representation is good

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Rawan Elbaba, Student Reporting Labs Rawan Elbaba, Student Reporting Labs

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/why-on-screen-representation-matters-according-to-these-teens

Why on-screen representation matters, according to these teens

Why does representation in pop culture matter?

For some young students, portrayals of minorities in the media not only affect how others see them, but it affects how they see themselves.

“I do think it’s powerful for people of a minority race to be represented in pop culture to really show a message that everybody has a place in this world,” said Alec Fields, a junior at Forest Hills High School in Pennsylvania.

Fields was one of 144 middle and high school students who were interviewed about seeing themselves reflected — or not — on the screen. PBS NewsHour turned to our Student Reporting Labs from across the country to hear what students had to say a topic that research shows still has room for growth.

The success of recent films like “Black Panther” and “Crazy Rich Asians” have — again — sent a message about the importance of representation of minorities, not only in Hollywood but in other aspects of pop culture as well.

Only two out of every 10 lead film actors (or 19.8 percent) were people of color in 2017, this year’s UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report found. Still, that’s a jump from the year before, when people of color accounted for 13.9 percent of lead roles. People of color have yet to reach proportional representation within the film industry, but there have been gains in specific areas, including film leads and overall cast diversity.

According to 2018 U.S. Census Bureau estimates , the nation’s population is nearly 40 percent non-white. By 2055, the country’s racial makeup is expected to change dramatically, the U.S. will not have one racial or ethnic majority group by 2055, the Pew Research Center estimated .

Some students said that not seeing yourself represented in elements of pop culture can affect mental health.

“It just makes you feel like, ‘Why don’t I see anybody like me?’ [It] kind of like brings your self-esteem down,” said Kimore Willis, a junior at Etiwanda High School in California.

Others said they often look to trends in pop culture when forming their own identities.

“We need to see people that look like ourselves and can say, ‘Oh, that looks like me!’ or ‘I identify with that,’” said Sonali Chhotalal, a junior at Cape May Technical High School in New Jersey.

Others, however, feel that Hollywood is overcompensating for their lack of diversity by depicting exaggerated and stereotypical characters.

Eric Wojtalewicz from Black River Falls High School in Wisconsin said that he sees a lot of gay characters that seem “over-the-top,” playing on old tropes. “I definitely think that not all gays are like that,” he said.

Kate Casper, a junior at T.C. Williams High School in Virginia, called Hollywood’s attempt at diversity “disingenuous.” Although there can never be enough diversity, Casper said, she feels that the entertainment industry is using diversity for economic benefit. “Diversity equals money in today’s world, which is cool, I guess,” she said, adding that “it’s cooler to have pure motives.”

The UCLA report agrees that diversity sells. It says that the median global box office has been the highest for films featuring casts that were more than 20-percent minority, making nearly $450 million in 2017.

Although public opinion may be divided about whether the entertainment industry is doing enough to represent all types of people, South Mountain High School student Dazhane Brown in Arizona said that feeling represented is “empowering.”

“If you see people who look like you and act like you and speak like you and come from the same place you come from … it serves as an inspiration,” Brown said.

PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs produced this story in an effort to highlight the importance of representation of minorities in popular culture. Students from 31 Labs across the country submitted these responses.

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Why Jane Fonda is putting herself on the line to fight climate change

Arts Nov 07

The importance of representation

When I write creatively, I write about white people. Not the same white person, sure: There’s the awkward misunderstood white person, or the rich white woman destined to solve crime or the hard working white man that robs a store at gunpoint. Sitting in a conference with my creative writing teacher, I told her I’m scared to write about things that I don’t know.

I fell in love with writing as I fell in love with books. I would read the Magic Tree House, Judy Bloom, Andrew Clements and Ann M. Martin during lunch, at recess, in my room when the lights were meant to be off. I told myself I would be a writer — that I could be a writer. On the covers of my second grade novels I’d draw a girl, using the peach shade crayon, and name her Grace. Or Lindsay or Abby or Charlotte. This is a girl I felt I knew. She was all around me, in my white school, in my white town. She was on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. She was on magazines and American Girl dolls. As I got older, this white wash became more apparent. Classical literature praises this peach-shade figment: Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, Anna Karenina. These adventurous yet respectful white women — I eventually branched out to white men — became my muse.

Representation in the media is a constant source of controversy. For decades, award shows like the Oscars and Grammys have consistently overlooked the work of black artists. Black Panther is proving to be one of the most influential movies of our time with its assertion of black power both in its plot and cast. Many other films and TV shows released in the past few years have sought to provide representation for minority groups in the media. Representation isn’t just a nice way to appease complaining minorities. The media is a reflection of who America is and isn’t. America isn’t just white, and it never has been. When America looks into a mirror, the reflection is white, Christian, financially well-off. The picturesque American citizen.

I, along with so many people of color, write about white people because that is the only face the media deems as a full character. The complexity awarded to white Americans in the media is not seen in minority characters. There is no drive to explore the sassy black sidekick when there’s the multi-faceted white person. There is no incentive to explore minority characters when they exist to further stereotypes. I assumed this was normal. Fiction is about channeling something ideal or fantastical. In my childhood, the ideal was always white. Black people were side characters or villains. They were thugs or drug lords. They were never the hero. The media is partially responsible in the process of constructing what blackness and whiteness are, and in America, the furthering of racial stereotypes only helps justify racist actions. The fight for adequate representation isn’t a new thing. Amazing people have been advocating for cultural diversity in the media since before I was born. But there is more work that needs to be done.

We are in such a place where fundamental American thought can be shifted. Right now, minorities are starting to be listened to. Minorities have been yelling for decades at a country that doesn’t acknowledge us as part of its cultural makeup. Now there are more movies, TV shows, podcasts, models, activists that are beginning to be appreciated and listened to. This is the time. Children don’t have to write about peach-colored girls. The foundations created finally have room for some footing. By pushing for representation, we can change the way America is seen by Americans. When media is white, the stories of the marginalized, of racism, unfair housing, income inequality are never told. The media is a way to bring stories to life. The complexities of different races are not realized by most Americans because they are not visible to most Americans. The media is a pivotal start in forcing Americans to confront the harsh truth of our current political dynamic. Our media is silencing the voices of millions.

Representation is a vicious cycle. We write about what we see and what we experience. When all we study is white and all we see is white, all we create is white. I applaud the great authors and thinkers that have managed to test these boundaries, to push our current media and literature out of balance. They inspire young writers like me to explore the unseen characters, the traditional sidekicks, the never forgotten villains. They also encourage us to find characters in our own identity. We are encouraged to write characters with our strength and weaknesses and flaws.

Everyday, the media reassures us that America is white. Minorities are sidekicks or the help, the American Dream is alive and well, and racism is dead. Representation in the media means that America can finally see itself in all its multicultural, multiracial, beautiful self. Representation in the media means that America sees more to minorities than stereotypes. Representation can make disadvantaged groups become real people.  

Contact Natachi Onwuamaegbu at natachi ‘at’ stanford.edu.

Natachi Onwuamaegbu is a freshman from Bethesda, Maryland. She is currently undecided but is leaning towards Political Science and English. Currently, Natachi is part of the Black Student Union and hopes to run a radio station on campus. When she's not wandering around campus, Natachi likes to sit in the sun, listen to music and overuse semi-colons.

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Why Is Representation So Important?

I was born in 1950, the youngest of five children in a white, working-class family living in a predominately blue-collar neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There were not many books in my household, but I distinctly remember the “Dick and Jane” series, which were the school textbooks that were used to teach reading, back in the day. And I definitely remember the illustrations and how the families in those books were portrayed.

Television shows like “ Father Knows Best,” “The Donna Reed Show,”  and “ Ozzie and Harriet “reinforced a father’s image, always dressed in a suit and tie, which was not a common sight in my community. I remember asking my mother why my father or any of the dads we knew didn’t dress like the fathers represented in those books or on the TV shows we watched.

I have heard from friends who are Black describe what happened in their homes during that same time period when a person of color appeared on television… everyone in the family would excitedly come running to witness this rare occurrence.

These anecdotes illustrate a child’s natural inclination to look for a reflection of themselves in the world around them. This is what representation – or the portrayal of a person or group in books and other media—is all about.

And it matters!

Children need to see themselves included and represented, and that representation should be truthful and not based on stereotypes. How people are depicted shapes how they see themselves and how others see them. It also defines or limits possibilities that one can aspire to depending on whether the representation is positive or negative.

For those readers who responded to my recent blog:  Should We Continue To Celebrate Dr. Seuss?  with a “don’t like it, don’t read it” reaction, I would counter that continuing to publish children’s books with offensive illustrations sends the wrong message to anyone who comes across them. It is crucial for all children to be exposed to truthful and positive images, not just non-white children; otherwise, we as Americans have no chance at becoming a better nation where all are seen, heard, and treated equally.

I hold out little hope for any mutual understanding from those respondents who replied with hate and disdain to my posting.

But I was heartened to hear from people who said they reconsidered their impulse to roll their eyes at the Dr. Seuss news. While they frankly expressed fatigue at times with the reexamination of misguided and immoral thinking and actions from the past, they acknowledged that they had discovered some understanding of the power of representation with further consideration. Many offered that when they recognized the significance of negative and offensive illustrations and how they contribute to division and hate—which is on the rise—they realized this fatigue was nothing compared to what non-white individuals had and continue to experience.

I have always cringed when people talk about the “good old days.” While I have many fond memories of the past, I am quick to recognize that it was far from perfect. I acknowledge that women, people of color, and any group considered to be “other” had to be submissive in that past. And that there were unjust laws in place or the mores of the time that limited the freedom of many of our citizens. That history must be confronted and identified for what it was…wrong. Calling it out doesn’t cancel anything or take away from what was positive about those times, nor does it proclaim that everything nowadays is ideal and without reproach.

Fortunately, progress is being made and representation in books and other media is becoming more inclusive and more positive; that said, we need to be vigilant in looking honestly at the past, as well as critically at how people are represented going forward.

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The power of political representation

Lisa Jane Disch, Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)

• Critical Exchange
• Open access
• Published: 16 December 2023

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• Lawrence Hamilton 1 , 2 ,
• Monica Brito Vieira 3 ,
• Lisa Disch 4 ,
• Lasse Thomassen 5 &
• Nadia Urbinati 6  

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This Critical Exchange takes up a conversation David Plotke inaugurated twenty-five years ago with this simple statement: ‘Representation is democracy’ ( 1997 ). This sentence announced a unique and powerful reframing that ‘transformed what was commonly believed to be an oxymoron into an equivalence’, as Mónica Brito Vieira so aptly and eloquently described it ( 2017 , p. 6). Rather than promote representation from the typical standpoint of republicanism, Plotke took up a vantage point informed by and grateful for the successes of twentieth-century democratic movements. By extending voice and rights to the formerly marginalized and replacing ‘direct personal domination’ and favoritism with abstract rules and procedures, he argued, democratic movements made ‘politics more complex and less direct’ (Plotke., 1997 , p. 24). Increased complexity gave representation ‘a central positive role in democratic politics’, making it an outcome and ally of democracy rather than ‘an unfortunate compromise between an ideal of direct democracy and messy modern realities’ (Plotke, 1997 , p. 24).

That same year, Iris Marion Young also questioned the privilege accorded to ‘direct democracy’, arguing that directness betrays ideals of equality, mutuality, and accountability wherever face-to-face gatherings cede power to ‘arrogant loud mouths whom no one chose to represent them’ (Young, 1997 , p. 353). Her words affirmed Jane J. Mansbridge’s classic study, published twenty years earlier, which documented how town hall governance brings out deep-seated habits of deference to gender- and race-based hierarchies ( 1980 ). These works proved harbingers of what Nadia Urbinati termed the ‘democratic rediscovery of representation’ that took hold in the early 2000s and challenged the ‘standard model’ of representative politics (Urbinati, 2006 , p. 5; Castiglione & Warren, 2019 , p. 22).

The standard model focuses on elections. It conceives of democratic representation as a principal-agent relationship that is territorially based, located within constitutionally sanctioned institutions of political decision-making, and the source for ‘a simple means and measure of political equality’: the vote (Castiglione & Warren, 2019 , p. 21). Accordingly, representative institutions are democratic insofar as they ensure responsiveness to the ‘interests and opinions of the people constituted by territorial membership’ (Castiglione & Warren, 2019 , p. 21). Due to the proliferation of transnational and subnational practices of representation and the generation of economic and ecological externalities that confound territorial boundaries, twenty-first-century globalization created a ‘disjunction’ between model and practice that provided one catalyst for the turn toward representation in democratic theory (Urbinati & Warren, 2008 , p. 388).

New forms of political action gave scholars an even more powerful catalyst. Various experiments defied the traditional opposition between participatory and representative governance: ‘citizen juries, consensus conferences, planning cells’ (Brown, 2006 , p. 203); ‘accountable autonomy’ in community policing and school budgeting (Fung, 2004 , p. 6); sortition (Sintomer, 2011 , 2023 ). Scholars proposed new categories to conceptualize this activity—’informal’, ‘lay’, and ‘self-appointed’ representation (Montanaro, 2012 , 2017 ; Warren, 2008 ). Scholars also transformed the practice of democratic theory, plumbing historical instances where representative and democratic practices conjoined (Hayat) and working the intersection between normative and empirical research (Hawkesworth, 2003 ; Mansbridge, 2003 , 2009 ; Sabl, 2015 ).

The ‘representative turn’ stood out for its proponents’ ‘willingness to question the polarity of representation and democracy’ (Brito Vieira, 2017 , p. 5). They emphasized that representative functions can be fulfilled by a broad variety of non-electoral political actors including social movements, organizations, individual citizens, and influential media figures. They also maintained that political representation ‘does not simply allow the social to be translated into the political, but also facilitates the formation of political groups and identities’ (Urbinati, 2006 , p. 37; Brito Vieira and Runciman, 2008 ; Brito Vieira, 2009 ; Schwartz, 1998 ; Thomassen, 2019 ; Young, 1997 ). Above all, their work made it clear that Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s classic definition of representation as the ‘making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact’ needed amending (Pitkin, 1967 , pp. 8, 9; emphasis original). These theorists, proponents of a ‘constructivist’ variant on the representative turn, emphasized making the represented and its interests over making them present (Disch, 2011 ; Hayward, 2009 ).

Michael Saward’s conceptualization of representation as claims-making provided an especially influential framework for analyzing this ‘performativity’ in both the speech act sense (as constitutive) and the theatrical sense (as performance) (Saward, 2014 , p. 725). He trained analysts’ attention on the work that would-be representatives do to ‘make representations’ of their constituents, by soliciting the ‘latter to recognize themselves’ in the portraits created by claims, policies, and other acts of representation (Saward, 2014 , p. 726; 2006 , 2010 ). He and others explored ‘representation’s aesthetic and cultural character’ (Saward, 2014 , p. 726) in the thought of Thomas Hobbes (Brito Vieira, 2009 ), in ‘enactments’ of race and gender through Congressional welfare reform (Hawkesworth, 2003 ), and in an array of staged public appearances (Salmon, 2010 ; Finlayson, 2021 ; Spary, 2021 ). Shirin Rai developed a ‘political performance framework’ that breaks political performances into their ‘component parts’ to identify the ‘materiality of performance’ and to analyze ‘why and how some performances mark a rupture in the everyday reproduction of social relations’ while others reproduce those relations (Rai, 2015 , pp. 1180, 1181). Laura Montanaro specified the category of ‘self-appointed’ representatives—charismatic individuals and organized advocacy groups who claim to speak for constituencies and are recognized as doing so even though they are neither elected nor appointed—and proposed normative criteria for assessing when they serve democracy and when they do not ( 2017 ).

This new work focused an urgent concern: ‘if representative politics is performative, how can we ensure that it is also democratic?’ (Thomassen in this Critical Exchange). By recognizing that political representation happens outside constitutionally sanctioned liberal democratic institutions and acknowledging its performativity, this work neutralized traditional election-based yardsticks for assessing its democratic legitimacy: authorization by and responsiveness to a geographically specified constituency.

It also provoked astute objections. Sophia Näsström observes an ambiguity about this work’s ‘diagnostic or normative’ aims ( 2011 , p. 502). Noting the pronounced asymmetries of voice in the non-electoral domain of global politics that favor the wealthy, she cautions that the emphasis on non-electoral representation may ‘serve as a warning of what may lie ahead, as a call for democratic theorists to rethink numerical equality beyond election’, or provide a ‘subtle’ means of acclimating people to the ‘idea that there may be acceptable forms of global representative government without democracy’ ( 2011 , p. 508). Jennifer Rubenstein similarly objects that the activities of global non-governmental organizations are not and do not claim to be acts of representation; they are exercises of power that should be analyzed as such rather than through a ‘representation lens’ ( 2007 , p. 208). Andrew Rehfeld ( 2017 ) pointedly observed that for all the new attention to representation, scholars failed to ask the simplest of questions: What is a representative and how does one come to be one?

Lisa Disch’s Making Constituencies emerges from the representative turn in democratic theory and is inspired by a specific problem: What are empirical researchers to make of the fact that they can affirm citizens’ capacity for preference-formation only at the cost of revealing their susceptibility to the self-seeking rhetoric of competing elites? This question originates from a reconsideration of early survey research that called traditional yardsticks of representative democracy into question long before democratic theorists made the turn. In 1964, Philip Converse famously debunked both responsiveness and accountability, arguing that voters offer little in the way of consistent beliefs or coherent ideologies for representatives to respond to and that they pay too little attention to politics to hold their representatives to account. Today, empirical scholars find that individuals in mass democracies do form political opinions, preferences, and identities but in response to political contexts rather than prior to them (see, for example, Carmines & Kuklinski, 1990 ; Lupia, 1992 , 1994 ; Druckman, 2001 ).

Making Constituencies emphasizes that empirical researchers offer distinct accounts of political learning processes that reach significantly different conclusions regarding the viability of representative democracy. One account holds that humans adapt their opinions and preferences to antagonistic group affiliations which they are psychologically disposed to form (Achen & Bartels, 2016 ; Iyengar et al., 2012 ). The other posts a political divide emerging in response to increasing polarization among political elites (Abrams & Fiorina, 2012 ; Levendusky, 2009 ). These accounts bear on the widely cited phenomenon of ‘sorting’, popularly known as the antagonistic division into partisan camps that pundits lament for rendering mass democracies increasingly ungovernable. The first account depoliticizes sorting by depicting it as a fact or state grounded in human psychology; the second treats it as a portrait of the political landscape—a representation. Rather than reflect a deep-seated partisan cleavage, talk of sorting, studies of sorting, and strategies designed to exploit it participate in constituting that antagonistic divide.

