Representative Claims: A Double Ambiguity

As part of the recent revival of theoretical studies on political representation, Michael Saward’s suggestion that we should look at it from the perspective of “representative claims” has been highly influential. There are many good reasons for the success of this formula; for the way in which it captures a more “constructivist” way of thinking about political representation, and for how it makes sense of more informal processes of representation. Beside stimulating a theoretical rethinking on the mechanisms of political representation, the focus on the “representative claims” perspective has also inspired some empirical research. In both instances this requires a more precise understanding of what it means to make a “representative claim” and how such a claim can be operationalised in more empirical studies. One difficulty comes from the notoriously slippery idea of “representation” itself. But less noticed it is perhaps that “claim” itself has its ambiguities, which emerge quite clearly as soon as one tries to translate the word in some other (European) languages. “Claim”, in English, covers two main semantic fields. One, meaning a “statement and an assertion about something”; and the other, meaning “a demand, or an entitlement”. The paper will explore the implications of such a semantic ambiguity for the theory of political representation.