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Combining key elements of classical and constructivist approaches to representation, this article suggests a novel reconceptualisation of political representation. Developed through participatory agency research with people in socio-economically difficult situations and anchored in people’s lived experiences and sense-making processes, the representative relationship is redefined as a pragmatic and solution-oriented partnership between representatives and the represented. Expanding the classical Pitkinian model, it enables representatives to be better informed about how to address peoples’ concerns. In doing so, it advances the notion of dynamic political representation, where the represented are not passive principals but active partners in decision-making. While we uphold the classical principle of acting in the interests of the represented, we reconceptualise these interests as dynamic and continuously evolving – a perspective consistent with constructivist thought. This research aligns with scholarly calls to rethink representation and revise the roles of the representatives and the represented, fostering meaningful and effective engagement. Our empirical findings highlight the urgency of reform for people in socio-economically difficult situations and underscores the broader relevance of these insights, in a context of increasing legitimacy deficits and rising discontent with current modes of representation in contemporary democracies.
Under what conditions citizens accept public institutions as legitimate authorities is a key question in political science. Recent accounts suggest that populist citizens reject international organisations (IOs) as distant, elitist, and undemocratic. Conversely, technocratic citizens should favour IOs as they represent the pinnacle of depoliticised, expertise-driven decision-making. In this article, we provide the first joint analysis of technocratic and populist attitudes as drivers of attitudes towards IOs. We analyse a unique survey conducted in five European countries that covers four IOs and ask how individual populist and technocratic attitudes influence attitudes towards IOs. We find only conditional evidence for a structural association between technocratic and populist and IO attitudes, and credible evidence that country-specific experiences with populism in power moderate these associations. Our contribution has important implications for our understanding of citizen attitudes towards various forms of political representation and the legitimacy of IOs.
Two interrelated trends have narrowed the class backgrounds of policymakers over the past decades: a decreasing share of working-class MPs and a parallel rise of highly educated ‘career politicians’ with little occupational experience outside politics. Although these trends risk aggravating representational inequality, we know little about their causes. Focusing on parties as the main gatekeepers to parliament, we analyse how the class background of political candidates influences the chances of being nominated in electorally safer positions. Based on original data on MPs’ backgrounds and the German GLES Candidate Study, we show that candidates with a working-class background have lower chances to be placed in safe positions, especially in center-right parties. Careerists, in contrast, enjoy systematic advantages in the nomination process, at least in left-wing parties. Lacking individual resources is thus not the only obstacle to working-class representation, but political parties are important actors in shaping the class composition of parliaments.
During the paradigmatic moment in the 1990s that Hirschl refers to as “juristocracy,” the global institutionalization of neoliberalism effectively untethered economic control from nation-states. States’ capacity to regulate economic flows diminished, as did their ability to fulfill many of the entitlements that were then aspirationally included in progressive constitutions. Peasants, small-scale food producers, and rural workers felt the effects of neoliberalism especially hard as global trade agreements and structural adjustment policies dismantled state support and made them vulnerable to global competition. With states constrained by binding global rules, these groups were forced to rethink existing grammars of social justice. Rather than simply claiming rights, they therefore devised new claims and repertoires of mobilization in the attempt to subordinate global capital flows to popular control. Through the claim of food sovereignty, rural communities formed transnational movements that today mobilize at sub- and supra-national levels with the goal of building decentralized, democratic, and sustainable food systems. This chapter describes how transnational food sovereignty movements have reconceptualized rights around the networked form of transnational governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), one of the key arenas of global food governance, it illustrates how food sovereignty movements creatively mobilize the right to food to institutionalize their own symbols and practices of representation. In doing so, the chapter argues that food sovereignty movements have rearticulated the right to food as a “representative claim” through which they seek to democratize transnational governance.
The impact of climate change on young people and future generations has become a key issue globally, and current international law-making processes insufficiently represent the interests of these groups. While ideally the interests of future generations would be mainstreamed, the authors argue that proxy-style mechanisms for representing future generations should urgently be pursued as a parallel strategy. This book analyses existing institutions in the UN which indirectly represent vulnerable groups and uses a novel combination of legal and philosophical methods based in the tradition of John Dewey's pragmatism and International Legal Realism. Chapters include case studies of climate change cases brought before international courts, tribunals and the UN envoy to demonstrate how representation of future generations can be implemented to bring about institutional reforms. Written in accessible language, it will make a useful reference for researchers, graduate students and policymakers in international environmental law, global environmental governance and environmental philosophy.
