Self-Appointed Representatives: The Belgian Citizen Platform for Refugee Support

In the current context of distrust and disenchantment towards representative institutions, scholars are revisiting theoretical models of political representation. In particular, representative democracy is increasingly being described as a ‘flexible relation between participation and representation’ (Urbinati, 2006), as a ‘dynamic process of claim-making by elected and non-elected actors’ (Saward 2006; 2010) and a process which depends less on the existence of ‘democracy’ than on the presence of an ‘audience’ to receive representative claims (Rehfeld, 2006). Despite recent enthusiasm towards this new conception of representative democracy, there is still ample scope to improve our understanding of what precisely hides behind these representative claims, i.e. what kind of activities actors undertake when they perform representation (electoral or not). This article aims to fill this gap by looking at one case of non-electoral representation, namely the ‘Citizen Platform for Refugee Support’ (CPRS) in Belgium. It analyzes the ways in which this platform develops its identity as a representative actor and how it bolsters its authority to speak on behalf of refugees. Born in September 2015 to respond to the immediate needs of refugees in Brussels, this platform has made an extensive use of its Facebook page to organize its activities and reach out to its audience. The CPRS recent campaigns #NotInMyName and #InMyName explicitly seek to hold the Belgian State Secretary for Asylum and Migration accountable for his ‘failed representation’, while advancing an alternative stance on migration policies. Based on the ‘representative claim’ theoretical model (Saward, 2010; Severs, 2012), we analyse the content of the CPRS Facebook page. Drawing on a qualitative text analysis of 868 Facebook posts going from 2 September 2015 until 6 February 2018, the paper aims to shed light on how ordinary citizens ‘perform representation’.