, to depend on representatives’ capacities (and interests) to mobilize us ordinary citizens in the right directions, or at least create enough conflict for us to identify alternatives, and then claim that it is the representatives themselves that take us in these new directions. Constructivist accounts that frame representation as dependent on claims-making seem with one hand to provide hope for the role and importance of our individual and group agency in democratic politics and then to take away this agency with the other. The representative (as opposed to the represented) ends up with most of the agency. Second, what of the older, important idea that representatives also represent the state? And what of the role of parties in the representative dynamic defended by Disch? It is striking that so little is said about the role of parties, given their presence and power in representative democracies. Can the state or political party be said to be a constituency in a way analogous to individuals and groups? This is not obviously the case, at least not without significant modification of the constructivists’ view. And what of those without voice or representation? Think of the Black residents in apartheid South Africa: the reason the fight took the form it did (primarily for civil and political rights) was due to the very fact that they had no voice or representation under apartheid. To think that change came about primarily because representatives created the cleavages and groups necessary for change is to miss the obvious brute fact that the de-, under-, and mis-represented groups could only be seen or heard (at least) initially by laying their bodies and lives on the line. That’s not to say that representation did not exist at all but that in certain circumstances it may not be enough.

Some may be tempted to think that the problem lies in a lack of normative guidance—that Disch’s view is too empirically grounded and insufficiently normative. I disagree. In fact, I think the empirical, real-world grounding is its major strength. The problem is not a lack of normative guidance but a lack of positive view of how to build into the account institutions that enable two seemingly irreconcilable things: more independence for representatives to create cleavages, groups, needs, interests and conflict; and more direct means for residents to judge and critique the performance and judgments of their representatives in terms of their needs and interests. This does not have to bring us back to pointing fingers at (in)competence amongst the ruled (or rulers) or to the idea that we are rooted within the various groups that make up our shared lives together.

Contrary to the framing offered by Disch, we can view representation through a constructivist lens and offer positive ideas and proposals about how to maintain and revivify institutions that enable the kind of political judgment necessary for effective representation, resistance, solidarity, inclusion and emancipation. We can constantly destabilize the institutional fabric of our democracies. To see how, we need to keep two goals front and center: residents and citizens must have control over their representatives who are determining their needs and interests and those of the state, alongside other formative institutions and practices; and they must be constrained sufficiently to give representatives the independence they need to make their own judgements regarding these needs and interests. Elsewhere (Hamilton, 2014 , pp. 133, 153, 192–205) I detail how these (often) partisan political institutions can be justified and sustained to the good of representative democracy. Here I can only note that the reason they can is that, like Disch’s account, with a little more emphasis on positive institution-building in line with an aesthetic view of representation, they help to break down the very common, yet unhelpful distinction in political thinking between ‘judgement’ and ‘opinion’.

If we escape both poles of thinking about representation—that representation is either about completely independent judgement or the direct transmission of opinion—either by means of Disch’s elegant constructivist account or an aesthetic view, it is possible to see that judgement becomes central at two levels of representation: acquiring and assessing the relevant factual information regarding existing needs and interests (which takes place via representatives and constituents); and the process of representing and evaluating needs, interest, and institutions (which leads to enhanced judgements amongst both rulers and ruled) (Hamilton, 2009 ). We thereby retain all the constructivist insights and keep representation material, grounded in the things that matter (involving representation): needs and interests.

Lawrence Hamilton

Representation and political strategy

Despite being embroiled in legal trouble, and despite his continuous lies, Donald Trump is leading the field of candidates for the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election. One commentator explained Trump’s success as follows:

Give Trump this: he doesn’t necessarily accept public opinion as it is but tries to shape it. Although there’d be widespread Republican doubts about the 2020 election no matter what he said, the belief that it was stolen wouldn’t be as deep and pervasive without his persistent (and deceptive) advocacy. He’s changed the landscape in his favor, and his opponents simply accept it at their peril. (Lowry, 2023 )

I would like to suggest that what this commentator proposes as an explanation for Trump’s success can be extended to all representative politics. When Trump claims to represent the real America, he does not mimic or reflect a real America out there but constructs it. He does not take public opinion as given, but shapes it. He makes a MAGA constituency by mobilizing interests and identities.

I take Making Constituencies to be making just this point: that representatives’ claims to represent their constituencies simultaneously construct—i.e. make—those constituencies. Moreover, (political) representation works insofar as it performatively constitutes what it claims to represent. Arguing this, Disch places herself in the so-called constructivist turn in the political theory of representation (Disch et al., 2019 ) by drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe ( 1985 ), among many others.

Populism is a discourse that claims to represent an entity that it simultaneously constitutes: the people. The people is an effect of populist discourse. Populism is the clearest expression of this performative aspect of representation and, for Laclau ( 2005 ), of politics in general: politics is about the construction of collective identities through their representation. Populism constructs a people, although the collective identity can have other names. The constructivist conception of representation shows, however, that it is not only populism that constructs identities and subjectivities: socialism constructs the working class as a revolutionary subject; liberalism constructs individual citizens and consumers as rights-bearers; and so on. In short, the performative aspect of populist representation is a general characteristic of representation.

Populism is the clearest expression of another general aspect of politics: antagonism. A populist discourse divides society in two, most obviously the people against the oligarchy. Populism divides, and it divides in such a way that the populist stands on the side of the (silent or not) majority. Populism is, therefore, a way to construct majorities.

Even though Disch draws on Laclau and Mouffe for her argument about the performative character of representation, she does not mention populism in her book. Trump is mentioned only three times (pp. 138, 140, 181 n. 42). And yet, my claim is that Trump allows us to learn something important, and general, about representation and politics. In one of the places Disch mentions Trump, she refers to him as an example of a ‘“Frankenstein” hybrid’ and a ‘monstrous hybrid’ (p. 140). She writes:

I wrote this book as a realist who has faith in mass democracy. My realism compels me to acknowledge the monstrous hybrids as real. They are not mangled versions of the American Dream but products of exclusions and entitlements that are built into its basic premises. My realism also counsels me that the democrat’s job is not to denounce any of democracy’s creatures but to take part in mobilizing counterforces against the ones I oppose. To believe in the power and possibility of countermobilization among sporadically inattentive people—people like myself, who follow more cues than we give— that comes down to faith. (p. 140)

This quote forcefully communicates the dilemma in which we find ourselves in the face of Trump and other monstrous hybrids: if representative politics is performative, (how) can we ensure that it is also democratic? Disch does not develop an answer in reference to populism, but I would like to do so here in order to cast more light on the dilemma.

Representation is mobilization and countermobilization. This is the terrain of politics. Politics is about constructing majorities, as Republicans from Nixon to Reagan did when they claimed to represent the silent majority. Those majorities may then be represented electorally and gradually become sedimented through policy. Thatcherism constructed a new majority at the end of the 1970s by mobilizing hardworking individuals, and Thatcherite policies then sedimented this majority, for instance by selling off council housing and thereby privatizing and individualizing how people thought about and ‘practiced’ housing (Hall, 1990 ). Strictly speaking, there is only countermobilization: we always find ourselves in a terrain where identities are already mobilized in some way. Trump’s claim about the stolen election amplifies existing claims about the election being stolen, but he is also mobilizing those claims in new ways. That terrain of already mobilized identities may be more or less dislocated and, therefore, open to countermobilization. Following Laclau and Mouffe, Disch refers to this as the ‘unfixity’ of identities that opens the social field as a plurality—and pluralization—of identities (pp. 9, 10; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985 , p. 85). To say that countermobilization always takes place in a (partly) mobilized terrain is also to say that countermobilization starts from this already (partly) mobilized terrain.

The danger for a progressive political project is to take that terrain as given rather than as something to be changed through mobilization. New Labour mobilized new constituencies from the mid-1990s onwards, and they did so in contrast to Thatcherism, for instance around sexuality and race. As such, they mobilized a new Britain (as Cool Britannia, for example). But New Labour also treated as given the Thatcherite majority around economic policy, so the new Britain was still a Britain of individuals who thought of social problems as individual problems. The realism of New Labour was to take certain things as given that were, in fact, the result of contingent hegemonic struggles. Disch proposes that we be realistic about how hegemonic struggles shape what we take to be real.

Countermobilization may consist in claiming to represent the ‘real’ interests of a constituency. We often find this in critiques of populists like Trump that they do not represent the real interests of working-class Americans. The point of the constructivist conception of representation is that real interests are real interests insofar as they have been represented and constructed as such. In other words, any representative claim may be a claim to represent something already there—the silent, moral majority, for instance—but we should treat that as a constative speech act that functions simultaneously as a performative speech act. This performative speech act only functions insofar as it appears as a constative claim to represent a state of affairs in the world. This does not mean that representations are not real. Insofar as they are successful, representations have real effects. For instance, the circulation of racist representations of Black Americans makes it more dangerous to be a young, Black male, because people act on those representations. I take this to be at the heart of Disch’s realism—that we shift focus from the individual representation to the institutions, practices, and discourses that generate certain kinds of representations: ‘critics and even friends of mass democracy … must focus on the systemic conditions for public-opinion and judgment-formation, rather than on the truth or falsehood of individual beliefs’ (p. 105).

The question, then, is what kinds of constituencies institutions mobilize. For instance, what constituencies are mobilized by different electoral systems? First-past-the-post systems may tend to mobilize identification with only two parties, sedimenting a two-party system over time. In such a system, what happens when competitive third-party candidates emerge? And what are the kinds of tweaks to such an electoral system that may break the polarization of constituencies into, for instance, ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’? Does Ranked Choice Voting, as practiced in Alaska, and in more and more places across the United States, mobilize less polarizing and more moderate constituencies (Jacobs, 2022 )? Does Ranked Choice Voting work against populists who divide society into two antagonistic camps? Likewise, does electoral fusion mobilize less or more polarized constituencies? Electoral fusion may help articulate a chain of equivalence among otherwise different parties—for instance, the Democratic Party and the Populist Party in the 1890s—thus fostering the division of the electoral field into two opposed camps. (While electoral fusion has largely disappeared from the American electoral system, one of the latest beneficiaries of electoral fusion was one Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election when he appeared on the ballot for both the Republican Party and the far-right American Independent Party in California.) But it may equally be that electoral fusion (as well as Ranked Choice Voting) challenge voters’ self-identifications, thus pluralizing the social field and opening the possibility for new constituencies to be articulated.

The discussion as to how an electoral system mobilizes polarized constituencies is relevant in the context of Disch’s view that, ‘The greater threat comes from a picture that partisans use to rally their supporters: that of an America sorted into opposing camps so deeply rooted that they cannot be shaken loose and remade’ (p. 2). I take Disch to be identifying polarization as a threat in two respects. First, polarization is a threat to democracy insofar as opposing camps are taken as pre-given to politics, rather than the result of power relations sedimented in American political institutions. This much follows from her mobilization-conception of representation: we should focus on the source of polarized constituencies, and that source lies in the institutional make-up rather than in some primordial, pre-political constituencies.

Second, there is a critique here, and in the rest of her book, of the polarized shape of contemporary American politics. Disch is clear that politics involves conflict and exclusion: ‘To analyze constituency effects is to analyze the politics of conflict. It is to regard group mobilization as an index of the institutional biases that organize some groups into and others out of politics, rather than as the expression of a common interest or affinity’ (p. 33). This is particularly interesting in the context of Laclau and Mouffe, on whom Disch draws, and who theorize politics as inherently antagonistic. There are two things at stake here, in Disch and in Laclau and Mouffe. The first is how we understand political conflict: antagonism, cleavage, difference, division, line-drawing, polarization, and so on. The second is the status of antagonism as a form of politics that divides society in two opposing camps.

In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , Laclau and Mouffe ( 1985 , pp. 122–127) use the term antagonism in two ways. First, they refer to the limit of objectivity or, in terms of the discussion here, the limits of representation. Second, they use it in the sense of a frontier between two opposed camps, a Schmittian friend/enemy relationship where the Other is the obstacle that prevents me from realizing my identity. It should be clear, however, that there is a tension between these two meanings of antagonism: if antagonism is the limit to representation, it cannot be represented as an enemy. This is why Laclau later conceptualized the limit of representation in terms of, first, dislocation and, later, heterogeneity (Thomassen, 2005 ). More important for my discussion here is how Laclau and Mouffe theorize antagonism as an antagonistic frontier. In Laclau, the antagonistic frontier becomes associated with populist discourse, which divides the social into two camps, and where each camp consists of a chain of equivalence among otherwise different constituencies. For instance, in Trump’s discourse, real Americans are opposed to a chain of equivalence of, among others, liberal elites, radical Democrats, weak Republicans, Muslims, and China. Mouffe’s agonistic democracy is organized around a we/they relationship, but importantly this relationship should not be one between enemies but between adversaries: ‘The challenge for democracy, therefore, is to establish the we/they distinction, which is constitutive of politics, in a way that is compatible with the recognition of pluralism’ (Mouffe, 2022 , p. 28).

I take Disch to be arguing something similar. If politics is about mobilizing constituencies, then democratic politics is about the struggle between different representations. In Laclau and Mouffe’s terms, democracy is a struggle for hegemony. However, it is important that this hegemonic struggle takes a democratic form. Disch points to a distinction Laclau and Mouffe draw between democratic and popular antagonisms in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (pp. 129, 130; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985 , pp. 131, 132, 137). Democratic antagonisms are associated with plurality, that is, with the unfixity of identities; popular antagonisms are those antagonisms which Laclau later refers to as populist antagonisms.