Giulia Bruna, in her chapter, offers a comparative framework for discussing the different strategies of J. M. Synge and Emily Lawless for achieving an authentic representation of the otherworldly geography of the Aran Islands, which was so much a part of the folklore of the region. Synge’s The Aran Islands, often treated as a spiritual autobiography, offers a way of reading the West of Ireland that complicates our understanding of authentic Irishness. While he derives a sense of authenticity through largely documentary and ethnographic rather than fictional means, Lawless, in Grania, captures an authentic sense of rural Ireland through the formal arrangements of the novel. Bruna is concerned with identifying, in Synge’s and Lawless’s work, modes of plural and dialogic authenticity that recognizes the “parasitic” relation of culture to nature. Bruna concludes that their versions of authenticity, though different in methodology, serve the same revivalist purpose of shaping Irish cultures for future generations.
In his chapter, Christopher Morash examines the modern myth of Revival, which takes the form of what Roland Barthes calls a new “mythic concept.” A good example of this form of myth is the story Yeats tells of meeting Synge in Paris, a meeting that Morash claims did not necessarily have to take place in order for the story to acquire a mythic function. A more substantial instance of the myth of Revival emerges from Synge’s interest in philosophy and science, particularly the work of Herbert Spencer, which enabled him to create a mythic vision of nature based on the ambivalent relationship between the observer and natural world they observe. Synge’s reading of Spencer ultimately leads him to confront early on a central problem of later modernist writers, that is, the instability of the subject/object relationship and the “ambivalent revival” of the observer’s perspective in aesthetic production.
Using constructivist representation theories, this article presents a framework for understanding how political staff shape representation. Using a survey of 366 parliamentary and constituency staff working for members of Parliament (MPs), I identify four key roles: proxies, liaisons, advisors, and gatekeepers. Proxies embody absent elected officials. Liaisons facilitate communication between elected officials and constituents. Advisors’ expertise and experience shape elected officials’ actions. Gatekeepers manage people’s and ideas’ access to elected officials. Constituency staff primarily act as proxies and liaisons, emphasizing local service and constituent connection. Parliamentary staff more often take on advisory and gatekeeping roles, which can influence elected officials’ perspectives. This framework provides insight into how staff mediate the representative process between elected officials and constituents. Staff actively shape who is heard and which issues gain attention, ultimately influencing the quality and inclusivity of democratic political representation. Thus, understandings of representation without staff are inherently incomplete.
This chapter frames the collaboration between Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso in the making of the 1906 portrait of Stein as a struggle over the modernist representation of the face. Having started the portrait with the sitter in front of him, Picasso famously erased Stein’s likeness and subsequently replaced it with a mask. Stein self-styled herself as an author and celebrity using Picasso’s portrait as a prop – as if it were a photograph. In turn, Stein’s literary portraits of Picasso attest to a desire for a radical erasure of the face, from memory and representation alike. The face nonetheless returns in the invocation of the proper name Picasso and through the intermedial dimensions of Stein’s portraiture writing. The chapter concludes by revisiting Nella Larsen’s use of the mask, specifically as the mask of whiteness, in her novel Passing (1929), a re-writing of Stein and Picasso’s experimentation with the racial dynamics of the mask.
This paper examines how public demand and institutional contexts shape the substantive representation of LGBTQ+ populations across Europe. I argue that while positive social constructions of LGBTQ+ populations are a necessary condition for the advances of LGBTQ+ rights, issue salience can facilitate LGBTQ+ rights only if public opinion on LGBTQ+ is positive. Furthermore, I assert that translating social constructions of LGBTQ+ populations into policy outputs is mediated by the proportionality of electoral systems. I analyze policy scores, public attitudes, and online interest concerning LGBTQ+ topics. I find that positive social constructions are correlated with more inclusive LGBTQ+ rights across countries, and the positive impact of issue salience on LGBTQ+ rights is observed only in countries with positive social constructions. Additionally, the analysis of electoral systems provides mixed evidence regarding the role of proportionality.
The aim of this empirical study is to map the representation before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) from 1997 to 2023, with a specific emphasis on oral proceedings. The dataset consists of background information on the identity of those appearing before ITLOS. To achieve this, various characteristics were coded, including the professional background, the gender, the nationality and the development status of the country of nationality. The study explores common assumptions, such as whether the oral proceedings are male dominated. It also investigates more specific hypotheses related to ITLOS as a specialized tribunal and whether this specialization results in any particularity in terms of representation.
As global migration continues to intensify, legislatures in liberal democracies increasingly feature policymakers with direct experiences with immigration. Concurrently, scholars often argue that electoral accountability creates incentives to appeal to public opinion, which in the context of immigration policymaking favors restrictions over admission. In this paper, we study these competing dynamics among these immigrant legislators. We theorize that political institutions—particularly political parties—impede the sincere expression of legislative preferences among legislators that come from immigrant backgrounds. To begin, we present stylized facts about legislative behavior drawing on roll-call votes from the Canadian, British, and American legislatures. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with representatives, we find strong evidence that the threat of political party sanction and individual concerns about legislators’ own parties affects legislative decision-making. These findings contribute to our understanding of legislative accountability and highlight how the trend of increasing immigration to democratic polities does not directly translate to political representation.