Despite the influence of the psychological account, empirical research frequently supports the political explanation. Recall the intractable partisan differences that were said to have influenced states’ pandemic-related regulations regarding masks and quarantine in the United States and people’s responses to those regulations. Sorting influenced how people understood and experienced the pandemic. Residents of blue [i.e. Democrat] states and/or counties blamed red-state [i.e. Republican] policy and the reckless actions of red-state residents for accelerating both the spread of the pandemic and the propagation of new variants.

Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report ( 2023 ) re-examines this narrative, highlighting the ‘great untold story’ that it was ‘common’ during the first months of the pandemic ‘to find selfless cooperation, people sharing best practices and regularly supporting one another across state lines and all political persuasions’ ( 2023 , p. 150). Only as the pandemic wore on, and the 2020 presidential election approached, did policy and behavior with respect to masking, social-distancing, and—ultimately—vaccine mandates exhibit partisan antagonism. The authors emphasize:

…there is a common view that politics, a ‘[r]ed response’ and a ‘blue response’, were the main obstacle to protecting citizens, not competence and policy failures. We found, instead, that it was more the other way around. Incompetence and policy failures, including the failure of federal executive leadership, produced bad outcomes, flying blind, and resorting to blunt instruments. Those failures and tensions fed toxic politics that further divided the country in a crisis rather than bringing it together ( 2023 , p. 151).

Spotlighting this key paragraph, David Wallace-Wells observes that ‘the partisanship of our pandemic response was not a pre-existing condition…[but] was, at least partly, a result of that response’ ( 2023 ). Applied to the pandemic, the sorting narrative entrenched the condition that its subscribers lament—a country cleaved by antagonistic partisanship and unable to cooperate to achieve clear public goods.

I wrote Making Constituencies to better align our ideals of representative democracy with empirical findings about how it works in practice. This required displacing representative democracy from its (mythical) ground in the ‘bedrock’ of voter preferences—the constructivist turn (Disch, 2011 ). The intuition driving the book is that the constructivist turn has the potential to shore up rather than undermine mass democracy. If representative democracy is at its best when representatives of all kinds—elected officials, opinion-shapers, advocacy groups, and more—build creative and unlikely coalitions, perhaps the turn to constructivism inspires optimism about those agents’ ability to do just that. The generative and perceptive essays that follow offer a wealth of insight into where democratic theory is moving today, particularly in western democracies. They also persuade me that my book gave too little consideration to an important element of this vision: political judgment and the political conditions that foster and distort it in mass publics.

An excellent introduction to a great absent

The constructivist conception of political representation allows Disch to advance two very important arguments, which are the pillars of this excellent book: the vindication of critical realism, and its distinction from what I would call ‘simplistic’ realism. The former inspires a theoretical and practical attitude that is supportive of democracy, while the latter fosters a pessimistic and skeptical, if not overtly critical, attitude toward it. This dualism leads us directly to the topics that have divided scholars of democracy since time immemorial: the role of competence and, indeed, of the competent in political decision-making, and a negative assessment of the role of political parties. While Disch comprehensively covers the former, she leaves out the latter.

Political theorists are well acquainted with Disch’s work, which over the years has become a valuable contribution to the theory of representation as ‘claim-making’—a constructivist approach that corrects the formalist reading and connects representation with participation rather than only voting and institutions. The enormous implications of the constructivist turn have not yet been fully appreciated. They concern the understanding of politics, the role of conflict as constitutive of democratic politics and political freedom, and the inclination of democratic theory toward critical realism. Critical realism is a guide to decoding the factors that determine the formation of citizens’ reasons for their political choices, without falling into moralism and pedagogical paternalism, or alternatively justifying the status quo.

Representation entails the construction of constituencies. The latter give unity to the claims and problems that bring us into the political arena, shape the linguistic frame that conveys to others our reasons and goals—they represent us to our fellow citizens and the audience. Organizational strategies are essential to the making of the several roles and actors that comprise the collective work of representation, which is in all respects a process of participation through which citizens construct their political identities (movements and parties) and goals, and seek and acquire the power to determine the direction of the government of their society; in doing all of that citizens construct ties among each other and side for or against other constituencies. Representation is the name of a form of participation, whose Latin root means two things at once: taking sides and taking part.

Disch brilliantly sketches the process through which this conception of representation emerged: a long journey that began with Pitkin’s seminal 1967 book, which took representation out of the corner to which behaviorist and elitist theories of democracy had confined it, albeit at the cost of emphasizing its formalistic character. ‘Pitkin modified interest representation in several radical ways. She redefined democratic representation from an interpersonal relationship to an anonymous and impersonal’ or formal system process (p. 38). While elitist theory emphasized the individual-to-individual relationship (between the represented and the representatives) and the role of individual preferences and interests—a perspective that is still predominant in political science—Pitkin unpacked representation in relation to the form of the mandate and ascribed relevance to the moment of ‘acting for’. This choice opened the way to issues of advocacy and leadership, and fatally to those of manipulation and ideological constructions. However, although Pitkin did not make the representative claim bi-directional, and insisted on the formalist moment to detract from the plebiscitary or demagogic strategy, she nevertheless opened the way for the active role of citizens, both as respondents and as creators of leaders. Mansbridge refined that trajectory in relation to the deliberative system, proposing the idea of anticipatory representation linked to and in fact promoted by retrospective voting. Disch writes that this move pushed Mansbridge ‘into the constituency paradox’ and into the tension between ‘manipulation’ and ‘education’ that characterizes representative democracy. Disch’s critical work is situated within this ‘paradox’ but with a view to its solution, foregoing the need to identify ‘criteria for distinguishing between persuasion and manipulations’ (p. 45).

Based on the constructivist turn, Disch mounts an assault on contemporary realists, notably Christopher H. Achen, Larry M. Bartel and Jason Brennan, who in fact are anything but realists insofar as they judge citizens’ decisions (election results) on the basis of an idea of ‘competent’ decision-making that claims authority over citizens’ judgment and decision. But, Disch suggests, understanding how and why citizens voted for this or that candidate is not the same as staging a court of law to pass a verdict on them. Contemporary realists rely on a psychological approach in analyzing preferences and beliefs; this individualistic poll-based method leads them to conclude that ignorance is the structural flaw that elections generate, a flaw that can only be contained but never erased. The prescription is predictable: democracy is to be saved from itself by narrowing the role of suffrage in two ways: expanding the role of the competent (Achen and Bartel) or limiting the right to vote to those who pass an exam (Brennan).

These realists argue that the psychological need of individuals to bond with a group is like an instinctive force toward belonging, a kind of ‘primordialism’. It could be said that the more competent and intellectually sharp we are, the more we can reason apart from a group or an instinctive need to belong. The more rational we are, the more individualistic we are, and the more competent we are as citizens—a condition that is of the few, not the many. According to these realists, therefore, any grouping is a sign of ignorance and intellectual laziness. They draw on Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde, who wrote before democracy raised the fear of the (blind, irrational, emotional and reactive) masses that demagogues conquer. The distrust of contemporary realists mimics Robert Michels’ point that individual citizens need to associate to resolve their weakness, with the paradoxical consequence that association brings them into the arms of an oligarchy and makes them dependent on partisan views.

This simplistic realism is certainly not conducive to representative democracy. As Disch shows, it is the child of behaviorism and a negative conception of politics. It has a pessimistic attitude that is difficult to substantiate, even if very pronounced. Simplistic realism identifies citizenship with voting, and representation with recording individual preferences, and reads preferences as emotional reactions to a world that ordinary citizens have no means of knowing or are not interested in knowing. How can we address this ideological construct that claims to be an objective account of reality?

The most important contribution of Disch’s book lies in offering an answer to this question. Disch responds to realist critics, not by rejecting realism but by reinterpreting it. She argues, very persuasively, that realism is not identifiable with the empirical investigation of individual opinions that assigns a central role to researchers and assumes that citizens are simply reactive; an approach, as we have seen, that draws on crowd psychology. The interdisciplinary approach proposed by the critical realism Disch advocates assumes that political judgments (the reasons for citizens’ decisions) occur within a structural social context. Citizens develop their representative claims and, thus, their electoral choices within reflections on a range of considerations of governmental choices, social and economic conditions, and confrontations between different parts of society. Therefore, we should not blame the ignorance of citizens but the presumption of political scientists, who reduce political judgment to a matter of individual psychological reactions that discard ex ante social relations.

Disch masterfully sketches two realisms by opposing to the one exemplified by Achen, Bartel and Brennan a realism exemplified by Katherine J. Cramer and Suzanne Mettler. The latter is the child of a socio-economic structural analysis of the environment in which people form their beliefs, develop their reasons for making decisions, and eventually organize. For simplistic realism, politics has the defect of being a domain in which opinions are manipulated and preferences are simply wrong, because they often are irrational responses to a reality that eludes citizens. For critical realism, politics is the complex art of interpretation and action, a kind of knowledge that aims at ‘effectuality’ and is pragmatically action-oriented. To understand how citizens opine and decide, we must rely on various disciplines and interrogate the relationship between institutions, leaders, and constituencies.

Based on critical realism, Disch takes an important step outside the demarcation drawn by Mansbridge between manipulation and education, partisan politics and reasonable deliberation. Disch goes to the source of political scientists’ distrust of power. ‘To accept that political speech moves people as much or more than it educates them is to acknowledge the irreducible “ambiguities” of manipulation as a concept’ (p. 94), because indeed the result might be that any form of consensus-seeking persuasion is a form of manipulation. Yet if this were the case what would be the role of elections, party pluralism, and conflict to achieve consensus and govern?

The train of ideas that leads Disch to place the theory of democracy within critical realism is represented by some prominent figures: Elmer E. Schattschneider (for his theory of the contagiousness of conflict and the tension between vested interests and political interests), Robert Goodin (for his critique of the fear of manipulation as a fear of ‘competitive political rhetoric’), Claude Lefort (for bringing the theory of power back to its Machiavellian roots as ‘empty space’ and the choral and individual work of contestation in free (democratic) societies), and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (for bringing antagonism and hegemonic articulation of claims into representative politics). These are Disch’s coordinates for thinking democracy as a place of ‘plurality’ and struggle against hierarchy, thus rejecting plurality as made up of groups ‘out there’. Disch argues that, ‘Thinking democracy means thinking of it as plural in this precise sense’ (p. 140).

I fully share Disch’s views about critical realism and pluralism. Her argument is strong, persuasive, and very important. However, I think her position needs a complement to address two issues that are absent in her critical realism. The first issue pertains to ‘antagonism’ as ‘sharp conflict’ that ‘forces decisions on fundamental, often zero-sum issues’ (p. 139). The examples Disch proposes are foundational ‘yes’ or ‘no’ issues as the basic thresholds of democracy: issues of slavery or equal rights, for instance. This kind of ‘zero sum’ antagonism does not, however, seem to qualify ordinary party politics (not even in a two-party system). Not all politics can be antagonistic in this foundational sense if democratic conflict is to be distinguished from civil war. Does Disch distinguish between foundational antagonism and ordinary conflict politics?

This question brings me to the second issue, namely the role of political parties. It is odd that a book based on Schattschneider’s theory of politics and conflict does not have an entry in its index on ‘party’, ‘parties’, or ‘political parties’ and does not mention Schattschneider’s 1942 book Party Government , a pivotal anti-Schumpeterian work. Disch prefers to refer to movements, which at times she seems to use synonymously with parties, in order to make the case for representative constructivism. But of course, movements and parties are not the same. Unless we ascribe hegemonic or equivalence work to a single leader (a demagogue or a populist), we should consider the pivotal role of a collective organizer and organized body like the ‘political party’. This was the ‘collective Prince’ that Antonio Gramsci had in mind when he opposed the hegemonic agency of collective leadership against the politics of domination by individual leadership. Disch’s book is about ‘making constituencies’, which is a collective enterprise. Among the makers of this enterprise are parties, even if they are an object of contempt when they aim to be something more than machines for selecting and campaigning for candidates. Yet this is a Schumpeterian reading with which Disch’s critical realism cannot be content.

Nadia Urbinati

Making representation matter

We are experiencing a ‘representative turn’ in democratic theory. Despite important advances in understanding representation at the level of ‘high’ theory (Saward, 2010 , and Brito Vieira, 2017 ) and empirical political science (Guasti & Geissel, 2019 ), there have been very few attempts to theorize from the real world of political representation on the ground. Until now.

Lisa Disch’s Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy ( 2021 ) does just this, and very neatly. It is a short book full of ideas and crisp, convincing moves. Its mix of the theoretical and the empirical enables Disch to ground her theoretical arguments and helps the reader grasp the complexities of mobilizing her novel account of representation. Disch has a very important point to make, and she makes it well, engaging a remarkable variety of literatures and perspectives.

This is a book about representation in democracy or representative democracy. More specifically, the book is ‘a crusade against competence’ (p. 137) that ‘asks you to change the way you think about political representation’ (p. 1). What links representation and competence? As Disch argues, although politics is ultimately all about interests, conflict, and power, classic accounts of representation rest on an ‘interest-first’ model in which constituencies form around things they want and elected representatives respond to their demands. In other words, they assume that interests (and associated group affiliations) exist prior to the dynamics of representation, and that the job of the representative is about responding to expressed interests. This assumption informs how ordinary citizens assess their representatives: they judge them better or worse depending on how responsive they are to their preferences. This framing forms part of a larger history and discourse about representative democracy. As Disch shows in chapters 1 to 5 (especially in chapter 3), since the middle of the twentieth century this has led a swath of supposedly ‘realist’ thinkers especially, but not only, in American political science and journalism to become pessimistic about democracy.

On this kind of responsiveness model of representation, where the representative is assumed to be not much more than the citizens’ delegate, it is all too easy to explain the vagaries of democracy, and why some groups may even seem to vote for candidates opposed to furthering their own interests, via the idea of citizen incompetence. If the representative process is viewed in these simplistic terms, this not only underplays the role of the representative in shaping interests but also makes the unrealistic assumption that interests are fixed and prior to representation. Therefore, if citizens fail to elect those who are responsive to or act in their interests, they must in some way be incompetent: unable to identify their interests, easily manipulated, sticking to the groups with which they associate and affiliate, and not thinking independently about what is in their interest.

The next logical step for these more pessimistic thinkers is to argue that democracy itself is irredeemably flawed because it fails to enable citizens to identify their interests and then hold their representatives to account in terms of their responsiveness to these interests. Moreover, these mistakes are not confined to anti-democratic or ‘elite’ democratic theorists. They apply even to those who correctly point out that most elected representatives do not serve lower income (or even middle income) interests but elite interests held by those that fund or support their parties, campaigns, and lives. Because corruption is endemic, representative democracy, in this view, is inherently flawed (Vergara, 2022 )—unless, of course, this entire argumentative edifice is shown to rest on a delusion or a form of wishful thinking (Geuss, 2015 ) regarding the nature of representation and representative democracy.

Before discussing how Disch helps us escape this unhelpful way of understanding representation, it is worth noting that she also reveals a related problem, namely, the tendency of most normative political theory that has predominated in the west for sixty years to begin from the individual, despite the evident facts of our relational, embedded and interdependent lives. While there are ethically sound reasons for such individualism, Disch keeps groups front and center of political understanding. However, she disputes the idea that groups and group identities are fixed and pre-political. As Disch notes throughout her book, social scientists and citizens commonly think of politically significant group identities as determined by economic or other social interests and regard these groups as forming relatively spontaneously whenever these interests are at stake. This view takes discrete groups as basic constituents of social life and the main source of social conflict.

This view is also common amongst democratic theorists trained in social science. Pluralist and participatory theories of democracy are just two examples. They assume an existing (if sometimes dormant) group or constituency that simply requires mobilization (or rather targeting). They imply that groups form around shared interests to demand laws and policies that serve those interests. By contrast, Disch sees groups not as foundations or starting points of politics but as ‘constituency effects’—outcomes rather than origins of acts of political representation. Following Brubaker ( 2004 , p. 11), Disch thinks that race exemplifies this. She writes:

Brubaker recommends that we think about ‘groups’ as we think about race. We may accept the fact that ‘racial idioms, ideologies, narratives, categories and systems of classification… are real and consequential, especially when they are embedded in powerful organizations’, but this acceptance in no way obligates us to ‘posit the existence of races’. Just as ‘race’—when conceived as a real difference or natural basis for hierarchy—gives little analytical purchase on white supremacy, ‘group’ affords little analytical purchase on the phenomena of identity, loyalty, and mobilization that primordialists use it to explain. Groups hold together not by any essential property shared among their members, but by virtue of representations of divisions and difference that position them in the social field (pp. 21, 22).

For Disch, whether we are talking about groups mobilized around class, race, or gender, it is important to see that groups and group identities are always mobilized or fashioned. In her terms, ‘acts of political representation solicit groups and constitute interests’ (p. 19). Thus, Disch suggests a new term to capture or ‘register’ the power of representation to divide the social field: ‘constituency effects’ (p. 18). She catalogues a range of direct and indirect constituency effects to show how mobilization by representatives does not merely register social cleavages but forges them.

Faithful to Laclau and Mouffe’s account of radical democracy and plurality, Disch argues that plurality and conflict are vital for this idea of representation constituting groups (ch. 7). This brings us back to, what I take to be, the central triangulation of ideas at work here: interests, groups and related mechanisms of representation.

There is little doubt that the French Revolution marks a new beginning for our understanding of representation. Elsewhere I have defended the remarkable theoretical novelty of the Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès’s account of representation, especially in his ‘What is the Third Estate?’ (Hamilton, 2014 ). Disch reveals an additional component of his moves that links him to Laclau and Mouffe’s point about ‘representation cutting new divisions into the irreducible plurality of the social’. Sieyès aimed not just to enfranchise more of the French people but to radically reform the whole representative structure by changing how we conceive of representation. In his proposal to transform the Estates General into the National Assembly, Sieyès proposed a radical repudiation of the traditional notion of the binding mandate. In a context where existing institutions and theories were concerned with limiting representation by securing it to social interests, the Tennis Court Oath proclaimed a ‘revolution of the deputies against the condition of their election’: representatives, Sieyes argued and the Oath proclaimed, would no longer be mere delegates, which constrained them to express the explicitly stated wills and needs of their constituencies. They liberated themselves from this straitjacket to take up a dual role ‘as both sovereign representatives of the nation and makers of the social order’ (p. 127).

