Political representation and climate change: friends or foes? An analysis of representative politics through the eyes of climate activists

In recent years, an increasing body of literature has pointed to a so-called “crisis of representation” (see Crouch, 2004; Hay, 2007; Saward 2010; Tormey, 2016): the growing feeling among the citizenry that electoral institutions are “not representing us”. In the field of climate change, growing discontent among youth has pointed to the so-called democratic myopia, i.e. the incapacity of representative democracy to represent the needs of future others and respond to long-term challenges. The recent climate mobilizations (Fridays for Future) are an explicit expression of this contestation. In this field, recent research has revealed an ambiguous pattern of attitudes towards representative institutions. In particular, young climate activists seem to both blame political representatives for their lack of political action, yet, at the same, still place hope in representative institutions to bring about change (Knops, 2021). Taking stock of these debates, we ask the following questions: what is the relation between climate activists and representative institutions? How do climate activists perceive the institutions of representative democracy? And, do these views change over time within a specific cycle of protest? In answering these questions, we pay particular attention to generational divides, that is: do young novice activists evaluate traditional representation differently compared to more vetted activists from older generations? And, do their representation evaluations evolve similarly or differently over the duration of the protest cycle? To answer these questions, we rely on survey data collected at three different moments of climate mobilization in Belgium (in January, March and September 2019, N = 985). We tap attitudes towards representation and institutions in a twofold manner: First, by means of closed-ended questions (N = 910). Second, by means of a frame analysis (Benford and Snow, 2000; Ketelaars et al, 2014; 2017) of the responses to a series of open questions on the diagnosis, blame and prognosis that climate activists draw of the situation (N = 985). Specifically, we seek out how meso-contextual evolutions (legislative failures; disappointing electoral results; and the rise other climate movements, in particular Extinction Rebellion) influence attitudes towards representation across generations. Given these contextual evolutions during the protest wave, we expect evaluations of representative democracy to become bleaker over time. And, we expect that the evaluations of youngsters will be characterized by a steeper decline compared to that of older participants. Our analysis contributes to ongoing scholarly debates on the relation between young citizens and representative democracy in times of climate change, and forwards important normative results about generational divides in that regard.