Making Representations: Standpoint, Context, Legitimacy

The core of my argument, set out in The Representative Claim (2010) in particular, is that a measure of democratic legitimation for representative claims can be generated by acceptance of claims by an appropriate constituency under certain conditions. Observers such as political theorists may attend to and interpret representative practices, but it is up constituents to accept or not such claims. It is not, for example, up to the political theorist to adjudicate or impose judgements from outside the representative relationship. In this paper, I elaborate, specify and add texture to key points, not least in the light of further pressing cases and debates in recent years. I explore issues of choice, temporality, lived experience and context, before specifying in more detail the idea and role of the ‘citizen standpoint’, a concept introduced in The Representative Claim. I then step back to consider what it may mean to do ‘normative’ work, and to speak of ‘legitimacy’, in the present context. I conclude with comments on shape-shifting representation and legitimation, and on open and closed social contexts. Approaching a context from the citizen standpoint involves attending in detail to both citizen assessments and to the conditions under which they are made (or not). The theorist or observer will largely be limited to such second-order tasks. Democratic legitimation of representative claims can only be generated by the actions of citizens themselves. The idea of attending to the conditions of citizen acceptance or assessment of representative claims may cover a multitude of social, economic and political circumstances in which groups of citizens may be positioned. Like feminist standpoint theory, the work involved may focus on relations of power and disempowerment in which citizens are enmeshed. The focus on representative claims and their reception is rooted in the use of practice-based, performative and constructivist methodological lenses. Some lament the loss, as they see it, of a normative perspective resulting from the use of these lenses – arguing ‘why we need a return to the ethics of political representation’ and to bolster ideas of ‘the good representative’ (Severs and Dovi 2018). There are worries that such lenses prevent the observer from taking a clear view on, for example, how we can ‘differentiate between legitimate and preposterous [representative] claims’ (Lord and Pollak 2013). The laments and worries are problematic, though. On the one hand, they appear to assume too easily an external viewpoint – somehow above or outside the productive and myriad practices which in fact produce and sustain representation. On the other hand, they overlook the normative work that constructivist approaches enable, approaches that in Michael Walzer’s (1987) terms follow ‘a path of interpretation’ rather than of ‘discovery’ or ‘invention’.