Claude Lefort ( 1988 ) claimed that this opened a new mode of political representation: by establishing the National Assembly, the revolutionaries threw off their shackles that bound representatives to reflect and reproduce a hierarchical order. They thus freed acts of representation—speeches, pamphlets, protests, bills—to rally popular political force in the face of existing conventions and towards the expansion of liberty. Sieyès not only aimed thus to persuade the most educated and upwardly mobile part of French society to disidentify with the privileged classes and align their sympathies downwards but opened up the possibility of new forms of representation beyond the restricted delegate model. This ‘rhetoric of social revolution’ opened a new cleavage, a new ordering, a new arena of conflict, involving the ‘identification and denunciation of a class enemy’. In John Dunn’s words, with reference to this period, ‘democracy was a reaction, above all, not to monarchy, let alone tyranny, but to another relatively concrete social category…—the nobility or aristocracy … Democrat was a label in and for political combat; and what that combat was directed against was aristocrats, or at the very least aristocracy’ (cited in Przeworski, 2009 , p. 283). Sieyès thus mounted an exemplary ‘representative claim’—in Laclau and Mouffe’s terminology, he launched a hegemonic bid. This new form of conflict between classes or groups brought about modern democracy as we know it.

This is what binds Sieyès to Laclau and Mouffe. As Lasse Thomassen has argued, ‘the hegemonic relation is essentially a relation of representation, where the representation is not the representation of an original presence but what brings about the represented—in short, a relation of articulation’ ( 2005 , p. 106, cited in Disch, p. 123). As is well known, Laclau and Mouffe do not use hegemony in its everyday sense of reducing politics to a struggle for domination between opposing political forces (Howarth, 2004 , p. 256, cited at p. 124). Rather, hegemony names the battle whereby political representatives (elected and unelected, formal and informal) ‘compete to activate new social divisions, provoke unaccustomed conflicts, and engage disaffected people in unexpected alliances—all with the aim of taking power’ (pp. 124, 125).

This is the crux for Laclau and Mouffe as well as for Disch. These processes involve antagonism not in the sense of disagreement, conflict, or unending hostility but as resistance in a social relationship that had previously reached equilibrium generated by a ‘confrontation between groups’ (Laclau, 1990 , p. 6, cited in Disch, p. 130). As Disch shows, Laclau and Mouffe describe a social field both unlike the mid-twentieth century pluralists’ complex terrain of competing social groups and the reduction to dichotomous class struggle wbich Marx hoped for (and the same can be said for the renewed plebian/elite divide espoused by contemporary left neo-Machiavellians). ‘Worker’, ‘woman’, ‘rural people, ‘Black’, ‘male’ or ‘female’: even as these categories seem to mark self-evidently different groups, Laclau and Mouffe argue that it is political division which has made them so, not demographic characteristics and certainly not essential properties. ‘Economic or historical logics do not create political actors… Representatives do more than stand for the interests of groups populated by “Black”, “White”, “rural”, etc., they constitute those groups by cutting divisions into the “irreducible plurality of the social”‘ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985 , p. 139, cited in Disch, pp. 130, 131). This is then linked to a process of creating alliances that are not formed between pre-constituted groups whose interests and identities coincide but by what Laclau and Mouffe call ‘articulation’: the creation of a graft or link from one struggle to the next by asserting an ‘equivalence’ that alters what they identify and what they might fight for (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985 , pp. 23, 63, cited in Disch, p. 131). Disch lists how a wide range of feminisms have articulated with arguments around biological essentialism and ‘separate spheres’ at one extreme to Marxism at the other. Like Laclau and Mouffe, she lauds rights as having had an ‘irradiating’ effect on many struggle-movements in the twentieth century, from Black people’s struggles for civil and political rights, to feminist struggles for reproductive and economic rights, to struggles by gay, lesbian and transgender persons. Yet, like Laclau and Mouffe, she notes that rights have worked both ways, as a ‘subversive power’ which serves emancipatory and not-so-emancipatory ends alike. In fact, ‘the neoliberal Right seized that subversive power to as great or greater effect than had the radical democratic Left’ (p. 132).

Even if we grant Disch the deserts of her mobilization account of representation, it remains hard to see how processes of forging cleavages work in practice towards goals of freedom and equality that are so central to her and others’ accounts of the progressive role of democratic representation. She claims that ‘Political representatives in democratic societies—elected officials, social movements, opinion shapers, and advocates of all kinds—do not represent in the typical substitutionist, mimetic understanding of the term. They engage in articulation, the stitching together of collectivities or groups by way of a “metaphorical transposition” of one struggle to another’ (p. 132). Having made this claim, the example she then mobilizes—the long-term detrimental effects of the triumph of free-labor republicanism arguments over labor-movement antislavery positions in the struggle to abolish slavery in the United States (leaving us the legacy of equating freedom with contract and the ‘right to work’ and the resultant decimation of unions)—is a perfect example of this problem. Both discourses claimed to be freedom enhancing, but the one that was ultimately successful used the language of rights and has had deleterious effects on worker power. Given Disch’s view of the dynamics of representation, how can she be sure the outcomes she supports will be progressive? If, as she argues, ‘[p]references form and group identifications take shape in response to cues and appeals from political parties, from opinion-shapers, from advocacy organizations, for candidates and office-holders—and more’ (p. 137), how can she be certain that cleavage and conflict will lead to increased freedom rather than apathy, elite domination, and waning political agency for the least powerful? She admits that she cannot: ‘[t]o believe in the power and possibility of countermobilization among sporadically inattentive people—people like myself, who follow more cues than we give— that comes down to faith’ (p. 140).

I want to suggest that we can ask more of our representatives by sticking faithfully to a more performative account of representation and avoiding the strict claims-making structure proposed by Disch and other constructivists. There are two related problems with these kinds of constructivist accounts, which are inherent in how representation is conceived. First, everything seems, ultimately, to depend on representatives’ capacities (and interests) to mobilize us ordinary citizens in the right directions, or at least create enough conflict for us to identify alternatives, and then claim that it is the representatives themselves that take us in these new directions. Constructivist accounts that frame representation as dependent on claims-making seem with one hand to provide hope for the role and importance of our individual and group agency in democratic politics and then to take away this agency with the other. The representative (as opposed to the represented) ends up with most of the agency. Second, what of the older, important idea that representatives also represent the state? And what of the role of parties in the representative dynamic defended by Disch? It is striking that so little is said about the role of parties, given their presence and power in representative democracies. Can the state or political party be said to be a constituency in a way analogous to individuals and groups? This is not obviously the case, at least not without significant modification of the constructivists’ view. And what of those without voice or representation? Think of the Black residents in apartheid South Africa: the reason the fight took the form it did (primarily for civil and political rights) was due to the very fact that they had no voice or representation under apartheid. To think that change came about primarily because representatives created the cleavages and groups necessary for change is to miss the obvious brute fact that the de-, under-, and mis-represented groups could only be seen or heard (at least) initially by laying their bodies and lives on the line. That’s not to say that representation did not exist at all but that in certain circumstances it may not be enough.

Some may be tempted to think that the problem lies in a lack of normative guidance—that Disch’s view is too empirically grounded and insufficiently normative. I disagree. In fact, I think the empirical, real-world grounding is its major strength. The problem is not a lack of normative guidance but a lack of positive view of how to build into the account institutions that enable two seemingly irreconcilable things: more independence for representatives to create cleavages, groups, needs, interests and conflict; and more direct means for residents to judge and critique the performance and judgments of their representatives in terms of their needs and interests. This does not have to bring us back to pointing fingers at (in)competence amongst the ruled (or rulers) or to the idea that we are rooted within the various groups that make up our shared lives together.

Contrary to the framing offered by Disch, we can view representation through a constructivist lens and offer positive ideas and proposals about how to maintain and revivify institutions that enable the kind of political judgment necessary for effective representation, resistance, solidarity, inclusion and emancipation. We can constantly destabilize the institutional fabric of our democracies. To see how, we need to keep two goals front and center: residents and citizens must have control over their representatives who are determining their needs and interests and those of the state, alongside other formative institutions and practices; and they must be constrained sufficiently to give representatives the independence they need to make their own judgements regarding these needs and interests. Elsewhere (Hamilton, 2014 , pp. 133, 153, 192–205) I detail how these (often) partisan political institutions can be justified and sustained to the good of representative democracy. Here I can only note that the reason they can is that, like Disch’s account, with a little more emphasis on positive institution-building in line with an aesthetic view of representation, they help to break down the very common, yet unhelpful distinction in political thinking between ‘judgement’ and ‘opinion’.

If we escape both poles of thinking about representation—that representation is either about completely independent judgement or the direct transmission of opinion—either by means of Disch’s elegant constructivist account or an aesthetic view, it is possible to see that judgement becomes central at two levels of representation: acquiring and assessing the relevant factual information regarding existing needs and interests (which takes place via representatives and constituents); and the process of representing and evaluating needs, interest, and institutions (which leads to enhanced judgements amongst both rulers and ruled) (Hamilton, 2009 ). We thereby retain all the constructivist insights and keep representation material, grounded in the things that matter (involving representation): needs and interests.

Lawrence Hamilton

Representation and political strategy

Despite being embroiled in legal trouble, and despite his continuous lies, Donald Trump is leading the field of candidates for the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election. One commentator explained Trump’s success as follows:

Give Trump this: he doesn’t necessarily accept public opinion as it is but tries to shape it. Although there’d be widespread Republican doubts about the 2020 election no matter what he said, the belief that it was stolen wouldn’t be as deep and pervasive without his persistent (and deceptive) advocacy. He’s changed the landscape in his favor, and his opponents simply accept it at their peril. (Lowry, 2023 )

I would like to suggest that what this commentator proposes as an explanation for Trump’s success can be extended to all representative politics. When Trump claims to represent the real America, he does not mimic or reflect a real America out there but constructs it. He does not take public opinion as given, but shapes it. He makes a MAGA constituency by mobilizing interests and identities.

I take Making Constituencies to be making just this point: that representatives’ claims to represent their constituencies simultaneously construct—i.e. make—those constituencies. Moreover, (political) representation works insofar as it performatively constitutes what it claims to represent. Arguing this, Disch places herself in the so-called constructivist turn in the political theory of representation (Disch et al., 2019 ) by drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe ( 1985 ), among many others.

Populism is a discourse that claims to represent an entity that it simultaneously constitutes: the people. The people is an effect of populist discourse. Populism is the clearest expression of this performative aspect of representation and, for Laclau ( 2005 ), of politics in general: politics is about the construction of collective identities through their representation. Populism constructs a people, although the collective identity can have other names. The constructivist conception of representation shows, however, that it is not only populism that constructs identities and subjectivities: socialism constructs the working class as a revolutionary subject; liberalism constructs individual citizens and consumers as rights-bearers; and so on. In short, the performative aspect of populist representation is a general characteristic of representation.

Populism is the clearest expression of another general aspect of politics: antagonism. A populist discourse divides society in two, most obviously the people against the oligarchy. Populism divides, and it divides in such a way that the populist stands on the side of the (silent or not) majority. Populism is, therefore, a way to construct majorities.

Even though Disch draws on Laclau and Mouffe for her argument about the performative character of representation, she does not mention populism in her book. Trump is mentioned only three times (pp. 138, 140, 181 n. 42). And yet, my claim is that Trump allows us to learn something important, and general, about representation and politics. In one of the places Disch mentions Trump, she refers to him as an example of a ‘“Frankenstein” hybrid’ and a ‘monstrous hybrid’ (p. 140). She writes:

I wrote this book as a realist who has faith in mass democracy. My realism compels me to acknowledge the monstrous hybrids as real. They are not mangled versions of the American Dream but products of exclusions and entitlements that are built into its basic premises. My realism also counsels me that the democrat’s job is not to denounce any of democracy’s creatures but to take part in mobilizing counterforces against the ones I oppose. To believe in the power and possibility of countermobilization among sporadically inattentive people—people like myself, who follow more cues than we give— that comes down to faith. (p. 140)

This quote forcefully communicates the dilemma in which we find ourselves in the face of Trump and other monstrous hybrids: if representative politics is performative, (how) can we ensure that it is also democratic? Disch does not develop an answer in reference to populism, but I would like to do so here in order to cast more light on the dilemma.

Representation is mobilization and countermobilization. This is the terrain of politics. Politics is about constructing majorities, as Republicans from Nixon to Reagan did when they claimed to represent the silent majority. Those majorities may then be represented electorally and gradually become sedimented through policy. Thatcherism constructed a new majority at the end of the 1970s by mobilizing hardworking individuals, and Thatcherite policies then sedimented this majority, for instance by selling off council housing and thereby privatizing and individualizing how people thought about and ‘practiced’ housing (Hall, 1990 ). Strictly speaking, there is only countermobilization: we always find ourselves in a terrain where identities are already mobilized in some way. Trump’s claim about the stolen election amplifies existing claims about the election being stolen, but he is also mobilizing those claims in new ways. That terrain of already mobilized identities may be more or less dislocated and, therefore, open to countermobilization. Following Laclau and Mouffe, Disch refers to this as the ‘unfixity’ of identities that opens the social field as a plurality—and pluralization—of identities (pp. 9, 10; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985 , p. 85). To say that countermobilization always takes place in a (partly) mobilized terrain is also to say that countermobilization starts from this already (partly) mobilized terrain.

The danger for a progressive political project is to take that terrain as given rather than as something to be changed through mobilization. New Labour mobilized new constituencies from the mid-1990s onwards, and they did so in contrast to Thatcherism, for instance around sexuality and race. As such, they mobilized a new Britain (as Cool Britannia, for example). But New Labour also treated as given the Thatcherite majority around economic policy, so the new Britain was still a Britain of individuals who thought of social problems as individual problems. The realism of New Labour was to take certain things as given that were, in fact, the result of contingent hegemonic struggles. Disch proposes that we be realistic about how hegemonic struggles shape what we take to be real.

Countermobilization may consist in claiming to represent the ‘real’ interests of a constituency. We often find this in critiques of populists like Trump that they do not represent the real interests of working-class Americans. The point of the constructivist conception of representation is that real interests are real interests insofar as they have been represented and constructed as such. In other words, any representative claim may be a claim to represent something already there—the silent, moral majority, for instance—but we should treat that as a constative speech act that functions simultaneously as a performative speech act. This performative speech act only functions insofar as it appears as a constative claim to represent a state of affairs in the world. This does not mean that representations are not real. Insofar as they are successful, representations have real effects. For instance, the circulation of racist representations of Black Americans makes it more dangerous to be a young, Black male, because people act on those representations. I take this to be at the heart of Disch’s realism—that we shift focus from the individual representation to the institutions, practices, and discourses that generate certain kinds of representations: ‘critics and even friends of mass democracy … must focus on the systemic conditions for public-opinion and judgment-formation, rather than on the truth or falsehood of individual beliefs’ (p. 105).

The question, then, is what kinds of constituencies institutions mobilize. For instance, what constituencies are mobilized by different electoral systems? First-past-the-post systems may tend to mobilize identification with only two parties, sedimenting a two-party system over time. In such a system, what happens when competitive third-party candidates emerge? And what are the kinds of tweaks to such an electoral system that may break the polarization of constituencies into, for instance, ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’? Does Ranked Choice Voting, as practiced in Alaska, and in more and more places across the United States, mobilize less polarizing and more moderate constituencies (Jacobs, 2022 )? Does Ranked Choice Voting work against populists who divide society into two antagonistic camps? Likewise, does electoral fusion mobilize less or more polarized constituencies? Electoral fusion may help articulate a chain of equivalence among otherwise different parties—for instance, the Democratic Party and the Populist Party in the 1890s—thus fostering the division of the electoral field into two opposed camps. (While electoral fusion has largely disappeared from the American electoral system, one of the latest beneficiaries of electoral fusion was one Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election when he appeared on the ballot for both the Republican Party and the far-right American Independent Party in California.) But it may equally be that electoral fusion (as well as Ranked Choice Voting) challenge voters’ self-identifications, thus pluralizing the social field and opening the possibility for new constituencies to be articulated.

The discussion as to how an electoral system mobilizes polarized constituencies is relevant in the context of Disch’s view that, ‘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’ (p. 2). I take Disch to be identifying polarization as a threat in two respects. First, polarization is a threat to democracy insofar as opposing camps are taken as pre-given to politics, rather than the result of power relations sedimented in American political institutions. This much follows from her mobilization-conception of representation: we should focus on the source of polarized constituencies, and that source lies in the institutional make-up rather than in some primordial, pre-political constituencies.

Second, there is a critique here, and in the rest of her book, of the polarized shape of contemporary American politics. Disch is clear that politics involves conflict and exclusion: ‘To analyze constituency effects is to analyze the politics of conflict. It is to regard group mobilization as an index of the institutional biases that organize some groups into and others out of politics, rather than as the expression of a common interest or affinity’ (p. 33). This is particularly interesting in the context of Laclau and Mouffe, on whom Disch draws, and who theorize politics as inherently antagonistic. There are two things at stake here, in Disch and in Laclau and Mouffe. The first is how we understand political conflict: antagonism, cleavage, difference, division, line-drawing, polarization, and so on. The second is the status of antagonism as a form of politics that divides society in two opposing camps.

