Analyzing Representation Processes after The Constructivist Turn: Representation in Swiss Election Campaigns after 1945

Building on a diachronic analysis of election campaigns in Switzerland since 1945, this paper proposes to discuss the possible implications of the “constructivist turn” in representation theory regarding empirical research on election campaigns and political parties. Election campaigns as representation processes are indeed classical objects to study representation; and yet there is a lack of studies enquiring into these processes from a constructivist perspective. This is where historical studies can be an asset, because looking back in time and comparing between periods make the performed character of representation claims particularly striking. Furthermore, it invites to reassess our often implicitly normative assumptions about how parties should represent, which often derive from a nostalgic take on former party types – in particular mass parties. Swiss parties and their campaigning in the immediate post-war era show on the contrary a more complex picture of representation. Firstly, parties were certainly not the only actors of representation in the equation, since the corporatist-consociative political system of the time allowed economic associations to claim representation over specific electorates. Political parties had to integrate these diverse claims into their election lists and platforms, at the risk of not receiving support from these associations. Secondly, even if some parties seem to have a clear-cut identity, such as the Peasants’ party in protestant cantons, election campaigns precisely helped to reaffirm their representation claim over peasants, an electorate that was slowly changing and losing the very social structures that had made a Peasants’ party possible in the first place. Indeed, at the turn of the seventies, the main Swiss parties, whose electoral basis had long seemed so stable, sensed their representation basis were slowly shrinking. It was therefore at that time that they turned to alternative ways to perform their representative legitimacy. Instead on hammering their traditional representation claim and/or their ability to govern, they insisted on their ability to represent marginalized groups such as women and youngsters.