‘Truth’ refers to reality – what is, was, will be, and should be – and its aspects, in the context of representations thereof. A true something is the real thing, and a true proposition, belief, hypothesis, exemplar, and so forth is a successful representation of truth in the first sense. The virtue of truthfulness is the judicious love of truth in both senses. From love of reality and correct representations of it, the truthful person tends to tell others the truth as she sees it, but is not fanatical about telling it, because virtues like justice, compassion, and gentleness, which themselves are a kind of truth, can enjoin the withholding or even distortion of truths. Truths can be horrible, and it can take courage and humility to admit them.
In this chapter the medieval history of political participation is summarised both in more general terms (such as the emergence of the concept of ‘representation’) and in the form of some of the most important individual examples, from Spain, Sicily and Hungary to Scandinavia and England.
Edited by
Marietta Auer, Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory,Paul B. Miller, University of Notre Dame, Indiana,Henry E. Smith, Harvard Law School, Massachusetts,James Toomey, University of Iowa
Private law theory is pulled in opposite directions: internal and external perspectives on law; holistic and reductionist methodologies; conceptualist and nominalist views; and deontological and consequentialist approaches. Relatedly, theories tend to focus on the micro or the macro scales – interpersonal relations or societal effects – but face difficulties in connecting them. In this paper, we examine these problems in private law theory through the lens of the legal phenomenology of Adolf Reinach. According to Reinach, the law presupposes a realm of real, timeless entitles and their workings that are synthetic a priori: they are neither conventional nor contingent. Nor are they inherently moral or customary. We argue that regardless of the ontological status of what Reinach identifies as a priori, it points toward something more robust than most current theories would countenance. We illustrate the usefulness of this perspective through Reinach’s analysis of property, transfer, and representation. Reinach captures features and generalizations that have eluded analysis, as, for example, when he treats the principle of nemo dat quod non habet (‘one cannot transfer what one does not own’) as underlying all transfer even if displaced by positive rules such as good faith purchase. His views also point toward the importance of accessibility for legal concepts, including cases of tacit knowledge. Whatever its exact source, this “deep structure” of the law has the potential to partially reconcile some of the fissures in private law theory and to connect the micro and the macro through a better understanding of system in law.
In this chapter, I take the theoretical predictions developed earlier to a near-global dataset using techniques of statistical inference. The analyses relate variation in country-year bureaucratic selection to two genres of outcomes: (1) a measure of representational inequality and (2) the incidence of internal conflict. I establish two core findings in this chapter. First, I show that countries in which civil servants are recruited more meritocratically are also those with higher measures of bureaucratic between-group inequality. Second, looking at the incidence of internal conflict in a given country-year observation, in a sample of post-colonial countries over the period 1941–2021, I find that internal conflict is more likely in countries that recruit civil servants meritocratically.
This chapter will provide a foundation for the provision of quality visual arts educational experiences in early childhood and the primary years. Practical suggestions for planning a high-quality visual arts program are linked to recent theory in a way that helps you construct your own visual arts program. Visual arts concepts, language, elements and principles will be defined and explained, with examples of the progression in visual arts education from early childhood through the primary years. Practicalities such as classroom management, safety and materials are addressed and additional interactive material can be found through the icons.
This chapter discusses the evolution of pagan iconography in Late Antiquity, examining how depictions of traditional gods and rituals changed between 300 and 700 CE. It challenges earlier interpretations that associate this period with artistic decline, instead emphasising continuity and transformation in the representation of pagan themes across various media. Drawing on legal, literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence, the chapter provides a comprehensive perspective on the artistic and religious landscape of the period. It discusses key examples such as the Arch of Constantine, which repurposed older sacrificial motifs, and later fourth-century artworks like the Symmachi ivory diptych, which continued to depict pagan sacrifices despite the growing influence of Christianity. The chapter also examines the selective destruction of pagan imagery, particularly the mutilated reliefs from the Aphrodisias Sebasteion, demonstrating how sacrificial depictions were specifically targeted. The chapter concludes by noting that while sacrificial iconography faded, other pagan motifs – especially those associated with gods like Dionysus and Venus – remained prevalent in mosaics, silverware and textiles. This enduring presence underscores the adaptability of pagan imagery, which continued to influence artistic traditions long after the fall of the Roman Empire.
This chapter explores how international law and its legitimacy could be improved and made more aligned with the demands of justice. It focuses on two types of requirements. First, there are the principles and accompanying procedures on the basis of which actors ask their agency (and their rights) to be recognized by international law and its culture of legitimacy. These principles are consent, justification, accountability, consistency, representation and participation, and non-abuse of power. Second, there are the topics around which this quest for the recognition of agency (and rights) takes place. They are better universality of international law, human rights as a benchmark of the legitimacy of sovereignty, compliance/enforcement/accountability, and human rights supported by public goods. These two kinds of requirements have been at the center of the efforts to make international law more inclusive as well as more legitimate, and they need to be taken more seriously in the future.