In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , Laclau and Mouffe ( 1985 , pp. 122–127) use the term antagonism in two ways. First, they refer to the limit of objectivity or, in terms of the discussion here, the limits of representation. Second, they use it in the sense of a frontier between two opposed camps, a Schmittian friend/enemy relationship where the Other is the obstacle that prevents me from realizing my identity. It should be clear, however, that there is a tension between these two meanings of antagonism: if antagonism is the limit to representation, it cannot be represented as an enemy. This is why Laclau later conceptualized the limit of representation in terms of, first, dislocation and, later, heterogeneity (Thomassen, 2005 ). More important for my discussion here is how Laclau and Mouffe theorize antagonism as an antagonistic frontier. In Laclau, the antagonistic frontier becomes associated with populist discourse, which divides the social into two camps, and where each camp consists of a chain of equivalence among otherwise different constituencies. For instance, in Trump’s discourse, real Americans are opposed to a chain of equivalence of, among others, liberal elites, radical Democrats, weak Republicans, Muslims, and China. Mouffe’s agonistic democracy is organized around a we/they relationship, but importantly this relationship should not be one between enemies but between adversaries: ‘The challenge for democracy, therefore, is to establish the we/they distinction, which is constitutive of politics, in a way that is compatible with the recognition of pluralism’ (Mouffe, 2022 , p. 28).

I take Disch to be arguing something similar. If politics is about mobilizing constituencies, then democratic politics is about the struggle between different representations. In Laclau and Mouffe’s terms, democracy is a struggle for hegemony. However, it is important that this hegemonic struggle takes a democratic form. Disch points to a distinction Laclau and Mouffe draw between democratic and popular antagonisms in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (pp. 129, 130; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985 , pp. 131, 132, 137). Democratic antagonisms are associated with plurality, that is, with the unfixity of identities; popular antagonisms are those antagonisms which Laclau later refers to as populist antagonisms.

Disch concludes that in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , ‘dichotomous division moves from being the very definition of antagonism to being strategically subordinate to democratic antagonism’ (p. 130). Disch is correct to identify this dichotomy between democratic and popular antagonisms and the priority of the former over the latter. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was written as an attempt to theorize the implications for the Marxist view, that history tends towards a single antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, of the emergence of a plurality of antagonisms around gender, race, the environment, and so on. Laclau and Mouffe’s point was that the antagonism between workers and capitalists—that is, class—was only one possible antagonism among many. Moreover, insofar as the pluralization of antagonisms shows the unfixity, or contingency, of identities, there is no hegemonic struggle—democratic or popular—without this pluralization of antagonisms. Mouffe’s theory of agonistic democracy is a continuation of these concerns: it is an attempt to theorize how democratic hegemonic struggle is possible, and how we should think of the democratic institutions that facilitate these struggles. At the same time, Laclau’s ( 2005 ) theory of populism—and, to a lesser degree, Mouffe’s ( 2018 , 2022 ) recent work on Left populism—connects popular antagonisms to emancipatory rupture. Laclau is closer to the Marxist imaginary that connects emancipation to an antagonistic struggle between two opposed camps. Indeed, while Hegemony and Socialist Strategy challenges the idea that society can be defined in its totality by a single antagonism, Laclau’s On Populist Reason tends to take the populist antagonism between people and oligarchy as somehow primordial (Laclau, 2005 ).

However, I would add to Disch’s reading of Laclau and Mouffe that we do not need to accept their dichotomy between democratic and popular antagonisms, even on their own premises. I read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy as identifying two basic logics of difference and equivalence, respectively, (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985 , pp. 127–134). Those logics intersect and interrupt one another, and this is how we should understand the contingency (plurality, unfixity, non-closure) of the social. But if that is the case, then, as Laclau and Mouffe ( 1985 , p. 129) themselves point out, there are no purely democratic or popular struggles; difference is always inscribed (to some extent) in equivalence, and equivalence is always interrupted (to some extent) by difference. We then have a continuum with difference at one end and equivalence at the other, but with the caveat that we always find ourselves between the two ends of the continuum. This allows a finer differentiation of forms of political conflict, ranging from more to less antagonistic.

If we think of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony in this way, we can, as Disch does, characterize their prioritization of democratic antagonisms as ‘strategic’: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy should be read as a deconstructive genealogy of how Marxists came to think of emancipation as an antagonistic struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as two homogeneous and opposed camps. It also makes sense for Mouffe ( 2018 , 2022 ) to theorize democracy in agonistic terms and propose a form of agonistic Left populism, if we remember that she is writing about liberal democratic states in western Europe. It makes sense for Laclau to stress the popular antagonisms in the context of Latin American oligarchic systems that have excluded large parts of the popular classes from political representation (Laclau, 2005 ). In short, it makes sense to think of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , of Mouffe’s writings on agonistic democracy and Left populism, and of Laclau’s writings on populism, in terms of strategy . By insisting on the tension between difference and equivalence, their theory of hegemony opens up the possibility of thinking of political interventions in terms of strategy rather than thinking of politics as a layer of mimetic representation of underlying social forces. There are no guarantees that this will pay off, let alone that the result will be progressive. For that reason, as Disch notes, politics is also a matter of faith.

We often think of populism as rhetorical deception and distortion of reality. Trump would certainly be a case in point. The other side of this association of populism with deception and distortion is a view of the masses as gullible, as inattentive and irrational, who simply follow populist leaders’ cues. Disch challenges this view. On her constructivist conception of representation, we should not judge political representation according to how well it represents a representation-independent reality, but according to how it mobilizes a reality. On this view of representation, we should not accept public opinion as it has been shaped by our political opponents but shape it ourselves. That is (political) representation: a practice that brings into being what it claims is reality. Disch urges us to accept this as the challenge of normal, mass democracy—a challenge for ordinary democrats who, even if they be professors of political science and local council members, let themselves be mobilized more than they themselves mobilize.

Lasse Thomassen

Representation: performative, perhaps democratic?

Lisa Disch’s Making Constituencies is imbued with a sense of urgency. The scenario Disch draws is dystopian if familiar: a democracy depleted of its capacity to make the world otherwise. Once responsible for realizing democracy’s creative potential, representation finds itself stiffened, sterile, trapped. Having developed into a crystallizing force, it turns everything it touches into a monolith.

The resulting political landscape finds itself represented in the two-color map of the United States, where red and blue uneasily share the same geographic space. This map is the foil against which Disch advances her own realistic utopia: a world in which representation functions creatively, generatively, and dynamically, as a power capable of bringing forth new social and political identities by forging unsuspected, unthinkable, perhaps even hitherto impermissible alliances (pp. 15, 124).

To tap into the power of representation, one needs to reconceptualize it. The theory of representation as mobilization laid out in Making Constituencies draws and expands on arguments Disch has been honing for over a decade now. Ever since the publication of her groundbreaking 2011 article, ‘Toward a Mobilization Conception of Democratic Representation’, Disch has been a leading proponent of constructivist approaches to political representation.

The turn to constructivism has been responsible for moving representation from the margins to the heart of democratic theory. Thanks to constructivists’ removal of the ‘bedrock norm’ (Disch, 2011 ) upon which previously unidirectional views of representation were founded, constituencies, their interests, their preferences, their identities have re-emerged as ‘things’ called into being by acts of representation rather than as their basis. This has recast the importance of representation for democracy. As Disch reminds us in her new book, the opposite of representation is neither participation nor mobilization. Being the catalyst (or inhibitor) of both, representation is responsible for political organization, engagement, and movement. It is representation, therefore, that brings ‘some groups into and others out of politics’ (p. 33).

The culmination of Disch’s work on the democratically generative power of representation, Making Constituencies brings out the major ‘strands’ of which her distinctive theoretical contribution is woven: notably, radical democratic theory, political realism, constructivist sociological theory, and empirical political science. Accordingly, the book brings these seemingly disparate influences together into a theoretically differentiated and politically engaged proposal.

While there is undoubted continuity in the book, there is also novelty in the framing of the argument. Making Constituencies is an attempt to make sense of and intervene in the current predicament of democracy in America. The book seeks to address the dangers presented by the rise of partisan sorting, political polarization, and the pursuant sedimentation of political identities. That social divisions between American partisans have grown exponentially in recent years seems to be an established fact of American politics. Behind every fact there is a causal structure to be explored, however. The normal assumption is that American voters are sorting themselves into the Democratic or Republican parties because they are matching their issue preferences more correctly than they used to. But this is the premise that Disch sets herself to upturn. Political representation, she contends, is not tracking social division: it is making it.

Sorting is therefore the bête noire of Making Constituencies . This is not because sorting does not make or mobilize constituencies; it does. The problem for Disch is that it makes and mobilizes them the wrong way. In her view, sorting constitutes a counterproductive type of mobilization whereby political elites construct and entrench the radically opposed, enclave-like constituencies they claim to (only) represent. Consequently, those same elites, together with their core supporters, end up not just radically polarized but much further along in the sorting process than the general public. Despite this, once in power, they claim full control to advance their unrepresentative platforms. The outcome is a nation that effectively agrees on many things but that finds itself bitterly divided nonetheless.

In Disch’s assessment, sorting is a kind of tyranny of the minority: a system in which an extreme and motivated faction wields outsized power in the face of a majority lacking political expression. It also represents a tyranny of the social over the political. Sorting, Disch claims, is taking ‘modern democracy back to a kind of political Middle Ages’, in which ‘social position’ determines ‘political allegiance’, with no space left for the poietic or creative power of politics (p. 139). Sorting enlists a kind of ‘commonsense primordialism’ in order to produce it as a ‘constituency effect’ (Brubaker, 2004 , p. 10; Disch. ch. 2). The word ‘commonsense’ is important here: those representative claims more likely to be felicitous need to resonate cognitively, and naturalized ‘truths’—such as that of the priority (temporal and normative) of the social over the political—enjoy greater political traction than alternatives. Hence, the hold that the ‘bedrock’ model of representation continues to have on the public and on the scientific study of politics.

While I am sympathetic to many of Disch’s claims, including her emphasis on the creative and transformative dimensions of representative politics and the dangers of social reification, her stark division between the social and the political deserves further inspection. If anything, it seems to have become more marked in Making Constituencies , where the social is almost entirely subsumed under the political and becomes a kind of ‘blob’, to use Hanna Pitkin’s ( 2000 ) words, depleted of any significance.

The driving force behind the emptying of the social seems to be radical democracy. From radical democracy, Disch derives an understanding of politics as something capable of bringing out the groundlessness of social existence, its radical (but occluded) contingency, undecidability, and contestability. Like the radical democrats from whom she draws (namely, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau), Disch foregrounds the contingency of the social to affirm the political as a sphere of radical freedom. By conferring primacy on the political, Disch seeks to achieve three key desiderata. First, to foreground latent (and often systemic) exclusions and conflicts that never come to see the day. Second, to open the repressed potential of (representative) politics to surmount those exclusions and radically reshape the political landscape. Third, to forestall the closure of the political order by any hegemonic imposition claiming to represent it. While I endorse all these desiderata, it seems to me questionable that they may ever be achieved if the encumbrances of social existence are not given due consideration, as sometimes seems to happen in the book. These encumbrances are multiple and range from the restructuring of social relations under globalized capital to the traction of collective identities historically entrenched as ‘things’ conferring guarantees of belonging and entitlement.

Even if I agree with Disch that representation comes out wrongly conceived and practically hamstrung where tied to (purportedly) pre-existing social dynamics, the discounting of the latter can be equally problematic. Lois McNay ( 2014 ) rightly characterizes the attendant problem as one of ‘social weightlessness’. Following radical democrats in seeing all interests and identities as ‘contingent and precarious articulations’ (Mouffe, 1992 , pp. 236, 237) makes interests and identities readily available for performative configuration and reconfiguration. Yet, when those interests and identities are seen as ‘embodied power relations’ (which they also are), they acquire ‘a phenomenal depth and durability that, whilst not inevitable, is not necessarily that easily amenable to agonist reconfiguration’ (McNay, 2013 , p. 72). The depth and durability of interests and identities often come in the way of the felicity of mobilization via representation along Disch’s solidaristic and progressive lines. I will offer an example of this later, when discussing Brexit’s nostalgia for empire and white entitlement to the spoils of colonialism. But first I want to highlight a few areas of agreement.

Disch regards sorting as political through and through, and is convinced that the recognition of its political character is critical for its undoing. She identifies a worrying pattern in the discussion of the phenomenon: most notably, the tendency to blame sorting not on elites, but on misinformation, disinformation, or the ignorance of voters. This shifting of attention from sorting to voter competence, in her view, is not just distractive, but positively dangerous.

Disch is right to be suspicious of the return of ‘competence’ arguments. Arguments for discrimination on grounds of competence have been historically responsible for keeping women, racialized, and minoritized individuals, as well as workers, at the gates of democracy. They have thus been, and still are, a tool of disenfranchisement, deployed by elites who fear that their status and power could be diminished by the entry of newcomers or (current) remainders into politics. The idea of having tests for allocating the franchise, and of having elites determining what those tests might be, is a nineteenth-century idea which has been abandoned for very good reasons. It eludes the democratic principle that all those subjected to political decisions should have a say on them—or, at the very least, a say on who makes them. It flies in the face of the democratic commitment to treating every adult individual as the best judge of their interests and thus as equally competent to participate in decision-making.

More than anything else, however, the competence argument deflects attention from systemic problems affecting representative democracies. Yet the main question one must ask, as Disch rightly points out, is ‘not what citizens bring to politics but what the institutions and processes of mass democracy bring out in them’ (p. 7). While reorientation to institutions and processes, and what they (may) bring out in citizens, is of prime importance, Disch’s focus on ‘how representatives bid for their attention or how political institutions shape and constrain those bids’ remains too one-directional and ‘bid-centric’, having relatively little to say about what in those bids and their dynamics empowers citizens as agents (p. 8). As multiple examples in Making Constituencies show, one can win attention and secure engagement without empowering citizens as bearers of judgement (often quite the opposite) or, more broadly, as people engaging in democratic agency in a meaningful fashion. As Pitkin stressed, agency of the represented is a key element of a non-elitist theory of (representative) democracy; it is also something that democratic representation needs to be able to nurture. Hence there is a vital question about mobilization—understood as a form of marshalling and organizing for use or action—that remains partly unanswered in Disch’s book: namely, under what conditions does mobilization via representation turn the represented into active participants in public life, so that whatever happens via representation happens also meaningfully through them? To address this question, it would seem necessary to look not just into social movements, as Disch does, but also political parties. For however much one may disagree with their practices of representation, parties remain a main, if not the main agent of partisan association, and most value polarization amongst sorted partisans occurs through them. However, parties, party reform, and institutional incentives to the reconfiguration of parties’ behavior, make (almost) no appearance in the book.

Equally, the book’s emphasis on representation as the representation of conflict seems unfit to address the problem of partisan-ideological sorting as an impediment to negotiated solutions and political compromise. Here, too, as Disch points out, one finds the causal arrow reversed. We have become accustomed to thinking that gridlock and stalemate are unfortunate by-products of the electorate’s demand for party intransigency. But this seems to be yet another misrepresentation of what is really happening. More than just seeking ideological representation, citizens seem to care about the processes by which disagreements are settled, even when reaching a compromise may come at the cost of partisan goals and policy objectives (Wolak, 2020 ). How might the persistence of this ‘care’ be explained, despite the prevalence of sorting? Answering this question seems (again) to require giving the social its due: normative values implied in compromise processes may be primarily socialized in ways that are independent of politics, though they can undoubtedly be negatively affected by it (Wolak, 2020 ). Hence the question: how can preferences about how politics should be practiced be nurtured also by and within the representative system? If political competition drives out-group distrust, how might the breakdown of trust amongst elites, responsible for fueling mistrust amongst citizens, be best acted upon institutionally?

Under conditions of partisan sorting, people are induced in making large, systematic errors when judging the extent to which partisans belong to party-stereotypical groups (e.g. the percentage of Republicans earning over $250,000 per year) or where opposing-party supporters stand on issues (namely, deeming their positions more extreme than they effectively are; see Ahler & Sood, 2018 ). These misperceptions threaten to warp public opinion.

The provision of conditions for the exercise of judgment is a requirement of any well-functioning representative system. To cite Kelsen, ‘among those who in fact exercise their political rights by participating in government, one would have to differentiate between the mindless masses who follow the lead of others and those few who—in accordance with the idea of democracy—decisively influence the governmental process based on independent judgment’ (Kelsen, 2013 , p. 38). Independent judgment, however, is far from an independent reality. It is something constituted within processes of representation and contestation. These processes mediate judgement and include the images of parties popularized by mass media as well as party associations constructed and mobilized in inter-party competition.

As Disch rightly stresses, citizens do not come to interests or preferences directly; it is through representation that beliefs or judgments about what is in their interest are formed. For this very reason, Disch ( 2011 ) in the past showed a keen interest in how procedures, institutions, and practices of representative democracy might elicit, inform, and test judgments about interests and preferences. But her earlier emphasis on ‘reflexivity’ as the normative criterion of legitimacy of representative systems, and as that which may protect citizens from elite manipulation (of the ‘bad’ kind) by enabling their judgment, takes a back seat in Making Constituencies.

This may be explained by the fact that Disch is seeking to distance herself from epistocrats and their definition of democratic competence as voters’ capacity to make informed judgments regarding their own interests and those of society as a whole (Disch, 2021 , p. 163, n. 1.) Yet there was never a risk of confusion, since Disch always placed reflexivity at the systemic rather than individual level: robust conditions of system reflexivity underpin citizens’ capacity to exercise judgment over competing representative claims seeking to control the terms of their political subjectification (Disch, 2011 ). The problem with ‘reflexivity’ losing its centrality in Disch’s argument is threefold. First, it leaves her account of representation too centered on what representatives do (and what they do to the represented), and pays little attention to the activities of the represented or how they may be best supported so that their judgment does not end up ‘impoverished’ (p.100). Second, while this ‘support’ is placed at the level of the representative system, we get little specification of what in it (what institutions, procedures, and/or practices) may enable citizens to critically engage with representative claims, and how. Third, the lack of (critical) engagement with the reflexivity criterion perpetuates a blind spot in respect of recognizing risks to democracy that go beyond the lack of systemic reflexivity.

One such risk comes from deeply entrenched social-cultural formations operating below the threshold of political agendas and competing framings of representative claims. For Disch ( 2011 ), reflexivity is primarily ensured by the representative system’s capacity to encourage competition and contestation. But if social imaginaries have become deeply settled, how can counter-hegemonic agency ever emerge, and what chances are there that it resonates with the public? In some passages of Making Constituencies , there is a sense that counter-hegemonic agency can occur almost ex nihilo through the operations of representation and counter-representation, as the social is presented as radically contingent and infinitely malleable. However, as it has been rightly noted, ‘representation can [itself] nurture social ignorance, despite the availability of ample opportunities for political contestation and alternative opinion formation’ (Mihai, 2022 , p. 962).

