Claims of Misrepresentation: A Comparison of Germany and Brazil

The system of representative democracy is under considerable strain – its institutions are struggling to maintain legitimacy (Mair 2009) and elected representatives are failing to keep their monopoly on (formal) political representation (Van Biezen 2014), and are being contested by an emerging multitude of (new) claim makers (Saward 2008). These claims of misrepresentation challenge the legitimacy and authority of the elected representatives as well as the functioning of the existing system of representative democracy. In this paper, we compare claims of misrepresentation in Brazil (during the presidential impeachment in 2016) and in Germany (focusing on the 2017 electoral campaign of the Alternative for Germany). We argue that to adequately explain effects of the claims of misrepresentation on democratic representation, it is necessary to, first of all, understand how the challengers construct themselves as political actors vis-a-vis their intended constituency and the democratic system. Second, it is important to comprehend what kind of claims emerge from these discourses: positive and/or negative. Using constructivist approach – Saward’s representative claim and literature on the interplay between populism and democracy (Kaltwasser 2012, 2014), our paper contributes to understanding the populist appeal – ‘the system' the populists seek to challenge and 'the people' they claim to create.