Disch concludes that in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , ‘dichotomous division moves from being the very definition of antagonism to being strategically subordinate to democratic antagonism’ (p. 130). Disch is correct to identify this dichotomy between democratic and popular antagonisms and the priority of the former over the latter. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was written as an attempt to theorize the implications for the Marxist view, that history tends towards a single antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, of the emergence of a plurality of antagonisms around gender, race, the environment, and so on. Laclau and Mouffe’s point was that the antagonism between workers and capitalists—that is, class—was only one possible antagonism among many. Moreover, insofar as the pluralization of antagonisms shows the unfixity, or contingency, of identities, there is no hegemonic struggle—democratic or popular—without this pluralization of antagonisms. Mouffe’s theory of agonistic democracy is a continuation of these concerns: it is an attempt to theorize how democratic hegemonic struggle is possible, and how we should think of the democratic institutions that facilitate these struggles. At the same time, Laclau’s ( 2005 ) theory of populism—and, to a lesser degree, Mouffe’s ( 2018 , 2022 ) recent work on Left populism—connects popular antagonisms to emancipatory rupture. Laclau is closer to the Marxist imaginary that connects emancipation to an antagonistic struggle between two opposed camps. Indeed, while Hegemony and Socialist Strategy challenges the idea that society can be defined in its totality by a single antagonism, Laclau’s On Populist Reason tends to take the populist antagonism between people and oligarchy as somehow primordial (Laclau, 2005 ).

However, I would add to Disch’s reading of Laclau and Mouffe that we do not need to accept their dichotomy between democratic and popular antagonisms, even on their own premises. I read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy as identifying two basic logics of difference and equivalence, respectively, (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985 , pp. 127–134). Those logics intersect and interrupt one another, and this is how we should understand the contingency (plurality, unfixity, non-closure) of the social. But if that is the case, then, as Laclau and Mouffe ( 1985 , p. 129) themselves point out, there are no purely democratic or popular struggles; difference is always inscribed (to some extent) in equivalence, and equivalence is always interrupted (to some extent) by difference. We then have a continuum with difference at one end and equivalence at the other, but with the caveat that we always find ourselves between the two ends of the continuum. This allows a finer differentiation of forms of political conflict, ranging from more to less antagonistic.

If we think of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony in this way, we can, as Disch does, characterize their prioritization of democratic antagonisms as ‘strategic’: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy should be read as a deconstructive genealogy of how Marxists came to think of emancipation as an antagonistic struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as two homogeneous and opposed camps. It also makes sense for Mouffe ( 2018 , 2022 ) to theorize democracy in agonistic terms and propose a form of agonistic Left populism, if we remember that she is writing about liberal democratic states in western Europe. It makes sense for Laclau to stress the popular antagonisms in the context of Latin American oligarchic systems that have excluded large parts of the popular classes from political representation (Laclau, 2005 ). In short, it makes sense to think of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , of Mouffe’s writings on agonistic democracy and Left populism, and of Laclau’s writings on populism, in terms of strategy . By insisting on the tension between difference and equivalence, their theory of hegemony opens up the possibility of thinking of political interventions in terms of strategy rather than thinking of politics as a layer of mimetic representation of underlying social forces. There are no guarantees that this will pay off, let alone that the result will be progressive. For that reason, as Disch notes, politics is also a matter of faith.

We often think of populism as rhetorical deception and distortion of reality. Trump would certainly be a case in point. The other side of this association of populism with deception and distortion is a view of the masses as gullible, as inattentive and irrational, who simply follow populist leaders’ cues. Disch challenges this view. On her constructivist conception of representation, we should not judge political representation according to how well it represents a representation-independent reality, but according to how it mobilizes a reality. On this view of representation, we should not accept public opinion as it has been shaped by our political opponents but shape it ourselves. That is (political) representation: a practice that brings into being what it claims is reality. Disch urges us to accept this as the challenge of normal, mass democracy—a challenge for ordinary democrats who, even if they be professors of political science and local council members, let themselves be mobilized more than they themselves mobilize.

Lasse Thomassen

Representation: performative, perhaps democratic?

Lisa Disch’s Making Constituencies is imbued with a sense of urgency. The scenario Disch draws is dystopian if familiar: a democracy depleted of its capacity to make the world otherwise. Once responsible for realizing democracy’s creative potential, representation finds itself stiffened, sterile, trapped. Having developed into a crystallizing force, it turns everything it touches into a monolith.

The resulting political landscape finds itself represented in the two-color map of the United States, where red and blue uneasily share the same geographic space. This map is the foil against which Disch advances her own realistic utopia: a world in which representation functions creatively, generatively, and dynamically, as a power capable of bringing forth new social and political identities by forging unsuspected, unthinkable, perhaps even hitherto impermissible alliances (pp. 15, 124).

To tap into the power of representation, one needs to reconceptualize it. The theory of representation as mobilization laid out in Making Constituencies draws and expands on arguments Disch has been honing for over a decade now. Ever since the publication of her groundbreaking 2011 article, ‘Toward a Mobilization Conception of Democratic Representation’, Disch has been a leading proponent of constructivist approaches to political representation.

The turn to constructivism has been responsible for moving representation from the margins to the heart of democratic theory. Thanks to constructivists’ removal of the ‘bedrock norm’ (Disch, 2011 ) upon which previously unidirectional views of representation were founded, constituencies, their interests, their preferences, their identities have re-emerged as ‘things’ called into being by acts of representation rather than as their basis. This has recast the importance of representation for democracy. As Disch reminds us in her new book, the opposite of representation is neither participation nor mobilization. Being the catalyst (or inhibitor) of both, representation is responsible for political organization, engagement, and movement. It is representation, therefore, that brings ‘some groups into and others out of politics’ (p. 33).

The culmination of Disch’s work on the democratically generative power of representation, Making Constituencies brings out the major ‘strands’ of which her distinctive theoretical contribution is woven: notably, radical democratic theory, political realism, constructivist sociological theory, and empirical political science. Accordingly, the book brings these seemingly disparate influences together into a theoretically differentiated and politically engaged proposal.

While there is undoubted continuity in the book, there is also novelty in the framing of the argument. Making Constituencies is an attempt to make sense of and intervene in the current predicament of democracy in America. The book seeks to address the dangers presented by the rise of partisan sorting, political polarization, and the pursuant sedimentation of political identities. That social divisions between American partisans have grown exponentially in recent years seems to be an established fact of American politics. Behind every fact there is a causal structure to be explored, however. The normal assumption is that American voters are sorting themselves into the Democratic or Republican parties because they are matching their issue preferences more correctly than they used to. But this is the premise that Disch sets herself to upturn. Political representation, she contends, is not tracking social division: it is making it.

Sorting is therefore the bête noire of Making Constituencies . This is not because sorting does not make or mobilize constituencies; it does. The problem for Disch is that it makes and mobilizes them the wrong way. In her view, sorting constitutes a counterproductive type of mobilization whereby political elites construct and entrench the radically opposed, enclave-like constituencies they claim to (only) represent. Consequently, those same elites, together with their core supporters, end up not just radically polarized but much further along in the sorting process than the general public. Despite this, once in power, they claim full control to advance their unrepresentative platforms. The outcome is a nation that effectively agrees on many things but that finds itself bitterly divided nonetheless.

In Disch’s assessment, sorting is a kind of tyranny of the minority: a system in which an extreme and motivated faction wields outsized power in the face of a majority lacking political expression. It also represents a tyranny of the social over the political. Sorting, Disch claims, is taking ‘modern democracy back to a kind of political Middle Ages’, in which ‘social position’ determines ‘political allegiance’, with no space left for the poietic or creative power of politics (p. 139). Sorting enlists a kind of ‘commonsense primordialism’ in order to produce it as a ‘constituency effect’ (Brubaker, 2004 , p. 10; Disch. ch. 2). The word ‘commonsense’ is important here: those representative claims more likely to be felicitous need to resonate cognitively, and naturalized ‘truths’—such as that of the priority (temporal and normative) of the social over the political—enjoy greater political traction than alternatives. Hence, the hold that the ‘bedrock’ model of representation continues to have on the public and on the scientific study of politics.

While I am sympathetic to many of Disch’s claims, including her emphasis on the creative and transformative dimensions of representative politics and the dangers of social reification, her stark division between the social and the political deserves further inspection. If anything, it seems to have become more marked in Making Constituencies , where the social is almost entirely subsumed under the political and becomes a kind of ‘blob’, to use Hanna Pitkin’s ( 2000 ) words, depleted of any significance.

The driving force behind the emptying of the social seems to be radical democracy. From radical democracy, Disch derives an understanding of politics as something capable of bringing out the groundlessness of social existence, its radical (but occluded) contingency, undecidability, and contestability. Like the radical democrats from whom she draws (namely, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau), Disch foregrounds the contingency of the social to affirm the political as a sphere of radical freedom. By conferring primacy on the political, Disch seeks to achieve three key desiderata. First, to foreground latent (and often systemic) exclusions and conflicts that never come to see the day. Second, to open the repressed potential of (representative) politics to surmount those exclusions and radically reshape the political landscape. Third, to forestall the closure of the political order by any hegemonic imposition claiming to represent it. While I endorse all these desiderata, it seems to me questionable that they may ever be achieved if the encumbrances of social existence are not given due consideration, as sometimes seems to happen in the book. These encumbrances are multiple and range from the restructuring of social relations under globalized capital to the traction of collective identities historically entrenched as ‘things’ conferring guarantees of belonging and entitlement.

Even if I agree with Disch that representation comes out wrongly conceived and practically hamstrung where tied to (purportedly) pre-existing social dynamics, the discounting of the latter can be equally problematic. Lois McNay ( 2014 ) rightly characterizes the attendant problem as one of ‘social weightlessness’. Following radical democrats in seeing all interests and identities as ‘contingent and precarious articulations’ (Mouffe, 1992 , pp. 236, 237) makes interests and identities readily available for performative configuration and reconfiguration. Yet, when those interests and identities are seen as ‘embodied power relations’ (which they also are), they acquire ‘a phenomenal depth and durability that, whilst not inevitable, is not necessarily that easily amenable to agonist reconfiguration’ (McNay, 2013 , p. 72). The depth and durability of interests and identities often come in the way of the felicity of mobilization via representation along Disch’s solidaristic and progressive lines. I will offer an example of this later, when discussing Brexit’s nostalgia for empire and white entitlement to the spoils of colonialism. But first I want to highlight a few areas of agreement.

Disch regards sorting as political through and through, and is convinced that the recognition of its political character is critical for its undoing. She identifies a worrying pattern in the discussion of the phenomenon: most notably, the tendency to blame sorting not on elites, but on misinformation, disinformation, or the ignorance of voters. This shifting of attention from sorting to voter competence, in her view, is not just distractive, but positively dangerous.

Disch is right to be suspicious of the return of ‘competence’ arguments. Arguments for discrimination on grounds of competence have been historically responsible for keeping women, racialized, and minoritized individuals, as well as workers, at the gates of democracy. They have thus been, and still are, a tool of disenfranchisement, deployed by elites who fear that their status and power could be diminished by the entry of newcomers or (current) remainders into politics. The idea of having tests for allocating the franchise, and of having elites determining what those tests might be, is a nineteenth-century idea which has been abandoned for very good reasons. It eludes the democratic principle that all those subjected to political decisions should have a say on them—or, at the very least, a say on who makes them. It flies in the face of the democratic commitment to treating every adult individual as the best judge of their interests and thus as equally competent to participate in decision-making.

More than anything else, however, the competence argument deflects attention from systemic problems affecting representative democracies. Yet the main question one must ask, as Disch rightly points out, is ‘not what citizens bring to politics but what the institutions and processes of mass democracy bring out in them’ (p. 7). While reorientation to institutions and processes, and what they (may) bring out in citizens, is of prime importance, Disch’s focus on ‘how representatives bid for their attention or how political institutions shape and constrain those bids’ remains too one-directional and ‘bid-centric’, having relatively little to say about what in those bids and their dynamics empowers citizens as agents (p. 8). As multiple examples in Making Constituencies show, one can win attention and secure engagement without empowering citizens as bearers of judgement (often quite the opposite) or, more broadly, as people engaging in democratic agency in a meaningful fashion. As Pitkin stressed, agency of the represented is a key element of a non-elitist theory of (representative) democracy; it is also something that democratic representation needs to be able to nurture. Hence there is a vital question about mobilization—understood as a form of marshalling and organizing for use or action—that remains partly unanswered in Disch’s book: namely, under what conditions does mobilization via representation turn the represented into active participants in public life, so that whatever happens via representation happens also meaningfully through them? To address this question, it would seem necessary to look not just into social movements, as Disch does, but also political parties. For however much one may disagree with their practices of representation, parties remain a main, if not the main agent of partisan association, and most value polarization amongst sorted partisans occurs through them. However, parties, party reform, and institutional incentives to the reconfiguration of parties’ behavior, make (almost) no appearance in the book.

Equally, the book’s emphasis on representation as the representation of conflict seems unfit to address the problem of partisan-ideological sorting as an impediment to negotiated solutions and political compromise. Here, too, as Disch points out, one finds the causal arrow reversed. We have become accustomed to thinking that gridlock and stalemate are unfortunate by-products of the electorate’s demand for party intransigency. But this seems to be yet another misrepresentation of what is really happening. More than just seeking ideological representation, citizens seem to care about the processes by which disagreements are settled, even when reaching a compromise may come at the cost of partisan goals and policy objectives (Wolak, 2020 ). How might the persistence of this ‘care’ be explained, despite the prevalence of sorting? Answering this question seems (again) to require giving the social its due: normative values implied in compromise processes may be primarily socialized in ways that are independent of politics, though they can undoubtedly be negatively affected by it (Wolak, 2020 ). Hence the question: how can preferences about how politics should be practiced be nurtured also by and within the representative system? If political competition drives out-group distrust, how might the breakdown of trust amongst elites, responsible for fueling mistrust amongst citizens, be best acted upon institutionally?

