Claims of Representation in Local Politics Between Representation and Democratic Innovations

Representative democracy is under considerable strain worldwide. The core of the problem is the fractured relationship between citizens and elected representatives (Dalton et al. 2011). While scholars agree that representative democracy is broken (Mair 2008, Van Biezen 2014), there is little agreement about how to repair it (Rosanvallon 2008, 2010, Mair 2009, Saward 2008). Constructivist turn in political representation (Disch, van de Sande, and Urbinati 2019) offers one possible way to improve the broken linkage between citizens and representatives. Constructivist democratic theorists propose reconceptualizing democracy as a constitutive process of claim-making. In this way, the scope of actors is broadened beyond elected representatives and procedures beyond elections, thus bridging representation, participation, and deliberation into a functional and more responsive system of democratic governance. However, broadening the scope of representation beyond electoral authorization opens up a conceptual and empirical challenge - it is no longer evident who speaks for whom and why s/he is entitled to do so (Warren 2001, Urbinati and Warren 2008, Montanaro 2017). We propose to conceptually capture and empirically grasp the cacophony of representative claims by using a novel typology of claims on representation (Guasti and Geissel 2019). The typology of claims on representation allows us to answer the questions who (claims to) speak for whom, and are these claims accepted. Using our approach, we analyze claims raised by self-selected actors in local democratic innovation (Hamburg referendum) and the reactions of the elected representatives. This paper aims to provide insights into how (discursive) interactions between elected- and self-selected representatives change the nature of representation, and to test the limits of the constructivist turn in political representation. We ask whether the analysis of claims provides inference on the revitalization of the link between representatives and the represented in democratic innovations.