Saward’s approach of “Representative Claim Making” sheds new light on the comprehension and evaluation of democratic representation. Rather than being a result of electoral authorization, representation is considered as an ongoing constructive process: Politicians, interest groups, or other public actors make competing claims about which interests should be represented by whom. In Saward’s concept, the authority to judge on those claims is the “audience” - understood in a broad sense: The audience can be the group claimed to be represented, the whole constituency, or political decision-makers themselves in terms of deciding which claimed-to-be representatives should be included in policy making. There is need for a deeper investigation of those audiences since the evaluation of the claims’ legitimacy highly depends on their character. I reflect different normative approaches regarding the questions who the relevant audience should be and how the criteria for assessing representative claims might vary depending on the audience.