Under conditions of partisan sorting, people are induced in making large, systematic errors when judging the extent to which partisans belong to party-stereotypical groups (e.g. the percentage of Republicans earning over $250,000 per year) or where opposing-party supporters stand on issues (namely, deeming their positions more extreme than they effectively are; see Ahler & Sood, 2018 ). These misperceptions threaten to warp public opinion.

The provision of conditions for the exercise of judgment is a requirement of any well-functioning representative system. To cite Kelsen, ‘among those who in fact exercise their political rights by participating in government, one would have to differentiate between the mindless masses who follow the lead of others and those few who—in accordance with the idea of democracy—decisively influence the governmental process based on independent judgment’ (Kelsen, 2013 , p. 38). Independent judgment, however, is far from an independent reality. It is something constituted within processes of representation and contestation. These processes mediate judgement and include the images of parties popularized by mass media as well as party associations constructed and mobilized in inter-party competition.

As Disch rightly stresses, citizens do not come to interests or preferences directly; it is through representation that beliefs or judgments about what is in their interest are formed. For this very reason, Disch ( 2011 ) in the past showed a keen interest in how procedures, institutions, and practices of representative democracy might elicit, inform, and test judgments about interests and preferences. But her earlier emphasis on ‘reflexivity’ as the normative criterion of legitimacy of representative systems, and as that which may protect citizens from elite manipulation (of the ‘bad’ kind) by enabling their judgment, takes a back seat in Making Constituencies.

This may be explained by the fact that Disch is seeking to distance herself from epistocrats and their definition of democratic competence as voters’ capacity to make informed judgments regarding their own interests and those of society as a whole (Disch, 2021 , p. 163, n. 1.) Yet there was never a risk of confusion, since Disch always placed reflexivity at the systemic rather than individual level: robust conditions of system reflexivity underpin citizens’ capacity to exercise judgment over competing representative claims seeking to control the terms of their political subjectification (Disch, 2011 ). The problem with ‘reflexivity’ losing its centrality in Disch’s argument is threefold. First, it leaves her account of representation too centered on what representatives do (and what they do to the represented), and pays little attention to the activities of the represented or how they may be best supported so that their judgment does not end up ‘impoverished’ (p.100). Second, while this ‘support’ is placed at the level of the representative system, we get little specification of what in it (what institutions, procedures, and/or practices) may enable citizens to critically engage with representative claims, and how. Third, the lack of (critical) engagement with the reflexivity criterion perpetuates a blind spot in respect of recognizing risks to democracy that go beyond the lack of systemic reflexivity.

One such risk comes from deeply entrenched social-cultural formations operating below the threshold of political agendas and competing framings of representative claims. For Disch ( 2011 ), reflexivity is primarily ensured by the representative system’s capacity to encourage competition and contestation. But if social imaginaries have become deeply settled, how can counter-hegemonic agency ever emerge, and what chances are there that it resonates with the public? In some passages of Making Constituencies , there is a sense that counter-hegemonic agency can occur almost ex nihilo through the operations of representation and counter-representation, as the social is presented as radically contingent and infinitely malleable. However, as it has been rightly noted, ‘representation can [itself] nurture social ignorance, despite the availability of ample opportunities for political contestation and alternative opinion formation’ (Mihai, 2022 , p. 962).

To speak of ‘social ignorance’ is not to bring the discussion back to the question of competence, understood as a matter of knowledge or true belief (although neither question is irrelevant to judgment or the conditions of its proper formation). ‘Social ignorance’ constitutes a specific form of ignorance, a ‘willful ignorance’ (Alcoff, 2007 , p. 39), reflected in the ‘social practice of legitimising epistemically problematic political imaginaries and the institutional systems they underpin’ (Mihai, 2022 , p.962) This kind of ignorance works by ‘naturaliz[ing] and dehistoriciz[ing] both the process and product of knowing, such that no political reflexivity or sociological analysis is thought to be required or even allowed’ (Alcoff, 2007 , p. 56). Where this kind of ignorance is the structural condition within and against which political representation operates, reflexivity falls inevitably short of securing the conditions under which the public may be able to judge and act otherwise. Take, for instance, the terms in which the debate on the 2016 referendum on Britain’s EU membership was waged. Disagreement between ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ hardly scratched the surface of the big unsaid: the subconscious imperial attitudes borne by ‘social ignorance’ about the legacy of British colonialism, including racism, which informed but were left broadly untouched by the campaign (Bell & Vucetic, 2019 ).

Chapter 4 of Making Constituencies draws on Goodin to advance a helpful reconceptualization of manipulation away from an intentionalist view, focusing on ‘the activities of anyone in particular’ toward the ‘relentless workings of systemic bias’ (Goodin, 1980 , p. 238). But the prophylactic advanced in that chapter—competing mobilization through ‘a dynamic interaction between frames and counterframes’ (p. 106)—does not offer an apt antidote to systemic biases, especially where they are sustained and reproduced by (often) unconsciously produced unknowledges. Social ignorance is structural, systemically produced and supported by everyday ignorance-practices. It amounts to an epistemic hiding of privilege, through an instituted imaginary that holds epistemic communities in place, complete with their conceptions of entitlement, and of hierarchical epistemic and social positioning (Medina, 2013 ). Counter-frames may sometimes be able to induce the kind of ‘epistemic friction’ necessary to disrupt social ignorance (Medina, 2013 ). But where social ignorance structures the very communicative setting in which competing mobilizations occur, epistemic friction may not happen as the competition may not reach into the structure that restrains and channels it (see Schaap, 2020 ).

In light of challenges like the one posed by social ignorance, Disch’s focus on taking the sting out of elite manipulation seems to miss the target. It is true that representative claims can enforce the practice of social ignorance without being ‘manipulative’ in the sense of spreading lies or falsehoods. However, Disch’s reframing of manipulation as something integral to representation dangerously overextends the concept and brings into relief some problems with her otherwise attractive proposal—namely, it exposes the normative deficit inherent in her radically constructivist view of representation as mobilization. What drives Disch’s book is a concern that citizens’ political identities have become sedimented, and this sedimentation is tethered to the fact that citizens have become too deeply divided in their perceptions of reality. These perceptions are elite-driven, but they become self-fulfilling. So here is the problem: partisan mobilization engaging the type of ‘cue taking’ Disch seems happy to bring under the category of ‘unproblematic manipulation’ has been found to be responsible for citizens’ living worlds apart and suspending disbelief about the portrayals of real-world conditions they are offered (e.g. Bisgaard & Slothuus, 2018 ). Disch’s attempt to separate sorting from manipulation is thus not entirely successful, which foregrounds her lack of normative resources to distinguish between democratically legitimate or illegitimate instances of representation, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sorting, empowering and disempowering mobilization. Hence, when ‘representation by misdirection’ (p. 100)—that is, representation seeking to draw attention away from unpopular policies and towards personality traits—is presented as a form of illegitimate representation, it is not at all clear what makes it illegitimate on Disch’s own terms. What is the normative standard driving its condemnation, and where is it coming from?

Making Constituencies is an engaging and stimulating book: lively, passionate, and contentious. It powerfully foregrounds the power of representation to create groups, to put them into a meaningful relationship with themselves (and others), and to mobilize them into political action. Unique in its integrative approach, it shows that an empirically informed political theory need not acquiesce in the status quo but can help us interrogate the actual and the possible in democratic representative politics.

Mónica Brito Vieira

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Is bad representation better than no representation at all?

I'm a fairly inexperienced writer trying to wrap my head around this question. As someone who's been kind of an asshole in the past, especially when it comes to social issues like racism or transphobia, I've recently tried to improve myself and become more aware. This happens to coincide with my forays into writing, and I want to get advice when it comes to the question: should I try having more representation in my writing, and risk saying something rude or insensitive with my art, perpetuating a stereotype, etc, or should I just.. not?

I completely understand the need for representation: stories are made to convey thoughts and emotions and feelings, and stories where you can see yourself in them and really get something tangible from that is invaluable. I've experienced it myself, as someone who struggles with mental illness; sometimes I can stumble upon a piece of media that really just gets it, and it's unbelievable how much that can mean to me, even if those stories weren't specifically about mental illness.

The problem comes with my rather limited experience as a person, as far as oppression goes. I'm not black, I'm not gay, I'm not trans. I'm a cishet white guy, and with that comes all the prejudices of being one, trying to sort through what's the product of me being raised in a society specifically created for people like me and really deal with that.

I want to include black characters (or really any.. non-white characters, so to speak) in my stories. I want to include gay characters or trans characters or asexual characters or anything else I feel like including. The issue is such that these minorities are those that have been stomped on repeatedly by society (I say "have been", but they still absolutely are nowadays), and I really want to avoid contributing to that.

Of course, I don't want to make stories about being black, or being gay, or being trans, because I haven't experienced those things. I do want to include those sorts of characters, so that more people can resonate with what I create. I understand that I can't authentically write about being a minority, and so that makes me extremely hesitant to include characters of color or gay characters or what have you. I'm worried that no matter how careful I am, I'm going to end up saying something harmful about these people.

Logically, I understand how you do it. Talk to people who have experienced those things, and definitely make any character with those traits (or any character in general, really) feel like a real person and not a caricature, a character that's more than just what they look like or who they're attracted to. But the anxiety still remains.

I'm not sure. I want to hear what other people think.

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Representative Democracy: Definition, Pros, and Cons

Edward Kimmel from Takoma Park, MD / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0

• B.S., Texas A&M University

Representative democracy is a form of government in which the people elect officials to create laws and policies on their behalf. Nearly 60 percent of the world’s countries employ a form of government based on representative democracy, including the United States, (a democratic republic), the United Kingdom (a constitutional monarchy), and France (a unitary state). Representative democracy is sometimes called indirect democracy.

Representative Democracy Definition

In a representative democracy, the people elect officials to create and vote on laws, policies, and other matters of government on society's behalf. In this manner, representative democracy is the opposite of direct democracy , in which the people vote on every law or policy themselves at every level of government. Representative democracy is typically employed in larger countries where the number of citizens involved would make direct democracy unmanageable. 

Common characteristics of representative democracy include:

• The powers of the elected representatives are defined by a constitution that establishes the basic laws, principles, and framework of the government.
• The constitution may provide for some forms of limited direct democracy, such as recall elections and ballot initiative elections.
• Elected representatives may also have the power to select other government leaders, such as a prime minister or president.
• An independent judiciary body, such as the U.S. Supreme Court, may have the power to declare laws enacted by the representatives to be unconstitutional.

In some representative democracies with bicameral legislatures, one chamber is not elected by the people. For example, members of the British Parliament’s House of Lords and the Senate of Canada obtain their positions through appointment, heredity, or official function.

Representative democracy stands out in sharp contrast to forms of government like totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and fascism , which allow the people little to no elected representation.

Brief History

The ancient Roman Republic was the first state in the Western world known to have a representative form of government. Today’s representative democracies more closely resemble the Roman than the Greek models of democracy, because the Roman model vested supreme power in the people and their elected representatives. 

Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester in 13th century Britain, is considered one of the fathers of representative government. In 1258, de Montfort held a famous parliament that stripped King Henry III of unlimited authority. A second de Montfort parliament in 1265 incorporated ordinary citizens. During the 17th century, the English Parliament pioneered some of the ideas and systems of liberal democracy culminating in the Glorious Revolution and passage of the Bill of Rights of 1689.

The American Revolution led to the creation of the United States Constitution in 1787, providing for a legislative House of Representatives directly elected by the people every two years. Until the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, U.S. Senators were not directly elected by the people. Women, men who owned no property, and Black persons did not gain the right to vote until the 19th and 20th centuries.

Representative Democracy in the U.S.

In the U.S., representative democracy is employed at the national government and state government levels. At the national government level, the people elect the president and the officials who represent them in the two chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. At the state government level, the people elect the governor and members of the state legislatures, who rule according to the state constitutions.

The President of the United States, Congress, and the federal courts share powers reserved to the national government by the U.S. Constitution. In creating a functional system called “ federalism ,” the U.S. Constitution also shares certain political powers with the states.

Pros and Cons of Representative Democracy

Representative democracy is the most prevalent form of government. As such, it has advantages and disadvantages for the government and the people.

Representative democracies are efficient. A single elected official represents the desires of a large number of people. In the U.S., for example, just two Senators represent all of the people in their states. By conducting a limited number of national elections, countries with representative democracies save time and money, which can then be devoted to other public needs.

A representative democracy is empowering. The people of each representative democracy's political subdivisions (state, district, region, etc.) choose the representatives who make their voices heard by the national government. Should those representatives fail to meet the expectations of their constituents , the voters can replace them in the next election.

Representative democracies encourage participation. When people are confident that they have a say in their government's decisions, they are more likely to remain aware of issues affecting their country and vote as a way of making their opinions on those issues heard.

A representative democracy is not always reliable. The votes of elected officials in a representative democracy may not always reflect the will of the people. The officials are not bound by law to vote the way the people who elected them want them to vote. Unless term limits apply to the official in question, the only options available to dissatisfied constituents are to vote the representative out of office in the next regular election or, in some cases, to demand a recall election.

Representative democracies can become inefficient. Governments shaped by representative democracy may develop into massive bureaucracies , which are notoriously slow to take action, especially on momentous issues.

A representative democracy can invite corruption. Candidates may misrepresent their stances on issues or policy goals to achieve political power. While in office, politicians may act in the service of personal financial gain rather than for the benefit of their constituents (sometimes to the direct detriment of their constituents).

