Good and Bad Representative Claims: How those in Power are Dropping the Ball

As societal problems increasingly feature a border-crossing dimension and traditional national political elites lose trust of citizens, new questions arise regarding the future of representative democracy. Can the classic model of representative democracy be adapted to the new realities of globalization? Can various actors at national and international level contribute to democratic life even if they have not been directly elected by citizens? This paper advances a communicative perspective on these questions, drawing on seminal theorizing by Michael Saward of representation as a practice of communicative claim-making. Based on an innovative dataset of close to 12.000 claims made by national and international actors on globalization-related issues in mass media, this paper analyzes who claims to represent whom, on what basis and to what effect. This analytical framework reveals how the dominance of economic concerns in public debates and the increasing focus on executive actors, experts and technocrats in the news coverage of globalization contributes to a democratic deficit of global governance. It also reveals lessons for academics and journalists alike about how public mediatized debate could be made more conducive to democratic representation, even when non-elected officials and populist fringe parties conduct much of that representation.