To speak of ‘social ignorance’ is not to bring the discussion back to the question of competence, understood as a matter of knowledge or true belief (although neither question is irrelevant to judgment or the conditions of its proper formation). ‘Social ignorance’ constitutes a specific form of ignorance, a ‘willful ignorance’ (Alcoff, 2007 , p. 39), reflected in the ‘social practice of legitimising epistemically problematic political imaginaries and the institutional systems they underpin’ (Mihai, 2022 , p.962) This kind of ignorance works by ‘naturaliz[ing] and dehistoriciz[ing] both the process and product of knowing, such that no political reflexivity or sociological analysis is thought to be required or even allowed’ (Alcoff, 2007 , p. 56). Where this kind of ignorance is the structural condition within and against which political representation operates, reflexivity falls inevitably short of securing the conditions under which the public may be able to judge and act otherwise. Take, for instance, the terms in which the debate on the 2016 referendum on Britain’s EU membership was waged. Disagreement between ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ hardly scratched the surface of the big unsaid: the subconscious imperial attitudes borne by ‘social ignorance’ about the legacy of British colonialism, including racism, which informed but were left broadly untouched by the campaign (Bell & Vucetic, 2019 ).

Chapter 4 of Making Constituencies draws on Goodin to advance a helpful reconceptualization of manipulation away from an intentionalist view, focusing on ‘the activities of anyone in particular’ toward the ‘relentless workings of systemic bias’ (Goodin, 1980 , p. 238). But the prophylactic advanced in that chapter—competing mobilization through ‘a dynamic interaction between frames and counterframes’ (p. 106)—does not offer an apt antidote to systemic biases, especially where they are sustained and reproduced by (often) unconsciously produced unknowledges. Social ignorance is structural, systemically produced and supported by everyday ignorance-practices. It amounts to an epistemic hiding of privilege, through an instituted imaginary that holds epistemic communities in place, complete with their conceptions of entitlement, and of hierarchical epistemic and social positioning (Medina, 2013 ). Counter-frames may sometimes be able to induce the kind of ‘epistemic friction’ necessary to disrupt social ignorance (Medina, 2013 ). But where social ignorance structures the very communicative setting in which competing mobilizations occur, epistemic friction may not happen as the competition may not reach into the structure that restrains and channels it (see Schaap, 2020 ).

In light of challenges like the one posed by social ignorance, Disch’s focus on taking the sting out of elite manipulation seems to miss the target. It is true that representative claims can enforce the practice of social ignorance without being ‘manipulative’ in the sense of spreading lies or falsehoods. However, Disch’s reframing of manipulation as something integral to representation dangerously overextends the concept and brings into relief some problems with her otherwise attractive proposal—namely, it exposes the normative deficit inherent in her radically constructivist view of representation as mobilization. What drives Disch’s book is a concern that citizens’ political identities have become sedimented, and this sedimentation is tethered to the fact that citizens have become too deeply divided in their perceptions of reality. These perceptions are elite-driven, but they become self-fulfilling. So here is the problem: partisan mobilization engaging the type of ‘cue taking’ Disch seems happy to bring under the category of ‘unproblematic manipulation’ has been found to be responsible for citizens’ living worlds apart and suspending disbelief about the portrayals of real-world conditions they are offered (e.g. Bisgaard & Slothuus, 2018 ). Disch’s attempt to separate sorting from manipulation is thus not entirely successful, which foregrounds her lack of normative resources to distinguish between democratically legitimate or illegitimate instances of representation, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sorting, empowering and disempowering mobilization. Hence, when ‘representation by misdirection’ (p. 100)—that is, representation seeking to draw attention away from unpopular policies and towards personality traits—is presented as a form of illegitimate representation, it is not at all clear what makes it illegitimate on Disch’s own terms. What is the normative standard driving its condemnation, and where is it coming from?

Making Constituencies is an engaging and stimulating book: lively, passionate, and contentious. It powerfully foregrounds the power of representation to create groups, to put them into a meaningful relationship with themselves (and others), and to mobilize them into political action. Unique in its integrative approach, it shows that an empirically informed political theory need not acquiesce in the status quo but can help us interrogate the actual and the possible in democratic representative politics.

Mónica Brito Vieira

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Political Representation

The concept of political representation is misleadingly simple: everyone seems to know what it is, yet few can agree on any particular definition. In fact, there is an extensive literature that offers many different definitions of this elusive concept. [Classic treatments of the concept of political representations within this literature include Pennock and Chapman 1968; Pitkin, 1967 and Schwartz, 1988.] Hanna Pitkin (1967) provides, perhaps, one of the most straightforward definitions: to represent is simply to “make present again.” On this definition, political representation is the activity of making citizens’ voices, opinions, and perspectives “present” in public policy making processes. Political representation occurs when political actors speak, advocate, symbolize, and act on the behalf of others in the political arena. In short, political representation is a kind of political assistance. This seemingly straightforward definition, however, is not adequate as it stands. For it leaves the concept of political representation underspecified. Indeed, as we will see, the concept of political representation has multiple and competing dimensions: our common understanding of political representation is one that contains different, and conflicting, conceptions of how political representatives should represent and so holds representatives to standards that are mutually incompatible. In leaving these dimensions underspecified, this definition fails to capture this paradoxical character of the concept.

This encyclopedia entry has three main goals. The first is to provide a general overview of the meaning of political representation, identifying the key components of this concept. The second is to highlight several important advances that have been made by the contemporary literature on political representation. These advances point to new forms of political representation, ones that are not limited to the relationship between formal representatives and their constituents. The third goal is to reveal several persistent problems with theories of political representation and thereby to propose some future areas of research.

1.1 Delegate vs. Trustee

1.2 pitkin’s four views of representation, 2. changing political realities and changing concepts of political representation, 3. contemporary advances, 4. future areas of study, a. general discussions of representation, b. arguments against representation, c. non-electoral forms of representation, d. representation and electoral design, e. representation and accountability, f. descriptive representation, other internet resources, related entries, 1. key components of political representation.

Political representation, on almost any account, will exhibit the following five components:

• some party that is representing (the representative, an organization, movement, state agency, etc.);
• some party that is being represented (the constituents, the clients, etc.);
• something that is being represented (opinions, perspectives, interests, discourses, etc.); and
• a setting within which the activity of representation is taking place (the political context).
• something that is being left out (the opinions, interests, and perspectives not voiced).

Theories of political representation often begin by specifying the terms for the first four components. For instance, democratic theorists often limit the types of representatives being discussed to formal representatives — that is, to representatives who hold elected offices. One reason that the concept of representation remains elusive is that theories of representation often apply only to particular kinds of political actors within a particular context. How individuals represent an electoral district is treated as distinct from how social movements, judicial bodies, or informal organizations represent. Consequently, it is unclear how different forms of representation relate to each other. Andrew Rehfeld (2006) has offered a general theory of representation which simply identifies representation by reference to a relevant audience accepting a person as its representative. One consequence of Rehfeld’s general approach to representation is that it allows for undemocratic cases of representation.

However, Rehfeld’s general theory of representation does not specify what representative do or should do in order to be recognized as a representative. And what exactly representatives do has been a hotly contested issue. In particular, a controversy has raged over whether representatives should act as delegates or trustees .

Historically, the theoretical literature on political representation has focused on whether representatives should act as delegates or as trustees . Representatives who are delegates simply follow the expressed preferences of their constituents. James Madison (1787–8) describes representative government as “the delegation of the government...to a small number of citizens elected by the rest.” Madison recognized that “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Consequently, Madison suggests having a diverse and large population as a way to decrease the problems with bad representation. In other words, the preferences of the represented can partially safeguard against the problems of faction.

In contrast, trustees are representatives who follow their own understanding of the best action to pursue. Edmund Burke (1790) is famous for arguing that

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interest each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole… You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament (115).

The delegate and the trustee conception of political representation place competing and contradictory demands on the behavior of representatives. [For a discussion of the similarities and differences between Madison’s and Burke’s conception of representation, see Pitkin 1967, 191–192.] Delegate conceptions of representation require representatives to follow their constituents’ preferences, while trustee conceptions require representatives to follow their own judgment about the proper course of action. Any adequate theory of representation must grapple with these contradictory demands.

Famously, Hanna Pitkin argues that theorists should not try to reconcile the paradoxical nature of the concept of representation. Rather, they should aim to preserve this paradox by recommending that citizens safeguard the autonomy of both the representative and of those being represented. The autonomy of the representative is preserved by allowing them to make decisions based on his or her understanding of the represented’s interests (the trustee conception of representation). The autonomy of those being represented is preserved by having the preferences of the represented influence evaluations of representatives (the delegate conception of representation). Representatives must act in ways that safeguard the capacity of the represented to authorize and to hold their representatives accountable and uphold the capacity of the representative to act independently of the wishes of the represented.

Objective interests are the key for determining whether the autonomy of representative and the autonomy of the represented have been breached. However, Pitkin never adequately specifies how we are to identify constituents’ objective interests. At points, she implies that constituents should have some say in what are their objective interests, but ultimately she merely shifts her focus away from this paradox to the recommendation that representatives should be evaluated on the basis of the reasons they give for disobeying the preferences of their constituents. For Pitkin, assessments about representatives will depend on the issue at hand and the political environment in which a representative acts. To understand the multiple and conflicting standards within the concept of representation is to reveal the futility of holding all representatives to some fixed set of guidelines. In this way, Pitkin concludes that standards for evaluating representatives defy generalizations. Moreover, individuals, especially democratic citizens, are likely to disagree deeply about what representatives should be doing.

Pitkin offers one of the most comprehensive discussions of the concept of political representation, attending to its contradictory character in her The Concept of Representation . This classic discussion of the concept of representation is one of the most influential and oft-cited works in the literature on political representation. (For a discussion of her influence, see Dovi 2016). Adopting a Wittgensteinian approach to language, Pitkin maintains that in order to understand the concept of political representation, one must consider the different ways in which the term is used. Each of these different uses of the term provides a different view of the concept. Pitkin compares the concept of representation to “ a rather complicated, convoluted, three–dimensional structure in the middle of a dark enclosure.” Political theorists provide “flash-bulb photographs of the structure taken from different angles” [1967, 10]. More specifically, political theorists have provided four main views of the concept of representation. Unfortunately, Pitkin never explains how these different views of political representation fit together. At times, she implies that the concept of representation is unified. At other times, she emphasizes the conflicts between these different views, e.g. how descriptive representation is opposed to accountability. Drawing on her flash-bulb metaphor, Pitkin argues that one must know the context in which the concept of representation is placed in order to determine its meaning. For Pitkin, the contemporary usage of the term “representation” can signficantly change its meaning.

For Pitkin, disagreements about representation can be partially reconciled by clarifying which view of representation is being invoked. Pitkin identifies at least four different views of representation: formalistic representation, descriptive representation, symbolic representation, and substantive representation. (For a brief description of each of these views, see chart below.) Each view provides a different approach for examining representation. The different views of representation can also provide different standards for assessing representatives. So disagreements about what representatives ought to be doing are aggravated by the fact that people adopt the wrong view of representation or misapply the standards of representation. Pitkin has in many ways set the terms of contemporary discussions about representation by providing this schematic overview of the concept of political representation.

1. Formalistic Representation : Brief Description . The institutional arrangements that precede and initiate representation. Formal representation has two dimensions: authorization and accountability. Main Research Question . What is the institutional position of a representative? Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . None. ( Authorization ): Brief Description . The means by which a representative obtains his or her standing, status, position or office. Main Research Questions . What is the process by which a representative gains power (e.g., elections) and what are the ways in which a representative can enforce his or her decisions? Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . No standards for assessing how well a representative behaves. One can merely assess whether a representative legitimately holds his or her position. pdf include--> ( Accountability ): Brief Description . The ability of constituents to punish their representative for failing to act in accordance with their wishes (e.g. voting an elected official out of office) or the responsiveness of the representative to the constituents. Main Research Question . What are the sanctioning mechanisms available to constituents? Is the representative responsive towards his or her constituents’ preferences? Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . No standards for assessing how well a representative behaves. One can merely determine whether a representative can be sanctioned or has been responsive.

Brief Description . The ways that a representative “stands for” the represented — that is, the meaning that a representative has for those being represented.

Main Research Question . What kind of response is invoked by the representative in those being represented?

Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . Representatives are assessed by the degree of acceptance that the representative has among the represented.

Brief Description . The extent to which a representative resembles those being represented.

Main Research Question . Does the representative look like, have common interests with, or share certain experiences with the represented?

Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . Assess the representative by the accuracy of the resemblance between the representative and the represented.

Brief Description . The activity of representatives—that is, the actions taken on behalf of, in the interest of, as an agent of, and as a substitute for the represented.

Main Research Question . Does the representative advance the policy preferences that serve the interests of the represented?

Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . Assess a representative by the extent to which policy outcomes advanced by a representative serve “the best interests” of their constituents.

One cannot overestimate the extent to which Pitkin has shaped contemporary understandings of political representation, especially among political scientists. For example, her claim that descriptive representation opposes accountability is often the starting point for contemporary discussions about whether marginalized groups need representatives from their groups.

Similarly, Pitkin’s conclusions about the paradoxical nature of political representation support the tendency among contemporary theorists and political scientists to focus on formal procedures of authorization and accountability (formalistic representation). In particular, there has been a lot of theoretical attention paid to the proper design of representative institutions (e.g. Amy 1996; Barber, 2001; Christiano 1996; Guinier 1994). This focus is certainly understandable, since one way to resolve the disputes about what representatives should be doing is to “let the people decide.” In other words, establishing fair procedures for reconciling conflicts provides democratic citizens one way to settle conflicts about the proper behavior of representatives. In this way, theoretical discussions of political representation tend to depict political representation as primarily a principal-agent relationship. The emphasis on elections also explains why discussions about the concept of political representation frequently collapse into discussions of democracy. Political representation is understood as a way of 1) establishing the legitimacy of democratic institutions and 2) creating institutional incentives for governments to be responsive to citizens.

David Plotke (1997) has noted that this emphasis on mechanisms of authorization and accountability was especially useful in the context of the Cold War. For this understanding of political representation (specifically, its demarcation from participatory democracy) was useful for distinguishing Western democracies from Communist countries. Those political systems that held competitive elections were considered to be democratic (Schumpeter 1976). Plotke questions whether such a distinction continues to be useful. Plotke recommends that we broaden the scope of our understanding of political representation to encompass interest representation and thereby return to debating what is the proper activity of representatives. Plotke’s insight into why traditional understandings of political representation resonated prior to the end of the Cold War suggests that modern understandings of political representation are to some extent contingent on political realities. For this reason, those who attempt to define political representation should recognize how changing political realities can affect contemporary understandings of political representation. Again, following Pitkin, ideas about political representation appear contingent on existing political practices of representation. Our understandings of representation are inextricably shaped by the manner in which people are currently being represented. For an informative discussion of the history of representation, see Monica Brito Vieira and David Runican’s Representation .

As mentioned earlier, theoretical discussions of political representation have focused mainly on the formal procedures of authorization and accountability within nation states, that is, on what Pitkin called formalistic representation. However, such a focus is no longer satisfactory due to international and domestic political transformations. [For an extensive discussion of international and domestic transformations, see Mark Warren and Dario Castioglione (2004).] Increasingly international, transnational and non-governmental actors play an important role in advancing public policies on behalf of democratic citizens—that is, acting as representatives for those citizens. Such actors “speak for,” “act for” and can even “stand for” individuals within a nation-state. It is no longer desirable to limit one’s understanding of political representation to elected officials within the nation-state. After all, increasingly state “contract out” important responsibilities to non-state actors, e.g. environmental regulation. As a result, elected officials do not necessarily possess “the capacity to act,” the capacity that Pitkin uses to identify who is a representative. So, as the powers of nation-state have been disseminated to international and transnational actors, elected representatives are not necessarily the agents who determine how policies are implemented. Given these changes, the traditional focus of political representation, that is, on elections within nation-states, is insufficient for understanding how public policies are being made and implemented. The complexity of modern representative processes and the multiple locations of political power suggest that contemporary notions of accountability are inadequate. Grant and Keohane (2005) have recently updated notions of accountability, suggesting that the scope of political representation needs to be expanded in order to reflect contemporary realities in the international arena. Michael Saward (2009) has proposed an innovative type of criteria that should be used for evaluating non-elective representative claims. John Dryzek and Simon Niemayer (2008) has proposed an alternative conception of representation, what he calls discursive representation, to reflect the fact that transnational actors represent discourses, not real people. By discourses, they mean “a set of categories and concepts embodying specific assumptions, judgments, contentions, dispositions, and capabilities.” The concept of discursive representation can potentially redeem the promise of deliberative democracy when the deliberative participation of all affected by a collective decision is infeasible.

Domestic transformations also reveal the need to update contemporary understandings of political representation. Associational life — social movements, interest groups, and civic associations—is increasingly recognized as important for the survival of representative democracies. The extent to which interest groups write public policies or play a central role in implementing and regulating policies is the extent to which the division between formal and informal representation has been blurred. The fluid relationship between the career paths of formal and informal representatives also suggests that contemporary realities do not justify focusing mainly on formal representatives. Mark Warren’s concept of citizen representatives (2008) opens up a theoretical framework for exploring how citizens represent themselves and serve in representative capacities.

Given these changes, it is necessary to revisit our conceptual understanding of political representation, specifically of democratic representation. For as Jane Mansbridge has recently noted, normative understandings of representation have not kept up with recent empirical research and contemporary democratic practices. In her important article “Rethinking Representation” Mansbridge identifies four forms of representation in modern democracies: promissory, anticipatory, gyroscopic and surrogacy. Promissory representation is a form of representation in which representatives are to be evaluated by the promises they make to constituents during campaigns. Promissory representation strongly resembles Pitkin’s discussion of formalistic representation. For both are primarily concerned with the ways that constituents give their consent to the authority of a representative. Drawing on recent empirical work, Mansbridge argues for the existence of three additional forms of representation. In anticipatory representation, representatives focus on what they think their constituents will reward in the next election and not on what they promised during the campaign of the previous election. Thus, anticipatory representation challenges those who understand accountability as primarily a retrospective activity. In gyroscopic representation, representatives “look within” to derive from their own experience conceptions of interest and principles to serve as a basis for their action. Finally, surrogate representation occurs when a legislator represents constituents outside of their districts. For Mansbridge, each of these different forms of representation generates a different normative criterion by which representatives should be assessed. All four forms of representation, then, are ways that democratic citizens can be legitimately represented within a democratic regime. Yet none of the latter three forms representation operates through the formal mechanisms of authorization and accountability. Recently, Mansbridge (2009) has gone further by suggesting that political science has focused too much on the sanctions model of accountability and that another model, what she calls the selection model, can be more effective at soliciting the desired behavior from representatives. According to Mansbridge, a sanction model of accountability presumes that the representative has different interests from the represented and that the represented should not only monitor but reward the good representative and punish the bad. In contrast, the selection model of accountability presumes that representatives have self-motivated and exogenous reasons for carrying out the represented’s wishes. In this way, Mansbridge broadens our understanding of accountability to allow for good representation to occur outside of formal sanctioning mechanisms.