In a final analysis, a representative democracy should truly result in a government created “by the people, for the people.” However, its success in doing so depends on the people’s freedom to express their wishes to their representatives and the willingness of those representatives to act accordingly.

• Desilver, Drew. "Despite global concerns about democracy, more than half of countries are democratic." Pew Research Center, 14 May 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/14/more-than-half-of-countries-are-democratic/.
• Kateb, George. "The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy." Institute of Education Sciences, 3 September 1979, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED175775.
• "Lesson 1: The Importance of Representative Democracy." Unicam Focus, Nebraska Legislature, 2020, https://nebraskalegislature.gov/education/lesson1.php.
• Russell, Greg. "Constitutionalism: America & Beyond." U.S. Department of State, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20141024130317/http:/www.ait.org.tw/infousa/zhtw/DOCS/Demopaper/dmpaper2.html.
• Direct Democracy: Definition, Examples, Pros and Cons
• Republic vs. Democracy: What Is the Difference?
• Electoral College Pros and Cons
• What Is a Bicameral Legislature and Why Does the U.S. Have One?
• What Is Incrementalism in Government? Definition and Examples
• Reasons to Keep the Electoral College
• What Is Populism? Definition and Examples
• What Is Redistricting? Definition and Examples
• Understanding the Ballot Initiative Process
• What Was the US Second Party System? History and Significance
• How Vacancies in the US Congress are Filled
• House and Senate Agendas and Resources
• How Many Members Are in the House of Representatives?
• About the Speaker of the House of Representatives
• Constituent Services: What Your Members of Congress Can Do For You
• Qualifications to be a US Representative

12 Representative Democracy Advantages and Disadvantages

A representative democracy is a structure of government where officials are elected to represent groups of people. These officials then vote on policies, laws, and other items of government business on behalf of the people so that the general population doesn’t need to vote on every separate issue as they would in a direct democracy.

Most democracies in the West are a form of a representative democracy. The United States is a federal republic, the UK is a constitutional monarchy, and Ireland is a parliamentary republic.

The advantage of a representative democracy is its efficiency. A large group of people receive the benefits of living in a democracy by having one representative vote according to their needs, wishes or desires. It saves time and money for the government so the funds can be used for other purposes.

The disadvantage of a representative democracy is that an official isn’t required to vote based on how their district or population center wishes them to vote. They can pursue their own agendas, vote according to their own conscious, and the only way to stop this is to either vote that person out of office on the next election cycle of initiate a recall election if one is allowed.

Here are some additional representative democracy advantages and disadvantages to think about.

Here are the Pros of a Representative Democracy

1. It still gives power to the people. A government with this structure still relies on what the majority of the people want in most circumstances. Each population center can send a representative to the government which will provide them with a voice in how the government operated. If the representative doesn’t perform or vote as the population they represent desires, then they can be voted out on the next election. In the US, that can be as soon as 2 years.

2. Checks and balances are put in place to limit power. In a representative democracy, it is important for all branches of the government to share equal power, but with differing responsibilities. In the United States, there is an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch. Each keeps the other in check because no single branch of government can wield all the power. This structure makes it possible for each representative to offer an opinion on laws or policies.

3. Everyone has the chance to participate. As long as you are eligible to vote, then you get to participate in a representative democracy. Sometimes people feel like their votes don’t count, especially if they find themselves in a minority position most of the time, but the ability to participate in the elections is not compromised. If you can vote, then you are making your opinion be heard.

4. It allows the government to react quickly. In an emergency situation, a representative democracy allows the government to act quickly to respond to whatever potential threat may be in place. There isn’t the need to put a vote to the rest of the public. The government officials can look at the situation, decide on the best course of action, and then take action.

5. It encourages people to participate. When people know that they can have their voice heard in their government, they are more likely to participate in the elections that are held. When there are important decisions to be made, more people show up to vote. In the 2016 US Presidential election, for example, more 126 million votes were cast. In 2008, 63% of eligible voters came out to cast a ballot.

6. It allows a district to form their own governmental presence. In the US, there are three stages of government: local, regional, and national. Each can be structured in a way to meet needs as effectively as possible at every level.

Here Are the Cons of a Representative Democracy

1. Polarization occurs frequently. People live in neighborhoods where they are most comfortable. Instead of focusing on diversity, the focus is on maintaining the status quo. Because of this process, political polarization occurs frequently in a representative democracy. People will move to a location where they can be in the majority and that creates natural population divisions throughout the country.

2. A super majority is possible in a representative democracy. Although the structure of a representative democracy is to provide checks and balances, there are times when one party can dominate the government. In 2016, for example, the Republican Party took control of the legislative and executive branch of government. If the US Senate had 60 Republicans, then nothing could be done to stop the legislation being pushed through until the next election cycle.

3. Districts must be able to trust their elected representatives. The elected officials in a representative democracy are supposed to represent the people. This is not always the case. Sometimes a vote might be swayed by political pressure from the party. A vote could be swayed by personal preferences. The reality of a representative democracy is that no one actually knows how a representative will vote until the vote is cast, as was seen when John McCain voted against healthcare reform in the US Senate in 2017.

4. The voice of the people technically ends with the election. Once a representative is elected, the voice that people have in their government is technically over. People can still write their elected officials, make appointments to speak with them, or confront them at town hall meetings, but they have no control over how the vote will actually be.

5. It is a system that invites corruption. Ever hear a statement like this: “All politicians lie.”? The structure of a representative democracy invites candidates to be less-than-forthcoming with their views and stances on current events. Once elected, there is no reason to deliver on a campaign promise or attempt to better the economic circumstances of their home districted. Officials can work on their own career instead to create personal gains and it can be difficult to stop such an official.

6. It focuses on the majority only. In a representative democracy, minority groups are only given enough air time to have their issues heard so that a vote can be obtained. In many ways, minority groups are left to solve their own problems in this structure of government because they do not have the voting power to overwhelm the majority.

These representative democracy advantages and disadvantages show us that this structure of government sacrifices individuality for speed and efficiency. In many ways, it can be a beneficial form of government that can represent the population of a nation quite effectively. It is also a structure that can make people feel like they’ve been left out of the process, especially if they are consistently in a minority group.

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Representative Democracy Remains a Popular Ideal, but People Around the World Are Critical of How It’s Working

Many say their country would be better off if more women, people from poor backgrounds and young adults held elective office, table of contents.

• How do views of democracy stack up against nondemocratic approaches?
• Widespread belief that elected officials are out of touch
• Many don’t think political parties represent them
• People rate their country’s leaders, parties and overall state of democracy poorly
• How ideology relates to views of representation
• In their own words: Ideas for improving democracy
• Views on representative democracy
• Views on direct democracy
• Views on expert rule
• Views on autocracy
• Views on military rule
• Views of elected officials
• How represented do people feel by political parties?
• What if more elected officials were women?
• What if more elected officials were from poor backgrounds?
• What if more elected officials were young adults?
• What if more elected officials were businesspeople?
• What if more elected officials were labor union members?
• What if more elected officials were religious?
• Satisfaction with democracy
• Views of national leaders, opposition leaders and political parties
• Appendix A: Political leaders and parties by country
• Classifying parties as populist
• Classifying parties as left, right or center
• Appendix C: Political categorization
• Acknowledgments
• About Pew Research Center’s Spring 2023 Global Attitudes Survey
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

This Pew Research Center analysis focuses on public opinion of democracy and political representation in 24 countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific region, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Satisfaction with democracy is examined in the context of long-term trend data. The report also explores views of nondemocratic systems of government. This is the first year since 2019 that the Global Attitudes Survey has included countries from Africa and Latin America due to the coronavirus outbreak .

For non-U.S. data, this report draws on nationally representative surveys of 27,285 adults conducted from Feb. 20 to May 22, 2023. All surveys were conducted over the phone with adults in Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Surveys were conducted face to face in Hungary, Poland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. In Australia, we used a mixed-mode probability-based online panel.

In the United States, we surveyed 3,576 U.S. adults from March 20 to 26, 2023. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

In Israel, the survey was conducted from March 15 to April 24, 2023, before Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the start of the Israel-Hamas war. 

Several countries have had national elections since this data was collected. Most recently, Indonesia held a general election in February 2024. Greece and Poland both held parliamentary elections, while Argentina, the Netherlands and Spain held general elections in 2023. In Nigeria, elections were held immediately before fieldwork began. 

Throughout the report, we analyze attitudes by respondents’ income and education. For income, we created lower, middle and higher income categories by splitting the respondents who provided this information into three roughly equal groups within each country.

To compare educational groups across countries, we standardize education levels based on the UN’s International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED).

• In India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Brazil, the lower education category is below secondary education and the higher category is secondary or above.
• The lower education category is secondary education or below and the higher category is postsecondary or above in Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the UK, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Argentina and Mexico.
• In the U.S., the lower education category is some college or below and the higher category is a college degree or more.

Here are the questions used for the report, along with responses, and the survey methodology .

The health of democracy has declined significantly in many nations over the past several years, but the concept of representative democracy continues to be popular among citizens across the globe.

Solid majorities in each of the 24 countries surveyed by Pew Research Center in 2023 describe representative democracy, or a democratic system where representatives elected by citizens decide what becomes law, as a somewhat or very good way to govern their country.

However, enthusiasm for this form of government has slipped in many nations since 2017. And the survey highlights significant criticisms of the way it’s working. Across the countries included in the study:

• A median of 59% are dissatisfied with how their democracy is functioning.
• 74% think elected officials don’t care what people like them think.
• 42% say no political party in their country represents their views.

What is a median?

Throughout this report, median scores are used to help readers see overall patterns in the data. The median percentage is the middle number in a list of all percentages sorted from highest to lowest.

What – or who – would make representative democracy work better?

Many say policies in their country would improve if more elected officials were women, people from poor backgrounds and young adults.

Electing more women is especially popular among women, and voting more young people into office is particularly popular among those under age 40.

Views are more mixed on the impact of electing more businesspeople and labor union members.

Overall, there is less enthusiasm for having more elected officials who are religious, although the idea is relatively popular in several middle-income nations (Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria and South Africa, as defined by the World Bank ).

For this report, we surveyed 30,861 people in 24 countries from Feb. 20 to May 22, 2023. In addition to this overview, the report includes chapters on:

• Attitudes toward different types of government systems
• Views about political representation
• Impact of electing more officials from different backgrounds
• Satisfaction with democracy and ratings for specific leaders and parties

Read some of the report’s key findings below.

Even though most people believe representative democracy is a good way to govern, many are open to other forms of government as well.

Direct democracy – a system where citizens, rather than elected officials, vote directly on major issues – is also viewed favorably by majorities in nearly all countries polled.

In most countries, expert rule – in which experts, not elected officials, make key decisions – is also a popular alternative.

And there is notable support for more authoritarian models of government.

In 13 countries, a quarter or more of those surveyed think a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts is a good form of government. In four of the eight middle-income nations in the study, at least half of respondents express this view.

Even military rule has its supporters, including about a third or more of the public in all eight middle-income countries. There is less support in high-income nations, although 17% say military rule could be a good system in Greece, Japan and the United Kingdom, and 15% hold this view in the United States.

Strong support for representative democracy has declined in many nations since we last asked the question in 2017.

The share of the public describing representative democracy as a very good way to govern is down significantly in 11 of the 22 countries where data from 2017 is available (trends are not available in Australia and the U.S.).

For instance, 54% of Swedes said representative democracy was a very good approach in 2017, while just 41% hold this view today.

In contrast, strong support for representative democracy has risen significantly in three nations (Brazil, Mexico and Poland).

Views on autocratic leadership

Support for a government where a strong leader can make decisions without interference from courts or parliaments has increased in eight of 22 nations since 2017.

It is up significantly in all three Latin American nations polled, as well as in Kenya, India, South Korea, Germany and Poland.

Support for a strong leader model is especially common among people with less education and those with lower incomes.

People on the ideological right are often more likely than those on the left to support rule by a strong leader.

Support for a system where experts, not elected officials, make key decisions is up significantly in most countries since 2017, and current views of this form of government may be tied at least in part to the COVID-19 pandemic . For example, in the U.S., 59% of those who believe public health officials have done a good job of responding to the coronavirus outbreak think expert rule is a good system, compared with just 35% among those who say public health officials have done a bad job of dealing with the pandemic.

One factor driving people’s dissatisfaction with the way democracy is functioning is the belief that politicians are out of touch and disconnected from the lives of ordinary citizens.

In every country surveyed, people who feel politicians don’t care about people like them are less satisfied with democracy.

Across 24 nations, a median of 74% say elected officials in their country don’t care what people like them think.

At least half of those surveyed hold this view in all countries but one (Sweden). Opinions about elected officials are particularly negative in Argentina, Greece, Nigeria, Spain and the U.S., where at least eight-in-ten believe elected officials don’t care what people like them think.

While a median of 54% across the 24 countries surveyed say there is at least one party that represents their views well, 42% say there is no party that represents their views.

Israelis, Nigerians and Swedes are the most likely to say at least one party represents their opinions – seven-in-ten or more express this view in each of these countries. 1 In contrast, about four-in-ten or fewer say this in Argentina, France, Italy and Spain. Americans are evenly divided on this question.

In 18 countries where we asked about ideology, people who place themselves in the center are especially likely to feel unrepresented. And in some countries, those on the right are particularly likely to say there is at least one party that represents their views.

The U.S. illustrates this pattern: 60% of American conservatives say there is a party that represents their opinions, compared with 52% of liberals and just 40% of moderates.

