This volume traces the roots of the constructivist turn in the distinct (and competing) traditions of Continental and Anglo-American Western political thought. Divided into three thematic parts, these 13 newly commissioned essays develop the constructivist turn as a central concept. They advance the insight that there can be no democratic politics without representation; constituencies or groups exist as agents of democratic politics only insofar as they are represented.

For at least two centuries, democratic representation has been at the center of debate. Should elected representatives express the views of the majority, or do they have the discretion to interpret their constituents’ interests? How can representatives balance the desires of their parties and their electors? What should be done to strengthen the representation of groups that have been excluded from the political system? Representative democracy itself remains frequently contested, regarded as incapable of reflecting the will of the masses, or inadequate for today’s global governance. Recently, however, this view of democratic representation has been under attack for its failure to capture the performative and constructive elements of the process of representation, and a new literature more attentive to these aspects of the relationship between representatives and the represented has arisen. In Creating Political Presence, a diverse and international group of scholars explores the implications of such a turn. Two broad, overlapping perspectives emerge. In the first section, the contributions investigate how political representation relates to empowerment, either facilitating or interfering with the capacity of citizens to develop autonomous judgment in collective decision making. Contributions in the second section look at representation from the perspective of inclusion, focusing on how representative relationships and claims articulate the demands of those who are excluded or have no voice. The final section examines political representation from a more systemic perspective, exploring its broader environmental conditions and the way it acquires democratic legitimacy.

At a time when political representation can be said to be facing its ultimate crisis, this crucial work clarifies the terms of the debate, providing an up-to date analysis of the main conceptual and institutional controversies that have arisen surrounding this topic. Written by leading scholars in the field, contributions focus on how representation is conceptualised and its relation to democracy.

Public division is not new; in fact, it is the lifeblood of politics, and political representatives have constructed divisions throughout history to mobilize constituencies. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the idea of a divided United States has become commonplace. In the wake of the 2020 election, some commentators warned that the American public was the most divided it has been since the Civil War. Political scientists, political theorists, and public intellectuals have suggested that uninformed, misinformed, and disinformed voters are at the root of this division. Some are simply unwilling to accept facts or science, which makes them easy targets for elite manipulation. It also creates a grass-roots political culture that discourages cross-partisan collaboration in Washington. Yet, manipulation of voters is not as grave a threat to democracy in America as many scholars and pundits make it out to be. The greater threat comes from a picture that partisans use to rally their supporters: that of an America sorted into opposing camps so deeply rooted that they cannot be shaken loose and remade. Making Constituencies proposes a new theory of representation as mobilization to argue that divisions like these are not inherent in society, but created, and political representatives of all kinds forge and deploy them to cultivate constituencies.

Representation is integral to the functioning and legitimacy of modern government. Yet political theorists have often been reluctant to engage directly with questions of representation, and empirical political scientists have closed down such questions by making representation synonymous with congruence. Conceptually unproblematic and normatively inert for some, representation has been deemed impossible to pin down analytically and to defend normatively by others. But this is changing. Political theorists are now turning to political representation as a subject worthy of theoretical investigation in its own right. In their effort to rework the theory of political representation, they are also hoping to impact how representation is assessed and studied empirically. This volume gathers together chapters by key contributors to what amounts to a "representative turn" in political theory. Their approaches and emphases are diverse, but taken together they represent a compelling and original attempt at re-conceptualizing political representation and critically assessing the main theoretical and political implications following from this, namely for how we conceive and assess representative democracy. Each contributor is invited to look back and ahead on the transformations to democratic self-government introduced by the theory and practice of political representation. Representation and democracy: outright conflict, uneasy cohabitation, or reciprocal constitutiveness? For those who think democracy would be better without representation, this volume is a must-read: it will question their assumptions, while also exploring some of the reasons for their discomfort. Reclaiming Representation is essential reading for scholars and graduate researchers committed to staying on top of new developments in the field.

This volume explores the nature and possibilities of constructivism through an engagement and examination of the foremost constructivist positions, Rawls and O'Neill.

This book arises out of Hannah Pitkin's doctoral dissertation and is considered by political scientists to be the gold standard in terms of a philosophical treatment of the subject. Pitkin covers the historical evolution of thinking about representation from the Greeks through the founding of the American republic highlighting diverse thinkers and politicians like Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and James Madison as well as more contemporary scholars like Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom.

Representation is more than a matter of elections and parties. This book offers a radical new perspective on the subject. Representation, it argues, is all around us, a dynamic practise across societies rather than simply a fixed feature of government. At the heart of the argument is the straightforward but versatile notion of the representative claim. People claim to speak or stand for others in multiple, shifting, and surprising patterns. At the same time they offer images of their constituents and audiences as artists paint portraits. Who can speak for and about us in this volatile world of representations? Which representative claims can have democratic legitimacy? The Representative Claim is set to transform our core assumptions about what representation is and can be. At a time when political representation is widely believed to be in crisis, the book provides a timely and critical corrective to conventional wisdom on the present and potential future of representative democracy.

"How can democracies effectively represent citizens? The goal of this Handbook is to evaluate comprehensively how well the interests and preferences of mass publics become represented by institutions in liberal democracies. It first explores how the idea and institutions of liberal democracies were formed over centuries and became enshrined in Western political systems. The contributors to this Handbook, made up of the world's leading scholars on the various aspects of political representation, examine how well the political elites and parties who are charged with the representation of the public interest meet their duties. Clearly, institutions often fail to live up to their own representation goals. With this in mind, the contributors explore several challenges to the way that the system of representation is organized in modern democracies. For example, actors such as parties and established elites face rising distrust among electorates. Also, the rise of international problems such as migration and environmentalism suggests that the focus of democracies on nation states may have to shift to a more international level. All told, this Handbook illuminates the normative and functional challenges faced by representative institutions in liberal democracies"--

Scholars of distributive politics often emphasize partisanship and clientelism. However, as Jennifer Bussell demonstrates in Clients and Constituents, legislators in "patronage democracies" also provide substantial constituency service: non-contingent, direct assistance to individual citizens. Bussell shows how the uneven character of access to services at the local level-often due to biased allocation on the part of local intermediaries-generates demand for help from higher-level officials. The nature of these appeals in turn provides incentives for politicians to help their constituents obtain public benefits. Drawing on a new cross-national dataset and extensive evidence from India-including sustained qualitative shadowing of politicians, novel elite and citizen surveys, and an experimental audit study with a near census of Indian state and national legislators-this book provides a theoretical and empirical examination of political responsiveness in developing countries. It highlights the potential for an under-appreciated form of democratic accountability, one that is however rooted in the character of patronage-based politics.