Mansbridge’s rethinking of the meaning of representation holds an important insight for contemporary discussions of democratic representation. By specifying the different forms of representation within a democratic polity, Mansbridge teaches us that we should refer to the multiple forms of democratic representation. Democratic representation should not be conceived as a monolithic concept. Moreover, what is abundantly clear is that democratic representation should no longer be treated as consisting simply in a relationship between elected officials and constituents within her voting district. Political representation should no longer be understood as a simple principal-agent relationship. Andrew Rehfeld has gone farther, maintaining that political representation should no longer be territorially based. In other words, Rehfeld (2005) argues that constituencies, e.g. electoral districts, should not be constructed based on where citizens live.

Lisa Disch (2011) also complicates our understanding of democratic representation as a principal-agent relationship by uncovering a dilemma that arises between expectations of democratic responsiveness to constituents and recent empirical findings regarding the context dependency of individual constituents’ preferences. In response to this dilemma, Disch proposes a mobilization conception of political representation and develops a systemic understanding of reflexivity as the measure of its legitimacy.

By far, one of the most important shifts in the literature on representation has been the “constructivist turn.” Constructivist approaches to representation emphasize the representative’s role in creating and framing the identities and claims of the represented. Here Michael Saward’s The Representative Claim is exemplary. For Saward, representation entails a series of relationships: “A maker of representations (M) puts forward a subject (S) which stands for an object (O) which is related to a referent (R) and is offered to an audience (A)” (2006, 302). Instead of presuming a pre-existing set of interests of the represented that representatives “bring into” the political arena, Saward stresses how representative claim-making is a “deeply culturally inflected practice.” Saward explicitly denies that theorists can know what are the interests of the represented. For this reason, the represented should have the ultimate say in judging the claims of the representative. The task of the representative is to create claims that will resonate with appropriate audiences.

Saward therefore does not evaluate representatives by the extent to which they advance the preferences or interests of the represented. Instead he focuses on the institutional and collective conditions in which claim-making takes place. The constructivist turn examines the conditions for claim-making, not the activities of particular representatives.

Saward’s “constructivist turn” has generated a new research direction for both political theorists and empirical scientists. For example, Lisa Disch (2015) considers whether the constructivist turn is a “normative dead” end, that is, whether the epistemological commitments of constructivism that deny the ability to identify interests will undermine the normative commitments to democratic politics. Disch offers an alternative approach, what she calls “the citizen standpoint”. This standpoint does not mean taking at face value whomever or whatever citizens regard as representing them. Rather, it is “an epistemological and political achievement that does not exist spontaneously but develops out of the activism of political movements together with the critical theories and transformative empirical research to which they give rise” (2015, 493). (For other critical engagements with Saward’s work, see Schaap et al, 2012 and Nässtrom, 2011).

There have been a number of important advances in theorizing the concept of political representation. In particular, these advances call into question the traditional way of thinking of political representation as a principal-agent relationship. Most notably, Melissa Williams’ recent work has recommended reenvisioning the activity of representation in light of the experiences of historically disadvantaged groups. In particular, she recommends understanding representation as “mediation.” In particular, Williams (1998, 8) identifies three different dimensions of political life that representatives must “mediate:” the dynamics of legislative decision-making, the nature of legislator-constituent relations, and the basis for aggregating citizens into representable constituencies. She explains each aspect by using a corresponding theme (voice, trust, and memory) and by drawing on the experiences of marginalized groups in the United States. For example, drawing on the experiences of American women trying to gain equal citizenship, Williams argues that historically disadvantaged groups need a “voice” in legislative decision-making. The “heavily deliberative” quality of legislative institutions requires the presence of individuals who have direct access to historically excluded perspectives.

In addition, Williams explains how representatives need to mediate the representative-constituent relationship in order to build “trust.” For Williams, trust is the cornerstone for democratic accountability. Relying on the experiences of African-Americans, Williams shows the consistent patterns of betrayal of African-Americans by privileged white citizens that give them good reason for distrusting white representatives and the institutions themselves. For Williams, relationships of distrust can be “at least partially mended if the disadvantaged group is represented by its own members”(1998, 14). Finally, representation involves mediating how groups are defined. The boundaries of groups according to Williams are partially established by past experiences — what Williams calls “memory.” Having certain shared patterns of marginalization justifies certain institutional mechanisms to guarantee presence.

Williams offers her understanding of representation as mediation as a supplement to what she regards as the traditional conception of liberal representation. Williams identifies two strands in liberal representation. The first strand she describes as the “ideal of fair representation as an outcome of free and open elections in which every citizen has an equally weighted vote” (1998, 57). The second strand is interest-group pluralism, which Williams describes as the “theory of the organization of shared social interests with the purpose of securing the equitable representation … of those groups in public policies” ( ibid .). Together, the two strands provide a coherent approach for achieving fair representation, but the traditional conception of liberal representation as made up of simply these two strands is inadequate. In particular, Williams criticizes the traditional conception of liberal representation for failing to take into account the injustices experienced by marginalized groups in the United States. Thus, Williams expands accounts of political representation beyond the question of institutional design and thus, in effect, challenges those who understand representation as simply a matter of formal procedures of authorization and accountability.

Another way of reenvisioning representation was offered by Nadia Urbinati (2000, 2002). Urbinati argues for understanding representation as advocacy. For Urbinati, the point of representation should not be the aggregation of interests, but the preservation of disagreements necessary for preserving liberty. Urbinati identifies two main features of advocacy: 1) the representative’s passionate link to the electors’ cause and 2) the representative’s relative autonomy of judgment. Urbinati emphasizes the importance of the former for motivating representatives to deliberate with each other and their constituents. For Urbinati the benefit of conceptualizing representation as advocacy is that it improves our understanding of deliberative democracy. In particular, it avoids a common mistake made by many contemporary deliberative democrats: focusing on the formal procedures of deliberation at the expense of examining the sources of inequality within civil society, e.g. the family. One benefit of Urbinati’s understanding of representation is its emphasis on the importance of opinion and consent formation. In particular, her agonistic conception of representation highlights the importance of disagreements and rhetoric to the procedures, practices, and ethos of democracy. Her account expands the scope of theoretical discussions of representation away from formal procedures of authorization to the deliberative and expressive dimensions of representative institutions. In this way, her agonistic understanding of representation provides a theoretical tool to those who wish to explain how non-state actors “represent.”

Other conceptual advancements have helped clarify the meaning of particular aspects of representation. For instance, Andrew Rehfeld (2009) has argued that we need to disaggregate the delegate/trustee distinction. Rehfeld highlights how representatives can be delegates and trustees in at least three different ways. For this reason, we should replace the traditional delegate/trustee distinction with three distinctions (aims, source of judgment, and responsiveness). By collapsing these three different ways of being delegates and trustees, political theorists and political scientists overlook the ways in which representatives are often partial delegates and partial trustees.

Other political theorists have asked us to rethink central aspects of our understanding of democratic representation. In Inclusion and Democracy Iris Marion Young asks us to rethink the importance of descriptive representation. Young stresses that attempts to include more voices in the political arena can suppress other voices. She illustrates this point using the example of a Latino representative who might inadvertently represent straight Latinos at the expense of gay and lesbian Latinos (1986, 350). For Young, the suppression of differences is a problem for all representation (1986, 351). Representatives of large districts or of small communities must negotiate the difficulty of one person representing many. Because such a difficulty is constitutive of representation, it is unreasonable to assume that representation should be characterized by a “relationship of identity.” The legitimacy of a representative is not primarily a function of his or her similarities to the represented. For Young, the representative should not be treated as a substitute for the represented. Consequently, Young recommends reconceptualizing representation as a differentiated relationship (2000, 125–127; 1986, 357). There are two main benefits of Young’s understanding of representation. First, her understanding of representation encourages us to recognize the diversity of those being represented. Second, her analysis of representation emphasizes the importance of recognizing how representative institutions include as well as they exclude. Democratic citizens need to remain vigilant about the ways in which providing representation for some groups comes at the expense of excluding others. Building on Young’s insight, Suzanne Dovi (2009) has argued that we should not conceptualize representation simply in terms of how we bring marginalized groups into democratic politics; rather, democratic representation can require limiting the influence of overrepresented privileged groups.

Moreover, based on this way of understanding political representation, Young provides an alterative account of democratic representation. Specifically, she envisions democratic representation as a dynamic process, one that moves between moments of authorization and moments of accountability (2000, 129). It is the movement between these moments that makes the process “democratic.” This fluidity allows citizens to authorize their representatives and for traces of that authorization to be evident in what the representatives do and how representatives are held accountable. The appropriateness of any given representative is therefore partially dependent on future behavior as well as on his or her past relationships. For this reason, Young maintains that evaluation of this process must be continuously “deferred.” We must assess representation dynamically, that is, assess the whole ongoing processes of authorization and accountability of representatives. Young’s discussion of the dynamic of representation emphasizes the ways in which evaluations of representatives are incomplete, needing to incorporate the extent to which democratic citizens need to suspend their evaluations of representatives and the extent to which representatives can face unanticipated issues.

Another insight about democratic representation that comes from the literature on descriptive representation is the importance of contingencies. Here the work of Jane Mansbridge on descriptive representation has been particularly influential. Mansbridge recommends that we evaluate descriptive representatives by contexts and certain functions. More specifically, Mansbridge (1999, 628) focuses on four functions and their related contexts in which disadvantaged groups would want to be represented by someone who belongs to their group. Those four functions are “(1) adequate communication in contexts of mistrust, (2) innovative thinking in contexts of uncrystallized, not fully articulated, interests, … (3) creating a social meaning of ‘ability to rule’ for members of a group in historical contexts where the ability has been seriously questioned and (4) increasing the polity’s de facto legitimacy in contexts of past discrimination.” For Mansbridge, descriptive representatives are needed when marginalized groups distrust members of relatively more privileged groups and when marginalized groups possess political preferences that have not been fully formed. The need for descriptive representation is contingent on certain functions.

Mansbridge’s insight about the contingency of descriptive representation suggests that at some point descriptive representatives might not be necessary. However, she doesn’t specify how we are to know if interests have become crystallized or trust has formed to the point that the need for descriptive representation would be obsolete. Thus, Mansbridge’s discussion of descriptive representation suggests that standards for evaluating representatives are fluid and flexible. For an interesting discussion of the problems with unified or fixed standards for evaluating Latino representatives, see Christina Beltran’s The Trouble with Unity .

Mansbridge’s discussion of descriptive representation points to another trend within the literature on political representation — namely, the trend to derive normative accounts of representation from the representative’s function. Russell Hardin (2004) captured this trend most clearly in his position that “if we wish to assess the morality of elected officials, we must understand their function as our representatives and then infer how they can fulfill this function.” For Hardin, only an empirical explanation of the role of a representative is necessary for determining what a representative should be doing. Following Hardin, Suzanne Dovi (2007) identifies three democratic standards for evaluating the performance of representatives: those of fair-mindedness, critical trust building, and good gate-keeping. In Ruling Passions , Andrew Sabl (2002) links the proper behavior of representatives to their particular office. In particular, Sabl focuses on three offices: senator, organizer and activist. He argues that the same standards should not be used to evaluate these different offices. Rather, each office is responsible for promoting democratic constancy, what Sabl understands as “the effective pursuit of interest.” Sabl (2002) and Hardin (2004) exemplify the trend to tie the standards for evaluating political representatives to the activity and office of those representatives.

There are three persistent problems associated with political representation. Each of these problems identifies a future area of investigation. The first problem is the proper institutional design for representative institutions within democratic polities. The theoretical literature on political representation has paid a lot of attention to the institutional design of democracies. More specifically, political theorists have recommended everything from proportional representation (e.g. Guinier, 1994 and Christiano, 1996) to citizen juries (Fishkin, 1995). However, with the growing number of democratic states, we are likely to witness more variation among the different forms of political representation. In particular, it is important to be aware of how non-democratic and hybrid regimes can adopt representative institutions to consolidate their power over their citizens. There is likely to be much debate about the advantages and disadvantages of adopting representative institutions.

This leads to a second future line of inquiry — ways in which democratic citizens can be marginalized by representative institutions. This problem is articulated most clearly by Young’s discussion of the difficulties arising from one person representing many. Young suggests that representative institutions can include the opinions, perspectives and interests of some citizens at the expense of marginalizing the opinions, perspectives and interests of others. Hence, a problem with institutional reforms aimed at increasing the representation of historically disadvantaged groups is that such reforms can and often do decrease the responsiveness of representatives. For instance, the creation of black districts has created safe zones for black elected officials so that they are less accountable to their constituents. Any decrease in accountability is especially worrisome given the ways citizens are vulnerable to their representatives. Thus, one future line of research is examining the ways that representative institutions marginalize the interests, opinions and perspectives of democratic citizens.

In particular, it is necessary for to acknowledge the biases of representative institutions. While E. E. Schattschneider (1960) has long noted the class bias of representative institutions, there is little discussion of how to improve the political representation of the disaffected — that is, the political representation of those citizens who do not have the will, the time, or political resources to participate in politics. The absence of such a discussion is particularly apparent in the literature on descriptive representation, the area that is most concerned with disadvantaged citizens. Anne Phillips (1995) raises the problems with the representation of the poor, e.g. the inability to define class, however, she argues for issues of class to be integrated into a politics of presence. Few theorists have taken up Phillip’s gauntlet and articulated how this integration of class and a politics of presence is to be done. Of course, some have recognized the ways in which interest groups, associations, and individual representatives can betray the least well off (e.g. Strolovitch, 2004). And some (Dovi, 2003) have argued that descriptive representatives need to be selected based on their relationship to citizens who have been unjustly excluded and marginalized by democratic politics. However, it is unclear how to counteract the class bias that pervades domestic and international representative institutions. It is necessary to specify the conditions under which certain groups within a democratic polity require enhanced representation. Recent empirical literature has suggested that the benefits of having descriptive representatives is by no means straightforward (Gay, 2002).

A third and final area of research involves the relationship between representation and democracy. Historically, representation was considered to be in opposition with democracy [See Dahl (1989) for a historical overview of the concept of representation]. When compared to the direct forms of democracy found in the ancient city-states, notably Athens, representative institutions appear to be poor substitutes for the ways that citizens actively ruled themselves. Barber (1984) has famously argued that representative institutions were opposed to strong democracy. In contrast, almost everyone now agrees that democratic political institutions are representative ones.

Bernard Manin (1997)reminds us that the Athenian Assembly, which often exemplifies direct forms of democracy, had only limited powers. According to Manin, the practice of selecting magistrates by lottery is what separates representative democracies from so-called direct democracies. Consequently, Manin argues that the methods of selecting public officials are crucial to understanding what makes representative governments democratic. He identifies four principles distinctive of representative government: 1) Those who govern are appointed by election at regular intervals; 2) The decision-making of those who govern retains a degree of independence from the wishes of the electorate; 3) Those who are governed may give expression to their opinions and political wishes without these being subject to the control of those who govern; and 4) Public decisions undergo the trial of debate (6). For Manin, historical democratic practices hold important lessons for determining whether representative institutions are democratic.

While it is clear that representative institutions are vital institutional components of democratic institutions, much more needs to be said about the meaning of democratic representation. In particular, it is important not to presume that all acts of representation are equally democratic. After all, not all acts of representation within a representative democracy are necessarily instances of democratic representation. Henry Richardson (2002) has explored the undemocratic ways that members of the bureaucracy can represent citizens. [For a more detailed discussion of non-democratic forms of representation, see Apter (1968). Michael Saward (2008) also discusses how existing systems of political representation do not necessarily serve democracy.] Similarly, it is unclear whether a representative who actively seeks to dismantle democratic institutions is representing democratically. Does democratic representation require representatives to advance the preferences of democratic citizens or does it require a commitment to democratic institutions? At this point, answers to such questions are unclear. What is certain is that democratic citizens are likely to disagree about what constitutes democratic representation.

One popular approach to addressing the different and conflicting standards used to evaluate representatives within democratic polities, is to simply equate multiple standards with democratic ones. More specifically, it is argued that democratic standards are pluralistic, accommodating the different standards possessed and used by democratic citizens. Theorists who adopt this approach fail to specify the proper relationship among these standards. For instance, it is unclear how the standards that Mansbridge identifies in the four different forms of representation should relate to each other. Does it matter if promissory forms of representation are replaced by surrogate forms of representation? A similar omission can be found in Pitkin: although Pitkin specifies there is a unified relationship among the different views of representation, she never describes how the different views interact. This omission reflects the lacunae in the literature about how formalistic representation relates to descriptive and substantive representation. Without such a specification, it is not apparent how citizens can determine if they have adequate powers of authorization and accountability.

Currently, it is not clear exactly what makes any given form of representation consistent, let alone consonant, with democratic representation. Is it the synergy among different forms or should we examine descriptive representation in isolation to determine the ways that it can undermine or enhance democratic representation? One tendency is to equate democratic representation simply with the existence of fluid and multiple standards. While it is true that the fact of pluralism provides justification for democratic institutions as Christiano (1996) has argued, it should no longer presumed that all forms of representation are democratic since the actions of representatives can be used to dissolve or weaken democratic institutions. The final research area is to articulate the relationship between different forms of representation and ways that these forms can undermine democratic representation.