The survey asked respondents how well they feel democracy is working in their country, and it also asked them to rate major national leaders and parties. Opinions on these questions may have shifted since the survey was conducted in spring 2023, but the overall results provide a relatively grim picture of the political mood in many nations. (Refer to Appendix A for details about the specific leaders and parties we asked about.)

• There are only seven countries where half or more are satisfied with the way democracy is working. 
• Among the 24 national leaders included on the survey, just 10 are viewed favorably by half or more of the public.
• Opposition leaders fare even worse – only six get favorable reviews.
• Across the countries polled, we asked about 87 different political parties. Just 21 get a positive rating.
• Opinions vary greatly across regions and countries, but to some extent, we see more positive views about leaders and parties in middle-income nations. 

This report highlights significant ideological differences on many questions, including preferences regarding the characteristics of people who serve as elected officials.

Those on the political left are generally much more likely than those on the right to favor electing more labor union members, young adults, people from poor backgrounds and women.

Meanwhile, those on the right are more likely to say policies would improve if more religious people and businesspeople held elective office.

Ideological divisions on these topics are often especially sharp in the U.S. There are also very large partisan differences.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to favor having more women, young adults, people from poor backgrounds and labor union members in office.

Meanwhile, Republicans are more likely to endorse electing more religious people and businesspeople. 

The survey also included the following open-ended question: “What do you think would help improve the way democracy in this country is working?” Respondents describe a wide variety of ideas for making democracy work better, but a few common themes emerge:

Improving political leadership: Respondents want politicians who are more responsive to the public’s needs, more attentive to the public’s voice, less corrupt and more competent. Many would also like political leaders to be more representative of their country’s population in terms of gender, age, race and other factors.

Government reform: Many believe improving democracy will require significant political reform in their country. Views about what reform should look like vary considerably, but suggestions include changing electoral systems, shifting the balance of power between institutions, and placing limits on how long politicians and judges can serve. In several countries, people express a desire for more direct democracy.

Expecting more from citizens: Respondents also emphasize that citizens have an important role to play in making democracy work better. They argue that citizens need to be more informed, engaged, tolerant and respectful of one another.  

Improving the economy: Many people – and especially those in middle-income nations – emphasize the link between a healthy economy and a healthy democracy. Respondents mention creating jobs; curbing inflation; changing government spending priorities; and investing more in infrastructure, such as roads, hospitals, water, electricity and schools.

The full results of the open-ended question will be released in an upcoming Pew Research Center report. For a preview of some of the findings, read “Who likes authoritarianism, and how do they want to change their government?”

Additional reports and analyses

Pew Research Center regularly explores public attitudes toward democracy and related issues around the world. Check out some of our major publications on this topic from the past few years:

• Majorities in most countries surveyed say social media is good for democracy  (February 2024)
• Social Media Seen as Mostly Good for Democracy Across Many Nations, but U.S. is a Major Outlier (December 2022)
• Global Public Opinion in an Era of Democratic Anxiety (December 2021)
• Citizens in Advanced Economies Want Significant Changes to Their Political Systems (October 2021)
• Democratic Rights Popular Globally but Commitment to Them Not Always Strong (February 2020)
• European Public Opinion Three Decades After the Fall of Communism (October 2019)

The Center also regularly examines U.S. public opinion on topics related to democracy. Some of the most recent releases include:

• Tuning Out: Americans on the Edge of Politics (January 2024)
• Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics (September 2023)
• Israel survey was conducted March 15-April 24, 2023, before Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and the start of the Israel-Hamas war. ↩

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Pros and cons of proportional representation

Could a change of voting system heal the UK’s polarised politics?

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1. Pro: better reflects voting

2. con: pathway for extremists, 3. pro: ends ‘wasted votes’, 4. con: local issues suffer, 5. pro: more representative locally, 6. con: compromise coalitions.

Keir Starmer has been accused of acting like a “feudal monarchy” after the Labour leader indicated he would not put a pledge for electoral reform in the party’s next election manifesto.

Labour members overwhelmingly backed a motion at the party conference in Liverpool to replace the current first-past-the-post system with proportional representation (PR).

Can Labour win the next general election? Is tactical voting a threat to the Tories? The important changes coming to future elections in the UK

And the views of the grassroots membership appear to align with voters in the so-called “Red Wall” constituencies Labour needs to win back to have any chance of forming the next government . A survey commissioned by campaign group Make Votes Matter of 40 heartland seats in the Midlands, North of England and Wales found 47% supported adopting PR, compared to just 12% who were in favour of keeping the existing electoral system.

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“Yet the Labour leader’s office has been reluctant to back PR,” said The New Statesman . “It would make the party vulnerable to Tory attack lines about electoral pacts, stitch-ups and a ‘coalition of chaos’. Plus, for MPs who have won their seats and held them under the existing system, there is little incentive to change.”

So what are the arguments for and against PR?

“Under PR systems the number of seats in parliament reflects the number of votes cast overall in elections,” said The Independent . Advocates believe, therefore, that if a party receives 20% of the vote, it should have 20% of the seats.

The current first-past-the-post (FPTP) “majoritarian system”, however, delivers disproportionate majorities that favour larger parties, voters in rural constituencies and does not reflect the true voting preference of the general public.

Under the existing UK system, for example, in the overall popular vote the Conservatives “need a lead of 5 points to secure a Commons majority; for Labour, the lead needs to be at least 12 points”, said The Guardian . If the two parties received an equal share of the vote at the next general election, the Tories would win 23 more seats than Labour, the paper said.

A more proportional system would also give smaller parties and independent candidates a better chance of getting into Parliament and introduce different voices to our national political life.

PR seldom results in one party holding an overall majority but rather leads to governments that need to compromise and build consensus. This means that – in theory, at least – stable, centrist policies that reflect a spectrum of views often prevail. This is the case in Germany, which has a government made up of centre-right free marketeers, the centre left and Greens.

By contrast, FPTP “is increasing polarisation, weakening accountability, and perpetuating an increasingly dysfunctional two-party system”, a report by The Constitution Society has warned.

“The premise that PR can be good for fringe parties is based on a kernel of truth . In the Netherlands and elsewhere, PR helps extremist parties and radical ideas turn diffuse votes into seats in legislatures,” said the Nato Association of Canada , citing a Harvard Kennedy School of Government study that found that PR systems tend to favour extreme right-wing parties.

If the 2015 UK general election had been held under a PR system, UKIP would have been the third-largest party in Parliament, with 83 seats instead of one. Good news for its supporters but worrying for those who linked the party’s popularity with a resurgence of xenophobia and nationalism.

“It is undoubtedly true that PR allows for higher numbers of MPs from ‘non-mainstream’ parties,” said Dylan Difford on the Electoral Reform Society site.

Most European parliaments contain at least one left-wing socialist and one right-wing populist party or in the recent case of Sweden and Italy right-wing populist parties can break through and win enough votes to form a government.

A more representative form of PR would put an end to millions of votes being “wasted” at elections.

In 2019, for example, analysis by the Electoral Reform Society found that across the UK, more than 22 million votes (70.8%) were “ignored because they went to non-elected candidates or were surplus to what the elected candidate needed” to win the seat.

A change to PR would mean candidates having to appeal to a much larger section of the public rather than just targeting a tiny proportion of swing voters in marginal constituencies. This in turn could lead to a higher turnout at the polls, as voters feel more engaged with the democratic process.

A study into voting patterns in New Zealand after its switch from FPTP to PR in 1996 found that “voters who were on the extreme left were significantly more likely to participate than previously, leading to an overall increase in turnout”. PR also fostered “more positive attitudes about the efficacy of voting”.

One of the main arguments against PR during the failed AV referendum of 2011 was that it would weaken the link between constituents and their MP.

Under FPTP, MPs serve the constituency they campaign in, so are more inclined to tackle local issues and represent the specific views of their constituents at a national level. Under the PR “list” system, electoral constituencies would have to be much bigger in order to have multiple seats to fill proportionately, possibly leading to local issues being overlooked.

FPTP allows MPs to be elected with a small overall percentage of the vote. Some representatives have been elected to Parliament despite 75% of their constituency voting for other candidates.

According to the Electoral Reform Society, the concentration of the Labour vote in certain areas meant that in 2019 it took on average 50,835 votes to elect a Labour MP, whilst only 38,264 votes were needed to return a Conservative MP.

The alternative vote (AV) system, which is not fully proportional but is still likely to increase the representation of small parties, and single transferable vote (STV) , which is truly proportional, would take into account voters’ back-up choices to end up with a candidate that satisfies a majority.

Talk of a so-called “coalition of chaos” made up of Labour, the Lib Dems and SNP was a feature of the Conservatives’ 2015 election campaign and fears of something similar are driving the current Labour leadership to shy away from backing PR.

In a country like the UK, which is used to long periods of single-party rule, the idea of a never-ending series of weak and indecisive coalition governments has been the main obstacle to electoral reform over the years.

Neither the trade union reforms that Margaret Thatcher pushed through nor Tony Blair’s raft of improvements to public services could have been carried through without a strong governing majority.

Detractors also claim PR carries an inherent instability. The Italian parliament, which uses such a system, is constantly in a state of uncertainty and has been prematurely dissolved three times since 2008.

There is also the messy process of forming a coalition. In Germany last year, this process took three months. And in October 2020 Belgium ended a record-breaking 653 days without a government or prime minister when Alexander de Croo was able to form a new four-way coalition, said Euronews .

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Political Representation

The concept of political representation is misleadingly simple: everyone seems to know what it is, yet few can agree on any particular definition. In fact, there is an extensive literature that offers many different definitions of this elusive concept. [Classic treatments of the concept of political representations within this literature include Pennock and Chapman 1968; Pitkin, 1967 and Schwartz, 1988.] Hanna Pitkin (1967) provides, perhaps, one of the most straightforward definitions: to represent is simply to “make present again.” On this definition, political representation is the activity of making citizens’ voices, opinions, and perspectives “present” in public policy making processes. Political representation occurs when political actors speak, advocate, symbolize, and act on the behalf of others in the political arena. In short, political representation is a kind of political assistance. This seemingly straightforward definition, however, is not adequate as it stands. For it leaves the concept of political representation underspecified. Indeed, as we will see, the concept of political representation has multiple and competing dimensions: our common understanding of political representation is one that contains different, and conflicting, conceptions of how political representatives should represent and so holds representatives to standards that are mutually incompatible. In leaving these dimensions underspecified, this definition fails to capture this paradoxical character of the concept.

This encyclopedia entry has three main goals. The first is to provide a general overview of the meaning of political representation, identifying the key components of this concept. The second is to highlight several important advances that have been made by the contemporary literature on political representation. These advances point to new forms of political representation, ones that are not limited to the relationship between formal representatives and their constituents. The third goal is to reveal several persistent problems with theories of political representation and thereby to propose some future areas of research.

1.1 Delegate vs. Trustee

1.2 pitkin’s four views of representation, 2. changing political realities and changing concepts of political representation, 3. contemporary advances, 4. future areas of study, a. general discussions of representation, b. arguments against representation, c. non-electoral forms of representation, d. representation and electoral design, e. representation and accountability, f. descriptive representation, other internet resources, related entries, 1. key components of political representation.

Political representation, on almost any account, will exhibit the following five components:

• some party that is representing (the representative, an organization, movement, state agency, etc.);
• some party that is being represented (the constituents, the clients, etc.);
• something that is being represented (opinions, perspectives, interests, discourses, etc.); and
• a setting within which the activity of representation is taking place (the political context).
• something that is being left out (the opinions, interests, and perspectives not voiced).

Theories of political representation often begin by specifying the terms for the first four components. For instance, democratic theorists often limit the types of representatives being discussed to formal representatives — that is, to representatives who hold elected offices. One reason that the concept of representation remains elusive is that theories of representation often apply only to particular kinds of political actors within a particular context. How individuals represent an electoral district is treated as distinct from how social movements, judicial bodies, or informal organizations represent. Consequently, it is unclear how different forms of representation relate to each other. Andrew Rehfeld (2006) has offered a general theory of representation which simply identifies representation by reference to a relevant audience accepting a person as its representative. One consequence of Rehfeld’s general approach to representation is that it allows for undemocratic cases of representation.

However, Rehfeld’s general theory of representation does not specify what representative do or should do in order to be recognized as a representative. And what exactly representatives do has been a hotly contested issue. In particular, a controversy has raged over whether representatives should act as delegates or trustees .

Historically, the theoretical literature on political representation has focused on whether representatives should act as delegates or as trustees . Representatives who are delegates simply follow the expressed preferences of their constituents. James Madison (1787–8) describes representative government as “the delegation of the government...to a small number of citizens elected by the rest.” Madison recognized that “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Consequently, Madison suggests having a diverse and large population as a way to decrease the problems with bad representation. In other words, the preferences of the represented can partially safeguard against the problems of faction.

In contrast, trustees are representatives who follow their own understanding of the best action to pursue. Edmund Burke (1790) is famous for arguing that

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interest each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole… You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament (115).

The delegate and the trustee conception of political representation place competing and contradictory demands on the behavior of representatives. [For a discussion of the similarities and differences between Madison’s and Burke’s conception of representation, see Pitkin 1967, 191–192.] Delegate conceptions of representation require representatives to follow their constituents’ preferences, while trustee conceptions require representatives to follow their own judgment about the proper course of action. Any adequate theory of representation must grapple with these contradictory demands.

