Presence, crowds, and plebiscitary representation: Addressing a gap in the claim-making approach of representation

Constructivist scholars of political representation in general, and proponents of the claim-making paradigm (Saward 2010) in particular, can plausibly claim to have a superior understanding of the contemporary crisis of party government (Mair 2013) and the resulting new forms of representation than the traditional Pitkinian approach. It is because they do not hypothesize a "social substrate" (Disch 2019) that precedes political representation but rather make sense of representation as a constitutive process that "makes constituencies" (Disch 2021). This makes it easier to understand several symptoms of the mentioned crisis (declining party membership, growing electoral volatility, the success of extra-establishment challengers, etc.). However, despite its advantages, the claim-making paradigm has been criticized for having a "discursive bias" (Brito Vieira 2020). While newer contributions that give greater weight to non-linguistic performativity (Saward 2017; 2020; Ostiguy, Panizza, and Moffitt 2021; Aiolfi 2023) and the role of affects (Knops 2022) in the representative process have somewhat alleviated this bias, the role of material, bodily, and sensory elements in the representative process still seems undertheorized, leaving a gap in the claim-making approach. It is because Saward’s notion of the "referent" is only a rather vague gesture towards these factors that raises its own problems (Disch 2012; Thompson 2012; Decreus 2013; Thomassen 2019), while performative approaches focus primarily on the stagecraft of leaders. The proposed paper would like to contribute to filling this gap by relating the material and the bodily in a different way to representative claims. It does so by resorting to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s notions of "rituals of presence" and "crowds" (Gumbrecht 2012; 2021) and using them together with the claim-making approach in mapping the process of a much-discussed contemporary representative setting, that of populist (Caramani 2017; Urbinati 2019) or plebiscitary (Urbinati 2014; Illés and Körösényi 2022; 2023) representation. It argues that to understand the success of this form of representation, the bodily and sensory processes of crowd events (popular acclamation; the sensorial unification of a crowd; the physical presence of another, rival group, etc.) are as essential as the stagecraft of leaders or the representative claims they make. What we should look at when studying this form of representation is the interaction or the "oscillation" between "presence effects" and "meaning effects" (Gumbrecht 2003). By describing how claim-making, non-linguistic performativity, and sensorial-bodily processes (the synchronization effect of rhythm, the incitement of the imagination by sensory stimuli, the autopoietic effect of chanting, the unifying effect of the common gazing at a single object, etc.) interact to bring about plebiscitary representation can supply the claim-making approach with a novel take on the material and the bodily: not in the form of a pre-given referent outside the constitutive process of representation, but as a way of making constituencies that is parallel to and complements claim-making.