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G. Democratic Representation

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• FairVote Program for Representative Government
• Proportional Representation Library , provides readings proportional representation elections created by Prof. Douglas J. Amy, Dept. of Politics, Mount Holyoke College
• Representation , an essay by Ann Marie Baldonado on the Postcolonial Studies website at Emory University.
• Representation: John Locke, Second Treatise, §§ 157–58 , in The Founders’ Constitution at the University of Chicago Press
• Popular Basis of Political Authority: David Hume, Of the Original Contract , in The Founders’ Constitution at the University of Chicago Press

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Representation: what is it good for?

Jo franklin-wright.

24 Feb 2021

Representation is a word that gets thrown around a lot, so as we come to the end of LGBT History Month I wanted to do a reappraisal of what representation means, and why the media and communications matter so much in changing attitudes and in influencing the wider narrative around LGBT rights.

At its core, representation is all about the idea that if you can see it, you can be it. Seeing a true representation of yourself, your community. the kinds of things you’ve been through or that your friends have been through (both good and bad) is life affirming. It helps people realise that the way they live their lives is acceptable and not shunned, that they’re recognised and celebrated, not hidden from view.

For those outside the community, it’s an eye opener. Having a true, honest and respectful representation of any group puts a stake in the ground to declare that we as a society recognise these people as valued members of our clan – and perhaps you should too.

Last year Procter & Gamble teamed up with GLAAD, an organisation that champions LGBT representation in media, and found that 80% of respondents who had been exposed to LGBTQ people in the media said they were more supportive of equal rights for LGBTQ people when compared to those who hadn’t been exposed.

The media in all its forms has a huge part to play in setting the tone for what types of people we deem acceptable and valuable in society. As comms professionals we already know that making perception shifts are done most effectively through storytelling.

Our brains are hardwired to respond to a narrative. It’s a survival technique and one of the reasons we’re successful as a species. If you think about it, we can cooperate creatively on a huge scale to collectively envisage a future that we want to inhabit – and then build it. Isn’t that incredible? And a lot of being able to envisage a collective future on a large scale comes from seeing your neighbour’s welfare as intrinsically linked to your own.

As we look at LGBT history we can see that the narrative around and attitudes to this group has been shaped by collective storytelling over time. Let’s take trans history as a fascinating and pressing example.

If you watch one thing on Netflix in the next week to mark the end of LGBT History Month, I’d implore you to make it a documentary called Disclosure that was produced by Laverne Cox, a black trans woman of Orange Is The New Black fame. It’s a confronting feature-length piece that takes you on a journey from the earliest trans representation on screen to today. It highlights instances in all our lifetimes when you probably won’t have batted an eyelid at trans people being roundly humiliated on screen. If there is a campaign out there to ban Ace Ventura I want to get behind it ( Joe Rogan even called it out for its unflinching transphobic violence ). The time we’re in now though could be said to be a heyday for trans representation on screen. The Emmy winning show Pose is a perfect encapsulation of the strides that have been made, depicting black trans lives in 1970s and 80s New York ballroom scene through some of the most humanising storylines ever written.

But despite the progress, there is still work to be done. A pervasive lack of education, awareness and representation is still all too often a matter of life and death for trans people. The recent all-encompassing debate over gendered bathrooms has sadly taken centre stage thanks to the involvement of high profile individuals.

This narrative has managed to detract from the real issues facing trans adults and children, who continue to face huge hurdles in terms of both societal acceptance and the ability to safely transition in the eyes of the law. More can be read about the latest updates to the Gender Recognition Act here . Stonewall found that almost half (48%) of the UK trans population have attempted suicide at least once, more than half (55%) have experienced negative comments or behaviour at work due to being trans, and 41% of trans people have been attacked or threatened with violence in the last five years.

If those stats don’t give us pause to think about what more we can be doing to shift the narrative on trans people, I’m not sure what will.

A lot of the problem is about exposure. GLAAD found that 80% of Americans don’t know anyone who is transgender. When someone is invisible in your daily life, it becomes difficult to relate to their challenges and understand how their experience of the world may be different from your own. This is where the need to represent these people on screen and in our comms becomes vital to addressing the issues that seem too far removed from reality for the majority of the population.

GLAAD is a great resource for organisations trying to make the shift in the way they speak about and represent trans lives publicly. The organisation recently launched guidelines for transgender representation in marketing – which states so plainly but it bears repeating: “Imagery that focuses on the everyday moments of LGBTQI+ people’s lives is essential in demonstrating that [they] are visible and valuable members of society,”

The telling and retelling of LGBT stories – and indeed stories from all groups – is an incredibly powerful way of ensuring that we are educating younger generations and shining a light on what can happen if we make people feel like they’re in the “other” group. Making big, long term societal perception shifts is hard work but is entirely possible if we commit to being be part of a creative, collective effort to envisage a better future for everyone.

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representation

Definition of representation

Examples of representation in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'representation.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing representation

• proportional representation
• self - representation

Dictionary Entries Near representation

representant

representationalism

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“Representation.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/representation. Accessed 14 Apr. 2024.

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Kids definition of representation, legal definition, legal definition of representation, more from merriam-webster on representation.

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Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about representation

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Difference Between Good and Bad Representation in Film

Indigo Mapa '21 , Staff Writer October 15, 2018

“Representing” is defined as “ the action of speaking or acting on behalf of someone.” Today, representation is a crucial element of film. “Bad” representation is especially important to avoid in the filmmaking. Often, we struggle to define what good and bad representation looks like.

Well, what is good and proper representation? It starts with thorough research and an understanding of what is being placed onto the big screen and projected into the public eye. For those involved in the filmmaking process, attempting to represent something that they do not identify with can be difficult. “Good representation” occurs when a person or culture is portrayed realistically, not purely based on stereotypes. A film with excellent representation is Crazy Rich Asians . The film received praise for its exceptional representation of the Asian culture and race. The film featured an all-Asian cast, a rare occurrence in Hollywood. This brought tears of joy to many Asians around the world when it was announced. Because of valuable personal experience, the actors were able to best convey their culture. Crazy Rich Asians “raised the bar for Asian representation in entertainment” (Selby). Though the film became a milestone for Asian-Americans and minorities in general, it still missed some important aspects in the Asian culture. Darker-skinned Asians were not portrayed equally in the film. Light-skinned Asian actors portrayed the wealthy and famous, while those with darker complexions appeared to portray workers and lower-class citizens. Though most likely unintentional, this can be pinpointed as some bad representation in the film. We continue to see that the films with good representation do not necessarily have the best representation. Nonetheless, Crazy Rich Asians is a clear milestone where representation is concerned.

Unfortunately, inadequate representation is common in film. It is difficult for an underrepresented group in society to have to watch films that poorly represent their group and thus perpetuate minority status. Because good representation can be so difficult to achieve, those involved in the filmmaking process wonder whether or not underrepresented groups should continue to be represented in film at all. But, when it comes along, good representation is incredibly valuable and should, therefore, be strived for rather than no representation whatsoever.

A particular audience that is under-represented in films is the community of people with disabilities. Me Before You , a film about a wealthy man who got into an accident and becomes paralyzed, falls in love with a woman who takes a job as his caretaker. The actor, Sam Claffin, portrays a character with a disability, yet he has never struggled with one himself. In Me Before You , Claflin’s character later dies via assisted suicide, simply because the character does not want to be a burden to his love interest/caretaker. This does not accurately represent the disabled community. In fact, it stereotypes them in suggesting that they want to be put out of their misery. People with disabilities should rather be portrayed by actors that experience a disability rather than abled actors. It is in the hands of those behind such films to ensure that disabled people are not portrayed as deserving only of pity.

Change can start with these films, where we can start to accurately represent the underrepresented members of society and bring about greater change. Though the industry is slowly improving and creating new innovative ways to represent minorities, there are still many films that are ignorant when it comes to representation.

Works Cited

“PORTRAYAL OF MINORITIES IN THE FILM, MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES.” HOPES Huntington’s Disease Information , web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/mediarace/portrayal.htm.

Powell, Robyn. “Opinion | What Hollywood Gets Wrong About Disabilities.” The Huffington Post , TheHuffingtonPost.com, 7 Mar. 2018, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-powell-what-hollywood-gets-wrong-about-disabilities_us_5a9ef0ffe4b0d4f5b66b1882.

White, Abbey. “How Can TV and Movies Get Representation Right? We Asked 6 Hollywood Diversity Consultants.” Vox , Vox, 28 Aug. 2017, www.vox.com/culture/2017/8/28/16181026/hollywood-representation-diversity-tv-movies.

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Good Representatives and Good Representation

by  Karen Celis , Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and  Sarah Childs,  Birkbeck, University of London

This article should be read as an ongoing dialogue between Suzanne Dovi and ourselves about a common concern: the quality of representation in general and, in particular, the good substantive representation for women (SRW). We strongly share Dovi’s concern that democratic institutions and processes can favor those in positions of power and can be used to dominate and oppress. We also are persuaded that for democracy to function well, a specific type of representative is required (Dovi  2007 ). The key difference between us is that Dovi’s focus (2002; 2007) is on the  individual  representative’s characteristics and qualities, whereas we turn our focus to the level of representative  processes . Representation is a process of advocacy and deliberation taking place within and outside of formal political institutions, where differences in political perspectives are advocated for and deliberated over (Saward  2010 ; Urbinati  2000 ; Williams  1998 ). SRW in formal institutions such as parliaments—we argue in this contribution—should meet specific “quality-control” criteria. We defend our preferred conception of good representation as procedural but, as we show herein, Dovi’s values of the good representative well may be important prerequisites for the good processes that we envisage.

Our claim for a shift away from the  actors  (i.e., women/feminist Members of Parliament) and  content  of SRW (i.e., legislative and policy outcomes) toward a focus on the  processes  of representation stems from two sources. First, we must fully acknowledge that women are a highly diverse group with varying and even conflicting interests. Second, we should reject an elision between SRW and feminist substantive representation. In our view, good SRW does not occur when the interests of only a limited group of women are represented. Neither does it occur when only a specific feminist understanding of gender equality is articulated. Instead, good representational processes take seriously the heterogeneity of women’s interests while accepting that not all women share feminist ideals.

Read the full article .

PS: Political Science & Politics  / Volume 51 /  Issue 2  / April 2018

Copyright © I American Political Science Association

77 episodes

The podcast you wish you had growing up. Our hosts, Abi, Eden, Isabel, Meghna, and Naina, and our guests, explore the funny, insightful, and awkward experiences of what it means to be of Asian descent. With the lack of representation in media, it's important that we support one another, bring awareness, and be at the forefront of change. We are entirely volunteer-run and wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing team based all over the world. If you have ideas, want to join our organization, or are looking to follow us, please explore: https://dearasiangirl.carrd.co/

Dear Asian Generation Dear Asian Youth

• Society & Culture
• 4.3 • 39 Ratings
• APR 11, 2024

Q & (G)A(Y) with the Co-Hosts!

Ever had any burning questions you wanted to ask about the LGBTQIA+ experience but were too nervous to? Never fear! Tune in to this episode where all 5 of our co-hosts launch into an open, judgement-free Q & A session about the complexities of queer culture and identity. Join us as we discuss everything from first crushes and queer relationships, to advice on coming out, to the intersectionality of what it really means to be "Gaysian." By the end of this episode, we hope you've learned something new about queer experiences and that you continue to be curious and supportive of all the LGBTQIA+ community members around you! **Please note that the term "ladyboy" is mentioned in this episode in reference to June Bellebono's essay 'Ladyboy' in Helena Lee's edited collection, 'East Side Voices'. The term is a commonly used English translation of the Thai term 'kathoey', which is used to inoffensively refer to those 'third gender' (queer and/or genderqueer, to our Western understanding) individuals who are widely accepted in Thai society due to their prominent historical (and present!) significance in Thai culture and entertainment. Though not intended to be transphobic or insulting, we recognise that as with most single-word translations, 'ladyboy' fails to encapsulate the complexity of the original term 'kathoey'.

• MAR 8, 2024

RepresentASIAN Matters! More Than Material with Olivia Kim

Join Abi, Eden, Meghna, and super special guest Olivia Kim in this exciting episode as they talk all things fashion. As SVP of Creative Merchandising at Nordstrom, Olivia is paving the way for young Asian women in the fashion industry, so it was a true honour to pick her brains for today's interview! How are real people, personalities, and stories reflected in pieces of clothing? How does Olivia's Korean-American culture and upbringing influence her work? Are trends becoming so microscopic and fast-moving nowadays that they cease to exist at all? Tune in now to hear all about how fashion is SO much more than material.

• FEB 24, 2024

RepresentASIAN Matters! Asian Art That Speaks To The Heart

Get ready for a tearjerker. Join Abi, Eden, and Meghna in this chatty episode as they discuss why representation is important to them, and which pieces of film, literature, and music have made them feel most represented in the past. From John Okada's fantastic novel No-No Boy, to Kimber Lee's poignant rebuttal and modern take on the infamous Miss Saigon, to the musical goddess that is Mitski herself.... we cover it all. Don't miss out on our cohosts' closing conversation about their hopes for the future of representation. What are your hopes? We want to hear from you!

• FEB 8, 2024

RepresentASIAN Matters! Maurissa Tancharoen on Breaking Barriers as a TV Showrunner

Join co-hosts Naina and Isabel as they explore the spectacular career of Maurissa Tancharoen, a co-creator, executive producer, and showrunner of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD—Marvel’s first and longest running TV show. Born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, Tancharoen grew up as a dancer and singer in and around the environment of film, TV, and Hollywood where she would eventually get her start in her writing career.  Together we discuss how Maurissa led the charge in championing diversity at Agents of SHIELD—one of the most diverse shows on air of its time—as well as her challenges navigating the industry both as an actress and up-and-coming writer. She shares what she’s most proud of, how her relationship to her Asian identity has evolved over time, as well as her advice for the next generation of writers. This episode also features our very own Podcast Manager, Lindsay Kamikawa, who worked alongside her as a writers production assistant and showrunner’s assistant for Agents of SHIELD’s last two seasons. 

• JAN 18, 2024

RepresentASIAN Matters! Lindsay Kamikawa on Asian Female Identity in Hollywood

In this episode, co-hosts Naina and Isabel sit down with screenwriter (and our very own Podcast Manager!) Lindsay Kamikawa and talk about the profound influence of popular media and Asian representation in Lindsay’s journey in Hollywood thus far. Lindsay candidly recounts pivotal moments of finding representation and the initial steps toward establishing a screenwriting career, while emphasizing the significance of Asian mentors and those in positions of power elevating the voices of the next generation. Through this, she offers insight into the unique challenges and strengths that come with her “overachiever” mindset, and exploring how it shapes the path to success and self-appreciation in the industry.

• 1 hr 14 min
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RepresentASIAN Matters! White Walls and Glass Boxes: Breaking Free with the Wing Luke Museum

Put on your thinking caps and come ponder art (and specifically museums) with us for a while! Join co-hosts Eden and Meghna through a conversation on Asian representation in the world of museums, and stay a little longer for an interview with co-host Abi and Education Specialist at the Wing Luke Museum, Maya Hayashi! Located in Seattle, WA, the Wing Luke is the only Pan-Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander museum in the United States. Listen in to learn how Wing Luke is putting community over colonialism in the world of museums and get a brief tour of the newest exhibit, "Sound Check! The Music We Make."

• 1 hr 28 min
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Customer Reviews

Such a good pod.

as a starbucks barista i found the newest episode on caffeine and coffee very interesting especially since i don’t drink coffee myself. definitely worth a listen!

You have to listen to this!!

Literally the best podcast ever! So relatable and empowering- you need dear Asian girl in your life:))

Super excited for this

I have followed her content in Instagram and have learnt so much. She offers key information, along with resources to tackle racism , xenofobia and sexism both in media and society

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Why Representation Matters and Why It’s Still Not Enough

Reflections on growing up brown, queer, and asian american..

Posted December 27, 2021 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

• Positive media representation can be helpful in increasing self-esteem for people of marginalized groups (especially youth).
• Interpersonal contact and exposure through media representation can assist in reducing stereotypes of underrepresented groups.
• Representation in educational curricula and social media can provide validation and support, especially for youth of marginalized groups.

Growing up as a Brown Asian American child of immigrants, I never really saw anyone who looked like me in the media. The TV shows and movies I watched mostly concentrated on blonde-haired, white, or light-skinned protagonists. They also normalized western and heterosexist ideals and behaviors, while hardly ever depicting things that reflected my everyday life. For example, it was equally odd and fascinating that people on TV didn’t eat rice at every meal; that their parents didn’t speak with accents; or that no one seemed to navigate a world of daily microaggressions . Despite these observations, I continued to absorb this mass media—internalizing messages of what my life should be like or what I should aspire to be like.

Because there were so few media images of people who looked like me, I distinctly remember the joy and validation that emerged when I did see those representations. Filipino American actors like Ernie Reyes, Nia Peeples, Dante Basco, and Tia Carrere looked like they could be my cousins. Each time they sporadically appeared in films and television series throughout my youth, their mere presence brought a sense of pride. However, because they never played Filipino characters (e.g., Carrere was Chinese American in Wayne's World ) or their racial identities remained unaddressed (e.g., Basco as Rufio in Hook ), I did not know for certain that they were Filipino American like me. And because the internet was not readily accessible (nor fully informational) until my late adolescence , I could not easily find out.

Through my Ethnic Studies classes as an undergraduate student (and my later research on Asian American and Filipino American experiences with microaggressions), I discovered that my perspectives were not that unique. Many Asian Americans and other people of color often struggle with their racial and ethnic identity development —with many citing how a lack of media representation negatively impacts their self-esteem and overall views of their racial or cultural groups. Scholars and community leaders have declared mottos like how it's "hard to be what you can’t see," asserting that people from marginalized groups do not pursue career or academic opportunities when they are not exposed to such possibilities. For example, when women (and women of color specifically) don’t see themselves represented in STEM fields , they may internalize that such careers are not made for them. When people of color don’t see themselves in the arts or in government positions, they likely learn similar messages too.

Complicating these messages are my intersectional identities as a queer person of color. In my teens, it was heartbreakingly lonely to witness everyday homophobia (especially unnecessary homophobic language) in almost all television programming. The few visual examples I saw of anyone LGBTQ involved mostly white, gay, cisgender people. While there was some comfort in seeing them navigate their coming out processes or overcome heterosexism on screen, their storylines often appeared unrealistic—at least in comparison to the nuanced homophobia I observed in my religious, immigrant family. In some ways, not seeing LGBTQ people of color in the media kept me in the closet for years.