Famously, Hanna Pitkin argues that theorists should not try to reconcile the paradoxical nature of the concept of representation. Rather, they should aim to preserve this paradox by recommending that citizens safeguard the autonomy of both the representative and of those being represented. The autonomy of the representative is preserved by allowing them to make decisions based on his or her understanding of the represented’s interests (the trustee conception of representation). The autonomy of those being represented is preserved by having the preferences of the represented influence evaluations of representatives (the delegate conception of representation). Representatives must act in ways that safeguard the capacity of the represented to authorize and to hold their representatives accountable and uphold the capacity of the representative to act independently of the wishes of the represented.

Objective interests are the key for determining whether the autonomy of representative and the autonomy of the represented have been breached. However, Pitkin never adequately specifies how we are to identify constituents’ objective interests. At points, she implies that constituents should have some say in what are their objective interests, but ultimately she merely shifts her focus away from this paradox to the recommendation that representatives should be evaluated on the basis of the reasons they give for disobeying the preferences of their constituents. For Pitkin, assessments about representatives will depend on the issue at hand and the political environment in which a representative acts. To understand the multiple and conflicting standards within the concept of representation is to reveal the futility of holding all representatives to some fixed set of guidelines. In this way, Pitkin concludes that standards for evaluating representatives defy generalizations. Moreover, individuals, especially democratic citizens, are likely to disagree deeply about what representatives should be doing.

Pitkin offers one of the most comprehensive discussions of the concept of political representation, attending to its contradictory character in her The Concept of Representation . This classic discussion of the concept of representation is one of the most influential and oft-cited works in the literature on political representation. (For a discussion of her influence, see Dovi 2016). Adopting a Wittgensteinian approach to language, Pitkin maintains that in order to understand the concept of political representation, one must consider the different ways in which the term is used. Each of these different uses of the term provides a different view of the concept. Pitkin compares the concept of representation to “ a rather complicated, convoluted, three–dimensional structure in the middle of a dark enclosure.” Political theorists provide “flash-bulb photographs of the structure taken from different angles” [1967, 10]. More specifically, political theorists have provided four main views of the concept of representation. Unfortunately, Pitkin never explains how these different views of political representation fit together. At times, she implies that the concept of representation is unified. At other times, she emphasizes the conflicts between these different views, e.g. how descriptive representation is opposed to accountability. Drawing on her flash-bulb metaphor, Pitkin argues that one must know the context in which the concept of representation is placed in order to determine its meaning. For Pitkin, the contemporary usage of the term “representation” can signficantly change its meaning.

For Pitkin, disagreements about representation can be partially reconciled by clarifying which view of representation is being invoked. Pitkin identifies at least four different views of representation: formalistic representation, descriptive representation, symbolic representation, and substantive representation. (For a brief description of each of these views, see chart below.) Each view provides a different approach for examining representation. The different views of representation can also provide different standards for assessing representatives. So disagreements about what representatives ought to be doing are aggravated by the fact that people adopt the wrong view of representation or misapply the standards of representation. Pitkin has in many ways set the terms of contemporary discussions about representation by providing this schematic overview of the concept of political representation.

1. Formalistic Representation : Brief Description . The institutional arrangements that precede and initiate representation. Formal representation has two dimensions: authorization and accountability. Main Research Question . What is the institutional position of a representative? Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . None. ( Authorization ): Brief Description . The means by which a representative obtains his or her standing, status, position or office. Main Research Questions . What is the process by which a representative gains power (e.g., elections) and what are the ways in which a representative can enforce his or her decisions? Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . No standards for assessing how well a representative behaves. One can merely assess whether a representative legitimately holds his or her position. pdf include--> ( Accountability ): Brief Description . The ability of constituents to punish their representative for failing to act in accordance with their wishes (e.g. voting an elected official out of office) or the responsiveness of the representative to the constituents. Main Research Question . What are the sanctioning mechanisms available to constituents? Is the representative responsive towards his or her constituents’ preferences? Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . No standards for assessing how well a representative behaves. One can merely determine whether a representative can be sanctioned or has been responsive.

Brief Description . The ways that a representative “stands for” the represented — that is, the meaning that a representative has for those being represented.

Main Research Question . What kind of response is invoked by the representative in those being represented?

Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . Representatives are assessed by the degree of acceptance that the representative has among the represented.

Brief Description . The extent to which a representative resembles those being represented.

Main Research Question . Does the representative look like, have common interests with, or share certain experiences with the represented?

Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . Assess the representative by the accuracy of the resemblance between the representative and the represented.

Brief Description . The activity of representatives—that is, the actions taken on behalf of, in the interest of, as an agent of, and as a substitute for the represented.

Main Research Question . Does the representative advance the policy preferences that serve the interests of the represented?

Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . Assess a representative by the extent to which policy outcomes advanced by a representative serve “the best interests” of their constituents.

One cannot overestimate the extent to which Pitkin has shaped contemporary understandings of political representation, especially among political scientists. For example, her claim that descriptive representation opposes accountability is often the starting point for contemporary discussions about whether marginalized groups need representatives from their groups.

Similarly, Pitkin’s conclusions about the paradoxical nature of political representation support the tendency among contemporary theorists and political scientists to focus on formal procedures of authorization and accountability (formalistic representation). In particular, there has been a lot of theoretical attention paid to the proper design of representative institutions (e.g. Amy 1996; Barber, 2001; Christiano 1996; Guinier 1994). This focus is certainly understandable, since one way to resolve the disputes about what representatives should be doing is to “let the people decide.” In other words, establishing fair procedures for reconciling conflicts provides democratic citizens one way to settle conflicts about the proper behavior of representatives. In this way, theoretical discussions of political representation tend to depict political representation as primarily a principal-agent relationship. The emphasis on elections also explains why discussions about the concept of political representation frequently collapse into discussions of democracy. Political representation is understood as a way of 1) establishing the legitimacy of democratic institutions and 2) creating institutional incentives for governments to be responsive to citizens.

David Plotke (1997) has noted that this emphasis on mechanisms of authorization and accountability was especially useful in the context of the Cold War. For this understanding of political representation (specifically, its demarcation from participatory democracy) was useful for distinguishing Western democracies from Communist countries. Those political systems that held competitive elections were considered to be democratic (Schumpeter 1976). Plotke questions whether such a distinction continues to be useful. Plotke recommends that we broaden the scope of our understanding of political representation to encompass interest representation and thereby return to debating what is the proper activity of representatives. Plotke’s insight into why traditional understandings of political representation resonated prior to the end of the Cold War suggests that modern understandings of political representation are to some extent contingent on political realities. For this reason, those who attempt to define political representation should recognize how changing political realities can affect contemporary understandings of political representation. Again, following Pitkin, ideas about political representation appear contingent on existing political practices of representation. Our understandings of representation are inextricably shaped by the manner in which people are currently being represented. For an informative discussion of the history of representation, see Monica Brito Vieira and David Runican’s Representation .

As mentioned earlier, theoretical discussions of political representation have focused mainly on the formal procedures of authorization and accountability within nation states, that is, on what Pitkin called formalistic representation. However, such a focus is no longer satisfactory due to international and domestic political transformations. [For an extensive discussion of international and domestic transformations, see Mark Warren and Dario Castioglione (2004).] Increasingly international, transnational and non-governmental actors play an important role in advancing public policies on behalf of democratic citizens—that is, acting as representatives for those citizens. Such actors “speak for,” “act for” and can even “stand for” individuals within a nation-state. It is no longer desirable to limit one’s understanding of political representation to elected officials within the nation-state. After all, increasingly state “contract out” important responsibilities to non-state actors, e.g. environmental regulation. As a result, elected officials do not necessarily possess “the capacity to act,” the capacity that Pitkin uses to identify who is a representative. So, as the powers of nation-state have been disseminated to international and transnational actors, elected representatives are not necessarily the agents who determine how policies are implemented. Given these changes, the traditional focus of political representation, that is, on elections within nation-states, is insufficient for understanding how public policies are being made and implemented. The complexity of modern representative processes and the multiple locations of political power suggest that contemporary notions of accountability are inadequate. Grant and Keohane (2005) have recently updated notions of accountability, suggesting that the scope of political representation needs to be expanded in order to reflect contemporary realities in the international arena. Michael Saward (2009) has proposed an innovative type of criteria that should be used for evaluating non-elective representative claims. John Dryzek and Simon Niemayer (2008) has proposed an alternative conception of representation, what he calls discursive representation, to reflect the fact that transnational actors represent discourses, not real people. By discourses, they mean “a set of categories and concepts embodying specific assumptions, judgments, contentions, dispositions, and capabilities.” The concept of discursive representation can potentially redeem the promise of deliberative democracy when the deliberative participation of all affected by a collective decision is infeasible.

Domestic transformations also reveal the need to update contemporary understandings of political representation. Associational life — social movements, interest groups, and civic associations—is increasingly recognized as important for the survival of representative democracies. The extent to which interest groups write public policies or play a central role in implementing and regulating policies is the extent to which the division between formal and informal representation has been blurred. The fluid relationship between the career paths of formal and informal representatives also suggests that contemporary realities do not justify focusing mainly on formal representatives. Mark Warren’s concept of citizen representatives (2008) opens up a theoretical framework for exploring how citizens represent themselves and serve in representative capacities.

Given these changes, it is necessary to revisit our conceptual understanding of political representation, specifically of democratic representation. For as Jane Mansbridge has recently noted, normative understandings of representation have not kept up with recent empirical research and contemporary democratic practices. In her important article “Rethinking Representation” Mansbridge identifies four forms of representation in modern democracies: promissory, anticipatory, gyroscopic and surrogacy. Promissory representation is a form of representation in which representatives are to be evaluated by the promises they make to constituents during campaigns. Promissory representation strongly resembles Pitkin’s discussion of formalistic representation. For both are primarily concerned with the ways that constituents give their consent to the authority of a representative. Drawing on recent empirical work, Mansbridge argues for the existence of three additional forms of representation. In anticipatory representation, representatives focus on what they think their constituents will reward in the next election and not on what they promised during the campaign of the previous election. Thus, anticipatory representation challenges those who understand accountability as primarily a retrospective activity. In gyroscopic representation, representatives “look within” to derive from their own experience conceptions of interest and principles to serve as a basis for their action. Finally, surrogate representation occurs when a legislator represents constituents outside of their districts. For Mansbridge, each of these different forms of representation generates a different normative criterion by which representatives should be assessed. All four forms of representation, then, are ways that democratic citizens can be legitimately represented within a democratic regime. Yet none of the latter three forms representation operates through the formal mechanisms of authorization and accountability. Recently, Mansbridge (2009) has gone further by suggesting that political science has focused too much on the sanctions model of accountability and that another model, what she calls the selection model, can be more effective at soliciting the desired behavior from representatives. According to Mansbridge, a sanction model of accountability presumes that the representative has different interests from the represented and that the represented should not only monitor but reward the good representative and punish the bad. In contrast, the selection model of accountability presumes that representatives have self-motivated and exogenous reasons for carrying out the represented’s wishes. In this way, Mansbridge broadens our understanding of accountability to allow for good representation to occur outside of formal sanctioning mechanisms.

Mansbridge’s rethinking of the meaning of representation holds an important insight for contemporary discussions of democratic representation. By specifying the different forms of representation within a democratic polity, Mansbridge teaches us that we should refer to the multiple forms of democratic representation. Democratic representation should not be conceived as a monolithic concept. Moreover, what is abundantly clear is that democratic representation should no longer be treated as consisting simply in a relationship between elected officials and constituents within her voting district. Political representation should no longer be understood as a simple principal-agent relationship. Andrew Rehfeld has gone farther, maintaining that political representation should no longer be territorially based. In other words, Rehfeld (2005) argues that constituencies, e.g. electoral districts, should not be constructed based on where citizens live.

Lisa Disch (2011) also complicates our understanding of democratic representation as a principal-agent relationship by uncovering a dilemma that arises between expectations of democratic responsiveness to constituents and recent empirical findings regarding the context dependency of individual constituents’ preferences. In response to this dilemma, Disch proposes a mobilization conception of political representation and develops a systemic understanding of reflexivity as the measure of its legitimacy.

By far, one of the most important shifts in the literature on representation has been the “constructivist turn.” Constructivist approaches to representation emphasize the representative’s role in creating and framing the identities and claims of the represented. Here Michael Saward’s The Representative Claim is exemplary. For Saward, representation entails a series of relationships: “A maker of representations (M) puts forward a subject (S) which stands for an object (O) which is related to a referent (R) and is offered to an audience (A)” (2006, 302). Instead of presuming a pre-existing set of interests of the represented that representatives “bring into” the political arena, Saward stresses how representative claim-making is a “deeply culturally inflected practice.” Saward explicitly denies that theorists can know what are the interests of the represented. For this reason, the represented should have the ultimate say in judging the claims of the representative. The task of the representative is to create claims that will resonate with appropriate audiences.

Saward therefore does not evaluate representatives by the extent to which they advance the preferences or interests of the represented. Instead he focuses on the institutional and collective conditions in which claim-making takes place. The constructivist turn examines the conditions for claim-making, not the activities of particular representatives.

Saward’s “constructivist turn” has generated a new research direction for both political theorists and empirical scientists. For example, Lisa Disch (2015) considers whether the constructivist turn is a “normative dead” end, that is, whether the epistemological commitments of constructivism that deny the ability to identify interests will undermine the normative commitments to democratic politics. Disch offers an alternative approach, what she calls “the citizen standpoint”. This standpoint does not mean taking at face value whomever or whatever citizens regard as representing them. Rather, it is “an epistemological and political achievement that does not exist spontaneously but develops out of the activism of political movements together with the critical theories and transformative empirical research to which they give rise” (2015, 493). (For other critical engagements with Saward’s work, see Schaap et al, 2012 and Nässtrom, 2011).

There have been a number of important advances in theorizing the concept of political representation. In particular, these advances call into question the traditional way of thinking of political representation as a principal-agent relationship. Most notably, Melissa Williams’ recent work has recommended reenvisioning the activity of representation in light of the experiences of historically disadvantaged groups. In particular, she recommends understanding representation as “mediation.” In particular, Williams (1998, 8) identifies three different dimensions of political life that representatives must “mediate:” the dynamics of legislative decision-making, the nature of legislator-constituent relations, and the basis for aggregating citizens into representable constituencies. She explains each aspect by using a corresponding theme (voice, trust, and memory) and by drawing on the experiences of marginalized groups in the United States. For example, drawing on the experiences of American women trying to gain equal citizenship, Williams argues that historically disadvantaged groups need a “voice” in legislative decision-making. The “heavily deliberative” quality of legislative institutions requires the presence of individuals who have direct access to historically excluded perspectives.

In addition, Williams explains how representatives need to mediate the representative-constituent relationship in order to build “trust.” For Williams, trust is the cornerstone for democratic accountability. Relying on the experiences of African-Americans, Williams shows the consistent patterns of betrayal of African-Americans by privileged white citizens that give them good reason for distrusting white representatives and the institutions themselves. For Williams, relationships of distrust can be “at least partially mended if the disadvantaged group is represented by its own members”(1998, 14). Finally, representation involves mediating how groups are defined. The boundaries of groups according to Williams are partially established by past experiences — what Williams calls “memory.” Having certain shared patterns of marginalization justifies certain institutional mechanisms to guarantee presence.

Williams offers her understanding of representation as mediation as a supplement to what she regards as the traditional conception of liberal representation. Williams identifies two strands in liberal representation. The first strand she describes as the “ideal of fair representation as an outcome of free and open elections in which every citizen has an equally weighted vote” (1998, 57). The second strand is interest-group pluralism, which Williams describes as the “theory of the organization of shared social interests with the purpose of securing the equitable representation … of those groups in public policies” ( ibid .). Together, the two strands provide a coherent approach for achieving fair representation, but the traditional conception of liberal representation as made up of simply these two strands is inadequate. In particular, Williams criticizes the traditional conception of liberal representation for failing to take into account the injustices experienced by marginalized groups in the United States. Thus, Williams expands accounts of political representation beyond the question of institutional design and thus, in effect, challenges those who understand representation as simply a matter of formal procedures of authorization and accountability.

Another way of reenvisioning representation was offered by Nadia Urbinati (2000, 2002). Urbinati argues for understanding representation as advocacy. For Urbinati, the point of representation should not be the aggregation of interests, but the preservation of disagreements necessary for preserving liberty. Urbinati identifies two main features of advocacy: 1) the representative’s passionate link to the electors’ cause and 2) the representative’s relative autonomy of judgment. Urbinati emphasizes the importance of the former for motivating representatives to deliberate with each other and their constituents. For Urbinati the benefit of conceptualizing representation as advocacy is that it improves our understanding of deliberative democracy. In particular, it avoids a common mistake made by many contemporary deliberative democrats: focusing on the formal procedures of deliberation at the expense of examining the sources of inequality within civil society, e.g. the family. One benefit of Urbinati’s understanding of representation is its emphasis on the importance of opinion and consent formation. In particular, her agonistic conception of representation highlights the importance of disagreements and rhetoric to the procedures, practices, and ethos of democracy. Her account expands the scope of theoretical discussions of representation away from formal procedures of authorization to the deliberative and expressive dimensions of representative institutions. In this way, her agonistic understanding of representation provides a theoretical tool to those who wish to explain how non-state actors “represent.”

Other conceptual advancements have helped clarify the meaning of particular aspects of representation. For instance, Andrew Rehfeld (2009) has argued that we need to disaggregate the delegate/trustee distinction. Rehfeld highlights how representatives can be delegates and trustees in at least three different ways. For this reason, we should replace the traditional delegate/trustee distinction with three distinctions (aims, source of judgment, and responsiveness). By collapsing these three different ways of being delegates and trustees, political theorists and political scientists overlook the ways in which representatives are often partial delegates and partial trustees.

Other political theorists have asked us to rethink central aspects of our understanding of democratic representation. In Inclusion and Democracy Iris Marion Young asks us to rethink the importance of descriptive representation. Young stresses that attempts to include more voices in the political arena can suppress other voices. She illustrates this point using the example of a Latino representative who might inadvertently represent straight Latinos at the expense of gay and lesbian Latinos (1986, 350). For Young, the suppression of differences is a problem for all representation (1986, 351). Representatives of large districts or of small communities must negotiate the difficulty of one person representing many. Because such a difficulty is constitutive of representation, it is unreasonable to assume that representation should be characterized by a “relationship of identity.” The legitimacy of a representative is not primarily a function of his or her similarities to the represented. For Young, the representative should not be treated as a substitute for the represented. Consequently, Young recommends reconceptualizing representation as a differentiated relationship (2000, 125–127; 1986, 357). There are two main benefits of Young’s understanding of representation. First, her understanding of representation encourages us to recognize the diversity of those being represented. Second, her analysis of representation emphasizes the importance of recognizing how representative institutions include as well as they exclude. Democratic citizens need to remain vigilant about the ways in which providing representation for some groups comes at the expense of excluding others. Building on Young’s insight, Suzanne Dovi (2009) has argued that we should not conceptualize representation simply in terms of how we bring marginalized groups into democratic politics; rather, democratic representation can require limiting the influence of overrepresented privileged groups.

Moreover, based on this way of understanding political representation, Young provides an alterative account of democratic representation. Specifically, she envisions democratic representation as a dynamic process, one that moves between moments of authorization and moments of accountability (2000, 129). It is the movement between these moments that makes the process “democratic.” This fluidity allows citizens to authorize their representatives and for traces of that authorization to be evident in what the representatives do and how representatives are held accountable. The appropriateness of any given representative is therefore partially dependent on future behavior as well as on his or her past relationships. For this reason, Young maintains that evaluation of this process must be continuously “deferred.” We must assess representation dynamically, that is, assess the whole ongoing processes of authorization and accountability of representatives. Young’s discussion of the dynamic of representation emphasizes the ways in which evaluations of representatives are incomplete, needing to incorporate the extent to which democratic citizens need to suspend their evaluations of representatives and the extent to which representatives can face unanticipated issues.

Another insight about democratic representation that comes from the literature on descriptive representation is the importance of contingencies. Here the work of Jane Mansbridge on descriptive representation has been particularly influential. Mansbridge recommends that we evaluate descriptive representatives by contexts and certain functions. More specifically, Mansbridge (1999, 628) focuses on four functions and their related contexts in which disadvantaged groups would want to be represented by someone who belongs to their group. Those four functions are “(1) adequate communication in contexts of mistrust, (2) innovative thinking in contexts of uncrystallized, not fully articulated, interests, … (3) creating a social meaning of ‘ability to rule’ for members of a group in historical contexts where the ability has been seriously questioned and (4) increasing the polity’s de facto legitimacy in contexts of past discrimination.” For Mansbridge, descriptive representatives are needed when marginalized groups distrust members of relatively more privileged groups and when marginalized groups possess political preferences that have not been fully formed. The need for descriptive representation is contingent on certain functions.

Mansbridge’s insight about the contingency of descriptive representation suggests that at some point descriptive representatives might not be necessary. However, she doesn’t specify how we are to know if interests have become crystallized or trust has formed to the point that the need for descriptive representation would be obsolete. Thus, Mansbridge’s discussion of descriptive representation suggests that standards for evaluating representatives are fluid and flexible. For an interesting discussion of the problems with unified or fixed standards for evaluating Latino representatives, see Christina Beltran’s The Trouble with Unity .

Mansbridge’s discussion of descriptive representation points to another trend within the literature on political representation — namely, the trend to derive normative accounts of representation from the representative’s function. Russell Hardin (2004) captured this trend most clearly in his position that “if we wish to assess the morality of elected officials, we must understand their function as our representatives and then infer how they can fulfill this function.” For Hardin, only an empirical explanation of the role of a representative is necessary for determining what a representative should be doing. Following Hardin, Suzanne Dovi (2007) identifies three democratic standards for evaluating the performance of representatives: those of fair-mindedness, critical trust building, and good gate-keeping. In Ruling Passions , Andrew Sabl (2002) links the proper behavior of representatives to their particular office. In particular, Sabl focuses on three offices: senator, organizer and activist. He argues that the same standards should not be used to evaluate these different offices. Rather, each office is responsible for promoting democratic constancy, what Sabl understands as “the effective pursuit of interest.” Sabl (2002) and Hardin (2004) exemplify the trend to tie the standards for evaluating political representatives to the activity and office of those representatives.

There are three persistent problems associated with political representation. Each of these problems identifies a future area of investigation. The first problem is the proper institutional design for representative institutions within democratic polities. The theoretical literature on political representation has paid a lot of attention to the institutional design of democracies. More specifically, political theorists have recommended everything from proportional representation (e.g. Guinier, 1994 and Christiano, 1996) to citizen juries (Fishkin, 1995). However, with the growing number of democratic states, we are likely to witness more variation among the different forms of political representation. In particular, it is important to be aware of how non-democratic and hybrid regimes can adopt representative institutions to consolidate their power over their citizens. There is likely to be much debate about the advantages and disadvantages of adopting representative institutions.

This leads to a second future line of inquiry — ways in which democratic citizens can be marginalized by representative institutions. This problem is articulated most clearly by Young’s discussion of the difficulties arising from one person representing many. Young suggests that representative institutions can include the opinions, perspectives and interests of some citizens at the expense of marginalizing the opinions, perspectives and interests of others. Hence, a problem with institutional reforms aimed at increasing the representation of historically disadvantaged groups is that such reforms can and often do decrease the responsiveness of representatives. For instance, the creation of black districts has created safe zones for black elected officials so that they are less accountable to their constituents. Any decrease in accountability is especially worrisome given the ways citizens are vulnerable to their representatives. Thus, one future line of research is examining the ways that representative institutions marginalize the interests, opinions and perspectives of democratic citizens.

In particular, it is necessary for to acknowledge the biases of representative institutions. While E. E. Schattschneider (1960) has long noted the class bias of representative institutions, there is little discussion of how to improve the political representation of the disaffected — that is, the political representation of those citizens who do not have the will, the time, or political resources to participate in politics. The absence of such a discussion is particularly apparent in the literature on descriptive representation, the area that is most concerned with disadvantaged citizens. Anne Phillips (1995) raises the problems with the representation of the poor, e.g. the inability to define class, however, she argues for issues of class to be integrated into a politics of presence. Few theorists have taken up Phillip’s gauntlet and articulated how this integration of class and a politics of presence is to be done. Of course, some have recognized the ways in which interest groups, associations, and individual representatives can betray the least well off (e.g. Strolovitch, 2004). And some (Dovi, 2003) have argued that descriptive representatives need to be selected based on their relationship to citizens who have been unjustly excluded and marginalized by democratic politics. However, it is unclear how to counteract the class bias that pervades domestic and international representative institutions. It is necessary to specify the conditions under which certain groups within a democratic polity require enhanced representation. Recent empirical literature has suggested that the benefits of having descriptive representatives is by no means straightforward (Gay, 2002).

A third and final area of research involves the relationship between representation and democracy. Historically, representation was considered to be in opposition with democracy [See Dahl (1989) for a historical overview of the concept of representation]. When compared to the direct forms of democracy found in the ancient city-states, notably Athens, representative institutions appear to be poor substitutes for the ways that citizens actively ruled themselves. Barber (1984) has famously argued that representative institutions were opposed to strong democracy. In contrast, almost everyone now agrees that democratic political institutions are representative ones.

Bernard Manin (1997)reminds us that the Athenian Assembly, which often exemplifies direct forms of democracy, had only limited powers. According to Manin, the practice of selecting magistrates by lottery is what separates representative democracies from so-called direct democracies. Consequently, Manin argues that the methods of selecting public officials are crucial to understanding what makes representative governments democratic. He identifies four principles distinctive of representative government: 1) Those who govern are appointed by election at regular intervals; 2) The decision-making of those who govern retains a degree of independence from the wishes of the electorate; 3) Those who are governed may give expression to their opinions and political wishes without these being subject to the control of those who govern; and 4) Public decisions undergo the trial of debate (6). For Manin, historical democratic practices hold important lessons for determining whether representative institutions are democratic.

While it is clear that representative institutions are vital institutional components of democratic institutions, much more needs to be said about the meaning of democratic representation. In particular, it is important not to presume that all acts of representation are equally democratic. After all, not all acts of representation within a representative democracy are necessarily instances of democratic representation. Henry Richardson (2002) has explored the undemocratic ways that members of the bureaucracy can represent citizens. [For a more detailed discussion of non-democratic forms of representation, see Apter (1968). Michael Saward (2008) also discusses how existing systems of political representation do not necessarily serve democracy.] Similarly, it is unclear whether a representative who actively seeks to dismantle democratic institutions is representing democratically. Does democratic representation require representatives to advance the preferences of democratic citizens or does it require a commitment to democratic institutions? At this point, answers to such questions are unclear. What is certain is that democratic citizens are likely to disagree about what constitutes democratic representation.

One popular approach to addressing the different and conflicting standards used to evaluate representatives within democratic polities, is to simply equate multiple standards with democratic ones. More specifically, it is argued that democratic standards are pluralistic, accommodating the different standards possessed and used by democratic citizens. Theorists who adopt this approach fail to specify the proper relationship among these standards. For instance, it is unclear how the standards that Mansbridge identifies in the four different forms of representation should relate to each other. Does it matter if promissory forms of representation are replaced by surrogate forms of representation? A similar omission can be found in Pitkin: although Pitkin specifies there is a unified relationship among the different views of representation, she never describes how the different views interact. This omission reflects the lacunae in the literature about how formalistic representation relates to descriptive and substantive representation. Without such a specification, it is not apparent how citizens can determine if they have adequate powers of authorization and accountability.

Currently, it is not clear exactly what makes any given form of representation consistent, let alone consonant, with democratic representation. Is it the synergy among different forms or should we examine descriptive representation in isolation to determine the ways that it can undermine or enhance democratic representation? One tendency is to equate democratic representation simply with the existence of fluid and multiple standards. While it is true that the fact of pluralism provides justification for democratic institutions as Christiano (1996) has argued, it should no longer presumed that all forms of representation are democratic since the actions of representatives can be used to dissolve or weaken democratic institutions. The final research area is to articulate the relationship between different forms of representation and ways that these forms can undermine democratic representation.

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G. Democratic Representation

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• –––, 2016. “Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation,” The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory , Jacob Levy (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198717133.013.24
• Mansbridge, Jane, 2003. “Rethinking Representation,” American Political Science Review , 97: 515–528.
• Näsström, Sofia, 2006. “Representative democracy as tautology: Ankersmit and Lefort on representation,” European Journal of Political Theory , 5(3): 321–342.
• Urbinati, Nadia, 2011. “Political Representation as Democratic Process,” Redescriptions (Yearbook of Political Thought and Conceptual History: Volume 10), Kari Palonen (ed.), Helsinki: Transaction Publishers.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• FairVote Program for Representative Government
• Proportional Representation Library , provides readings proportional representation elections created by Prof. Douglas J. Amy, Dept. of Politics, Mount Holyoke College
• Representation , an essay by Ann Marie Baldonado on the Postcolonial Studies website at Emory University.
• Representation: John Locke, Second Treatise, §§ 157–58 , in The Founders’ Constitution at the University of Chicago Press
• Popular Basis of Political Authority: David Hume, Of the Original Contract , in The Founders’ Constitution at the University of Chicago Press

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2024 Election

Many voters say congress is broken. could proportional representation fix it.

Hansi Lo Wang

A perimeter fence surrounds the U.S. Capitol in February ahead of President Biden's State of the Union speech in Washington, D.C. Mariam Zuhaib/AP hide caption

A perimeter fence surrounds the U.S. Capitol in February ahead of President Biden's State of the Union speech in Washington, D.C.

With an increasingly polarized Congress and fewer competitive elections , there are growing calls among some election reformers to change how voters elect members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

One potential alternative to the current winner-take-all approach for House races is known as proportional representation.

Instead of the single candidate with the most votes winning a House district's seat, a proportional representation system would elect multiple representatives in each district, distributing seats in the legislature roughly in proportion to the votes each party receives.

Supporters say proportional representation could help temper the rise of political extremism, eliminate the threat of gerrymandering and ensure the fair representation of people of color, as well as voters who are outnumbered in reliably "red" or "blue" parts of the country.

This story is part of a series of reports on alternatives to how U.S. voters cast ballots and elect their political leaders. Click here for more NPR voting stories .

And last year, a group of more than 200 political scientists, legal scholars and historians across the U.S. said the time for Congress to change is now.

"Our arcane, single-member districting process divides, polarizes, and isolates us from each other," they wrote in an open letter to lawmakers. "It has effectively extinguished competitive elections for most Americans, and produced a deeply divided political system that is incapable of responding to changing demands and emerging challenges with necessary legitimacy."

But how exactly proportional representation could change House elections is an open question with major hurdles. There's a federal law that bans it, and many of its supporters acknowledge it would likely be years, if not decades, before a majority of lawmakers allow such a big, untested restructuring of Congress.

What could proportional representation in the House look like?

There's a spectrum of ways to reform the House using proportional representation. Two key factors are how many representatives a multi-member district would have and how winners of House seats would be proportionally allocated.

In 2021, Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia led a group of other House Democrats in reintroducing a proposal that's been floating around Congress since 2017 . The Fair Representation Act would require states to use ranked choice voting for House races. It calls for states with six or more representatives to create districts with three to five members each, and states with fewer than six representatives to elect all of them as at-large members of one statewide district.

Some advocates also raise the possibility of increasing the total number of House seats, which has been stuck at 435 seats for decades .

Stuck At 435 Representatives? Why The U.S. House Hasn't Grown With Census Counts

While there's no consensus on the mechanics, supporters say moving toward proportional representation could allow the country's diversity to be better represented — including in communities where elections, outside of primaries, have become non-competitive.

"When you're looking at New York City, where I live, it's a city of almost 8.5 million people. And there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Republican voters who find themselves in districts with lopsided Democratic majorities," says Reihan Salam, a Brooklyn-based Republican who heads the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and has written in support of proportional representation .

Salam sees proportional representation as "something that would be hugely healthy for our politics to see to it that you don't just have competitive elections in a small, tiny handful of swing districts or swing states."

And that increased competition could push political parties to be more willing to compromise and negotiate, says Didi Kuo, a fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Kuo, who has studied versions of proportional representation systems in New Zealand, Italy and Japan, notes that many other democracies around the world have rewritten their rules "when some people are marginalized or excluded from representation, or when votes are not being translated into seats."

"How would you like it if there were a system where you could at least ensure that one person you like gets elected or one person of the party that you support?" Kuo says about what proportional representation could offer.

It could also lead to the rise of more political parties, which supporters say could boost voter turnout by expanding voters' choices in candidates.

But that could come with complications, warns Ruth Bloch Rubin, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago.

"We've seen how difficult it was to elect a speaker with just two parties, that when you introduce multiple parties, it increases the odds that you're going to have collective action problems, coordination problems. It's just going to be slower and harder to get people to reach agreement," says Bloch Rubin, who has written about the potential challenges that could come with switching from the current system of two major parties.

Why is proportional representation in the House against the law?

In 1967, Congress passed a law that bans a House district from electing more than one representative.

Courts hearing redistricting lawsuits at the time were considering ordering states with contested maps to use multi-member districts and hold statewide at-large elections as a temporary fix — a scenario that many lawmakers wanted to avoid. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law, many lawmakers also wanted to block southern states from using multi-member districts and at-large, winner-take-all elections for the House to weaken the voting power of Black voters.

Since then, lawmakers, including Beyer, have introduced bills that would undo that requirement of single-member congressional districts and allow for multi-member districts.

Former Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Campbell of California is seen in 2010. While serving in Congress back in 1999, Campbell testified in support of multi-member districts, which he says he still supports. Paul Sakuma/AP hide caption

While serving in Congress back in 1999, now-former Republican Rep. Tom Campbell of California testified in support of multi-member districts, which he says he still supports.

"No one looks at the House of Representatives today and says, 'There's a good model of functioning governance.' No one says that. And so the interest in trying something else has never been higher," says Campbell, who is now a law professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and has left the GOP to form the Common Sense Party of California.

But in recent years, there's been no public support for proportional representation from Republicans in Congress, which Campbell sees as a sign of how polarized Capitol Hill has become.

"A Republican who puts her name or his name on such a bill will be targeted in the next primary election for the simple reason that you are attempting to move towards a system that might allow more members of Congress who are not Republican," Campbell says.

For many representatives, regardless of party, there's not a lot of incentive to try and disrupt the status quo that got them elected, says Bloch Rubin, the political scientist at the University of Chicago.

"Everyone's adapted their campaign and electoral strategies for the way the rules currently function," Bloch Rubin adds.

Term limits for Congress are wildly popular. But most experts say they'd be a bad idea

The U.S. has a 'primary problem,' say advocates who call for new election systems

How could proportional representation ensure fair representation for people of color.

The U.S. Supreme Court's weakening of the Voting Rights Act over the past decade has helped fuel interest in proportional representation among some civil rights advocates.

While the high court upheld its past rulings on a key remaining section of that landmark law, the loss of other legal protections against racial discrimination in the election process has made it harder to ensure fair representation for people of color around the country.

"If you go into communities of color, they're increasingly disillusioned with the political process. And the system that we have now, in many ways, adds to that disillusionment," says Alora Thomas-Lundborg, strategic director of litigation and advocacy at Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. "It's a winner-take-all system, meaning that if you happen to be in a district where you don't represent the plurality of votes, then you just get no representation and folks feel as though they're not represented. And even when you're in a district where maybe you are being represented, if that district is no longer competitive, you may still feel that your elected representative is not responsive to your needs because they're not out there having to curry your vote."

For communities of color, proportional representation could, in theory, set up a House of Representatives that is more reflective of their shares of the U.S. population, which is becoming increasingly diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, Thomas-Lundborg adds.

But that promise is untested.

Thomas-Lundborg says more state and local governments adopting proportional representation systems could help assuage some concerns about what impact it would actually have in racially and ethnically diverse parts of the country.

"We are at a point where we're asking a lot of questions and trying to think about the future as the nature of the Supreme Court is changing and the demographics of our country is changing," Thomas-Lundborg says. "And it's a really important time to start thinking proactively about these issues."

Edited by Benjamin Swasey

• voting stories

Maybe Cranston should pick a Democrat for mayor?

Robert ferri acknowledges he might benefit as an alternative to the nasty campaigns mayor ken hopkins and state representative barbara ann fenton-fung have run, but said it hasn’t been good for cranston.

If I could design a lawn sign for Robert Ferri as he runs for mayor of Cranston, I wouldn’t even bother to tell voters that he’s a Democrat.

It would just say: Robert Ferri, grownup for mayor.

That’s the conclusion I came to this week when I spoke to the 68-year-old councilman and retired small businessman. He’s not going to win you over with the poise of Providence Mayor Brett Smiley or the warmth of Central Falls Mayor Maria Rivera , but you get the sense that he’s a serious guy who wants to address the city’s issues around flooding and get a firm grasp around the budget.

Nuts and bolts. And rats. Get rid of the damn rats.

Ferri has the luxury of kicking back and eating popcorn while the two Republicans in the race, incumbent Mayor Ken Hopkins and state Representative Barbara Ann Fenton-Fung , slug it out in a primary that has all the sophistication of a pig wrestling match.

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The race is equal parts petty and bitter, with Hopkins cynically attempting to mislead voters about Fenton-Fung’s position on illegal immigration , and Fenton-Fung resorting to attacking friends and family members of Hopkins who have jobs in the city . Hopkins is now facing a lawsuit for allegedly taking a vintage sports car from a Cranston property owner without paying for it, and while the details are troubling, it also comes across as a desperate last-minute hit on the mayor ahead of Tuesday’s primary.

It’s sad because Hopkins and Fenton-Fung are much better people than they are showing themselves to be as candidates, but we’ve reached a point where if one one of them raises a valid concern about the growing rat problem in Cranston, the other candidate simply yells, “You’re a rat.” I hate to give them sophomoric ideas, but I’m a little surprised both campaigns aren’t sending volunteers in rat costumes to events held by the other candidate.

That has created an opening for Ferri, who is trying to become the first Democrat to be mayor of Rhode Island’s second-largest city since 2007. He was elected to the council as a Republican, but switched parties in 2022 to give Democrats control of the council, and is now the party’s standard bearer for mayor.

When we spoke on Tuesday, a week before the Republican primary (he faces no opponent on the Democratic side), Ferri acknowledged that he might benefit as an alternative to the nasty campaigns that Hopkins and Fenton-Fung have run, but he said it hasn’t been good for Cranston.

“It gives people a bad perception about what politics is all about,” Ferri said.

Ferri, who owned Town Lanes bowling alley in Johnston for 20 years, has been asking voters to fill out a quality-of-life survey on his campaign website, and he’s heard loud and clear that voters are concerned about schools and infrastructure.

One of his top priorities if he wins the mayor’s office would be to hire a department of public works director, something the city has been lacking in recent years. He said he also wants to get a better grasp around the flooding issues that seem to be increasingly prevalent in the city.

“I know what I don’t know,” Ferri. “But I’ll hire the people who do know.”

Ferri isn’t promising a complete shakeup in the city, at least not at the highest level jobs.

He wants to retain Cranston Police Chief Colonel Michael J. Winquist and School Superintendent Jeannine Nota-Masse, and for good reason. They’re both excellent at their jobs. He said there will be a vacancy for fire chief because Robert Ryan will face mandatory retirement based on his age.

But he accuses Hopkins of being a little too in love with the title of mayor, while not necessarily putting in the work that leading a city demands. In other words, Ferri doesn’t plan to waste time driving around in an unregistered vintage sports car that may or may not be his.

“I want to be a mayor who sits at his desk and does the job,” Ferri said.

Not everything is perfect with Ferri. He’s a little light on offering actual plans for addressing climate change and the city budget, and he speaks in the third person too much ( “Robert Ferri thinks you should vote for Robert Ferri.” ) But he offers such a contrast to the Republicans in the race.

And the odds could be on his side.

It’s safe to bet that the loser of the Hopkins/Fenton-Fung primary isn’t going to immediately endorse the winner, which means there’s a chance that Ferri could win over many of the dissident voters. He also still has a small Republican base of voters who support him.

He also has a pro in campaign manager Michael Beauregard , who will do everything he can to help Ferri capitalize on the growing excitement around Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign for president. There’s no question that Harris is going to defeat Donald Trump in Cranston, but if she can win by 20 or more percentage points the way Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012, Ferri is sure to benefit.

It is normally unfathomable to argue that a Democrat could represent the party of change almost anywhere in Rhode Island, but voters should do themselves a favor and give Ferri a long look.

At the very least, you’d be getting a grownup as mayor.

Dan McGowan can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him @danmcgowan .