How representation can help

Representation can serve as opportunities for minoritized people to find community support and validation. For example, recent studies have found that social media has given LGBTQ young people the outlets to connect with others—especially when the COVID-19 pandemic has limited in-person opportunities. Given the increased suicidal ideation, depression , and other mental health issues among LGBTQ youth amidst this global pandemic, visibility via social media can possibly save lives. Relatedly, taking Ethnic Studies courses can be valuable in helping students to develop a critical consciousness that is culturally relevant to their lives. In this way, representation can allow students of color to personally connect to school, potentially making their educational pursuits more meaningful.

Further, representation can be helpful in reducing negative stereotypes about other groups. Initially discussed by psychologist Dr. Gordon Allport as Intergroup Contact Theory, researchers believed that the more exposure or contact that people had to groups who were different from them, the less likely they would maintain prejudice . Literature has supported how positive LGBTQ media representation helped transform public opinions about LGBTQ people and their rights. In 2019, the Pew Research Center reported that the general US population significantly changed their views of same-sex marriage in just 15 years—with 60% of the population being opposed in 2004 to 61% in favor in 2019. While there are many other factors that likely influenced these perspective shifts, studies suggest that positive LGBTQ media depictions played a significant role.

For Asian Americans and other groups who have been historically underrepresented in the media, any visibility can feel like a win. For example, Gold House recently featured an article in Vanity Fair , highlighting the power of Asian American visibility in the media—citing blockbuster films like Crazy Rich Asians and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings . Asian American producers like Mindy Kaling of Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls demonstrate how influential creators of color can initiate their own projects and write their own storylines, in order to directly increase representation (and indirectly increase mental health and positive esteem for its audiences of color).

When representation is not enough

However, representation simply is not enough—especially when it is one-dimensional, superficial, or not actually representative. Some scholars describe how Asian American media depictions still tend to reinforce stereotypes, which may negatively impact identity development for Asian American youth. Asian American Studies is still needed to teach about oppression and to combat hate violence. Further, representation might also fail to reflect the true diversity of communities; historically, Brown Asian Americans have been underrepresented in Asian American media, resulting in marginalization within marginalized groups. For example, Filipino Americans—despite being the first Asian American group to settle in the US and one of the largest immigrant groups—remain underrepresented across many sectors, including academia, arts, and government.

Representation should never be the final goal; instead, it should merely be one step toward equity. Having a diverse cast on a television show is meaningless if those storylines promote harmful stereotypes or fail to address societal inequities. Being the “first” at anything is pointless if there aren’t efforts to address the systemic obstacles that prevent people from certain groups from succeeding in the first place.

Instead, representation should be intentional. People in power should aim for their content to reflect their audiences—especially if they know that doing so could assist in increasing people's self-esteem and wellness. People who have the opportunity to represent their identity groups in any sector may make conscious efforts to use their influence to teach (or remind) others that their communities exist. Finally, parents and teachers can be more intentional in ensuring that their children and students always feel seen and validated. By providing youth with visual representations of people they can relate to, they can potentially save future generations from a lifetime of feeling underrepresented or misunderstood.

Kevin Leo Yabut Nadal, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the City University of New York and the author of books including Microaggressions and Traumatic Stress .

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

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Legendary editor marty baron describes his 'collision of power' with trump and bezos.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

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Trump’s Trial Lawyer Gambled a Gilded Manhattan Career to Represent Him

Todd Blanche was a prosecutor and worked for a prestigious firm. Now, he is the principal lawyer for Donald Trump as he becomes the first former president to face prosecution.

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By Maggie Haberman ,  Ben Protess and Alan Feuer

Just over a year ago, Todd Blanche was a registered New York Democrat and a partner at Wall Street’s oldest law firm, where the nation’s corporate elite go for legal help. Now, he is a registered Florida Republican who runs his own firm, where the biggest client is a man both famous and infamous for his legal troubles: Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Blanche recently bought a home in Palm Beach County near Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. He brought his family to Mr. Trump’s campaign celebration there on Super Tuesday. And during Mr. Trump’s first criminal trial, set to begin in Manhattan on April 15, he will use space at 40 Wall Street, the former president’s office tower near the courthouse.

After a well-credentialed career as a federal prosecutor and a white-collar defense lawyer, Mr. Blanche, 49, has bet his professional future on representing Mr. Trump, the first former U.S. president to be indicted.

It was a striking career move — forfeiting a lucrative law firm partnership to represent a man notorious for cycling through lawyers and ignoring their bills — that has baffled Mr. Blanche’s former colleagues at the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York.

Many have privately questioned, at social events and in informal alumni gatherings, why he would upend his life and risk his reputation for Mr. Trump, whose refusal to acknowledge his loss in the 2020 election has become a chasm in the U.S. political and legal systems. Many prominent lawyers have refused to represent the former president, they note, and three of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers are now witnesses against him.

Mr. Blanche’s decision to defend Mr. Trump in three of the former president’s four criminal cases has pushed the lawyer outside his comfort zone. He developed a reputation as a skilled courtroom prosecutor — working in the same office as Alvin L. Bragg, now the Manhattan district attorney prosecuting Mr. Trump — but has far less experience at the defense table. Mr. Trump’s Manhattan case will be only his second criminal trial as a defense lawyer, and one of his few state court engagements.

Despite the risks, Mr. Blanche has much to gain from Mr. Trump. No longer just another high-priced defense lawyer in a city full of them, Mr. Blanche is handling the country’s most significant criminal case, raising his profile and creating a question about whether a door would open for him in a second Trump administration.

He jokes about having his eye on an ambassadorship to Italy, friends say, although he often says he has no actual interest in a government job. Still, many assume he would welcome the chance to run his old office, the Southern District, a role that the agency’s alumni covet.

As the Manhattan trial draws near, some of his former Southern District colleagues have come to Mr. Blanche’s defense, noting that every defendant, no matter how polarizing, is entitled to capable counsel.

“I have heard from a good number of people in the S.D.N.Y. who have said, ‘Why the heck would Todd do this — why would he ever take this case?’” said Elie Honig, the CNN senior legal analyst, who worked with Mr. Blanche at the Southern District and speaks highly of him. “My response is, generally, when did we become pearl-clutchers about defense lawyers defending defendants?”

“That’s what the job is and what our system requires,” he added.

Mr. Blanche has his hands full. He is the lead counsel on both Mr. Trump’s trial in Manhattan on charges that he covered up a sex scandal surrounding his 2016 presidential campaign, as well as the case in Fort Pierce, Fla., where he is charged under the Espionage Act over his retaining of sensitive government documents after he left office. Mr. Blanche is also a co-counsel in Mr. Trump’s federal case in Washington on charges that he conspired to defraud the United States with his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

At the heart of the strategy used by Mr. Blanche and his colleagues on the Trump legal team is a favorite Trump tactic: stalling.

The defense team has sought to delay the trials as long as possible, hoping to push them past Election Day, and Mr. Trump’s associates privately say they see it working. In the case brought by the Manhattan district attorney, the judge recently granted a three-week delay, though he has rejected Mr. Blanche’s effort to postpone the case further.

Mr. Blanche, who is working on the Manhattan case with Susan Necheles, a veteran defense lawyer, is not a total newcomer to Mr. Trump’s world. With the blessing of his former law firm, Cadwalader, Mr. Blanche had in recent years represented other associates of the former president, including Paul Manafort, his onetime campaign chairman, and Boris Ephsteyn, a roving adviser.

But when he proposed taking on Mr. Trump himself, the Cadwalader committee that handles reputational issues balked, people with knowledge of the matter said, and none of the firm’s leaders intervened on Mr. Blanche’s behalf. A spokesman for the firm did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Mr. Blanche described the experience to friends as painful and politicized, but told friends that he had been frustrated with a lack of autonomy at the huge firm and was ready to strike out on his own.

Last April, he founded Blanche Law in New York and began defending Mr. Trump himself.

His fees, like those of other Trump lawyers, have been paid through Save America, the political action committee seeded with tens of millions of small-dollar donations that Mr. Trump raised as he pushed false claims of widespread election fraud in November 2020 and after. The PAC paid Cadwalader roughly $420,000 when Mr. Blanche was representing Mr. Epshteyn, while Blanche Law has been paid just over $3 million since April 2023, federal records show.

While no one’s job in Mr. Trump’s world is ever safe, Mr. Blanche is enjoying an extended honeymoon, developing a reputation in Mr. Trump’s orbit for reading him well.

Some of Mr. Blanche’s friends said that they had perceived him to be a centrist, law-and-order Democrat, whose politics were not so at odds with Mr. Trump that his transition to voting as a Republican was especially jarring.

They describe him as deeply loyal to the people he cares about, and a true believer in the notion that Mr. Trump should not face trial in the Manhattan case. Mr. Blanche has a competitive streak — he has finished two full Ironman races — but by Trump lawyer standards, he is nonconfrontational and soft-spoken. He also is uninterested in appearing on television, even though Mr. Trump often likes to see his lawyers onscreen.

Although Mr. Trump usually doesn’t refer to Mr. Blanche as a “fighter,” one of his highest accolades, he does tell associates that his lawyer is smart and doing a good job. In recent court appearances, the two men have seemed almost chummy, whispering frequently to one another at the defense table.

Mr. Blanche’s decision to move to Florida reflected how fundamentally his representation of Mr. Trump has influenced not only Mr. Blanche’s professional life, but his personal one. Mr. Blanche’s wife, a doctor, has joined him in Florida, where he had for some time been looking to move for family reasons, and where he maximizes his time with a client who doesn’t like being scheduled. He commutes to New York for trial matters.

The website of Mr. Blanche’s firm briefly listed its address as Mr. Trump’s building at 40 Wall Street, where the former president has repeatedly held news conferences after court appearances. Two people close to Mr. Blanche, who were not authorized to discuss the situation publicly, said the space was a temporary war room; the address was removed from the firm’s website after The New York Times asked the campaign about the arrangement.

Bruce Green, who teaches legal ethics at Fordham Law School in New York, said he didn’t see a problem with Mr. Blanche’s tight bond with Mr. Trump, although he did question whether it could affect the lawyer’s judgment.

“Lots of defendants don’t trust their lawyers, but here there’s obviously a good relationship,” Mr. Green said. “Still, while it’s important to have trust, it’s also important to have a sense of detachment. If you drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak, it could impair your willingness to tell a client hard truths.”

Many of the arguments that Mr. Blanche has raised on behalf of Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, echoed the former president’s own laments about his criminal cases. In filings and hearings, Mr. Blanche has painted a picture of the former president as the victim of partisan attacks from Democrats and has attacked the cases themselves as attempts to derail Mr. Trump’s campaign for the White House.

Even some seemingly casual phrases Mr. Blanche has woven into his court filings appear designed with the client’s perspective in mind. In papers recently filed in the classified document case, he referred offhandedly to Mr. Trump’s “first term” in office, implying that there would be a second.

At times, his rhetoric has irritated the judge overseeing the Manhattan criminal case. Just last week, the judge wrote in an order that while he welcomed “zealous advocacy and creative lawyering,” he also expected attorneys to “demonstrate the proper respect and decorum that is owed to the courts.” Sending a none-too-subtle shot across the bow, the judge reminded Mr. Blanche’s team of his power to punish disobedience with criminal contempt.

The judge, Juan M. Merchan, also lambasted Mr. Blanche in a courtroom full of reporters last week, rebuking him for not directly answering a question. (Mr. Blanche apologized.) When Mr. Blanche accused the district attorney’s office of prosecutorial misconduct, Justice Merchan questioned how long Mr. Blanche had worked as a prosecutor, implying that he should have known better than to have leveled that claim.

Mr. Blanche joined the Southern District in 1999, not as a prosecutor, but as a paralegal. He worked days and went to Brooklyn Law School at night, commuting from Long Island. Mr. Blanche, who was married at 20 and a grandfather in his 40s, conveyed a decidedly middle-class vibe at an office known for its Ivy League pedigree.

When he returned to the Southern District a few years later as a prosecutor, he focused largely on violent crime, rather than the white-collar cases that prosecutors have parlayed into lucrative law firm jobs. Mr. Blanche ultimately became a co-leader of the Southern District’s violent crimes unit.

As a violent crimes prosecutor, Mr. Blanche was responsible for handling a variety of unsavory cooperating witnesses, including drug dealers and murderers. That experience, his former colleagues said, showed a contrarian streak and an empathetic side that explains his decision to essentially put his career on the line for someone as divisive as Mr. Trump.

Sabrina Shroff, a longtime federal defender, recalled that as a prosecutor Mr. Blanche had once dropped robbery charges against one of her clients after she demonstrated to him that the case should be dismissed.

“It would have been easy to write my client off,” she said, “and he didn’t.”

Nicole Hong contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

Ben Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, writing about public corruption. He has been covering the various criminal investigations into former President Trump and his allies. More about Ben Protess

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.  More about Alan Feuer

Our Coverage of the Trump Hush-Money Case

The manhattan district attorney has filed charges against former president donald trump over a hush-money payment to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election..

Taking the Case to Trial: Trump is all but certain to become the first former U.S. president to stand trial on criminal charges after a judge denied his effort to delay the proceeding and confirmed it will begin on April 15 .

Implications for Trump: As the case goes to trial, the former president’s inner circle sees a silver lining in the timing. But Trump wouldn’t be able to pardon himself  should he become president again as he could if found guilty in the federal cases against him.

Michael Cohen: Trump’s former fixer was not an essential witness in the former president’s civil fraud trial in New York  that concluded in January. But he will be when he takes the stand in the hush-money case .

Stormy Daniels: The chain of events flowing from a 2006 encounter that the adult film star said she had with Trump has led to the brink of a historic trial. Here's a look inside the hush-money payout .

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The Buyer-Agent Playbook: How Agents Are Navigating the Commission Discourse With Clients

Editor’s Note: The Buyer-Agent Playbook is a new iteration of RISMedia’s biweekly Playbook segment, specifically centering on buyer agency and how agents are navigating the changes and trends in a post-NAR-settlement environment. The series will provide brokers and agents with insights and information to ensure they not only survive but thrive in these challenging times. Industry professionals explain the strategies they’re employing and unique ideas they’ve formulated. Tune in every other Thursday for another addition to the series. 

The proposed settlement by the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) regarding real estate commission structures and buyer-agent agreements has sparked heated discussions from all angles. Still, there’s one thing that agents can agree on: it’s all a matter of perception.

RISMedia connected with three real estate practitioners who shared their experience with the topic thus far, who pointed to continued transparency as the key to navigating the murky waters of potential changes. 

In terms of tangible shifts, there are few. Chris Giolitto, real estate agent with William Raveis in Connecticut, says his brokerage is holding out to see what the outcome of the settlement will be. 

While Shawneequa Badger, leader of Oakland-based The Badger Real Estate Group at eXp, largely agrees it’s a wait-and-see game, she initiated an immediate team meeting upon learning about the proposed settlement. 

“I wanted everyone to feel supported and heard, so I made sure to provide a safe space for questions and concerns. Keeping our team well-informed was my top priority,” she says. 

eXp has also provided them with a Buyer Representation Toolkit they can share with sellers and buyers, alongside extensive training at both the team and broker levels.

For Leigh Brown, leader of five-agent group One Community Real Estate, it’s status quo as North Carolina already had comprehensive policies and general statutes in place to protect buyer-agency and the consumer overall, she says.

“The only thing we’ve done is added a compensation plan where the consumer can choose to pay hourly instead of commission if that’s the route they want to take,” says Brown.

What consumers are hearing

The three agents agree there’s been a lot of speculation in public debate and not a lot of facts. This has led to some confusion on consumers’ part.

“I’ve gone to great lengths to address the narrative surrounding agent compensation,” says Badger, who has not only had one-on-one conversations with her clients, but taken to social channels like LinkedIn to add context to the NAR settlement discussion.

The fee structure has always been flexible, she says, and will remain that way as the industry navigates through this adjustment period. 

Brown, however, blames some media coverage for how these conversations have taken shape, which introduced problems to an industry that she says was the “last fair and free market on planet Earth.” As a result, she’s having to refute unproven allegations, she says.

“It’s a difficult situation to handle,” says Giolitto, commenting on the media frenzy, “But I think REALTORS® are doing themselves a disservice by ‘firing back.’ I believe my role is to meet with prospective buyers and sellers, explain how the new laws affect them, and explain the options they have moving forward so that they can make the best decision for their families.”

Shifting perception

Within an industry that has been flooded with a negative perception of REALTOR® value, there’s an opportunity to use these ongoing conversations with consumers to shed light on real estate processes, regardless of what their next evolution might be.

“We are preparing our sellers in advance—whether they choose to offer compensation to the buyer agent or not,” says Brown. “If an offer of compensation is agreed upon, it will be offered to any REALTOR®.”

It’s a chance for improved transparency and showcasing true value in the marketplace, says Badger. “Embracing clarity and openness can turn confusion into a positive outcome for everyone involved.”

According to Giolitto, “REALTORS® who care about their clients will succeed because their value will be unmatched. These REALTORS® understand the importance of protecting their clients’ interests throughout a transaction.”

This is the case throughout the offer, inspection and closing processes, he says. “The insight of a REALTOR® saves them tens and tens of thousands of dollars down the line of owning their home.”

Liz Dominguez

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Judges Deny Lawsuit Consolidation Effort, Leaving Commission Cases Scattered

Exploring the Shift Toward In-House Marketing Teams

Consumer Sentiment Continues to Fall in April

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The Fallout TV series is more like a great sequel to the games than just an adaptation

Fallout is the rare adaptation that adds to its source material

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Fallout is a franchise that’s held together by tone just as much as any unifying story beats or canon. The series’ distinct post-apocalyptic vision of an America that never escaped the wide eyes, fake smiles, and faker optimism of the Cold War has become iconic, and its version of Americana shot through with radioactive black humor is more identifiable than any single character from the games will ever be (except Vault Boy, of course). It’s a series that revels in its ability to be funny, touching, sad, sweet, and disgusting all in a single moment. And that tone is what Amazon Prime Video’s new Fallout TV series captures best, and what makes it an excellent addition to the franchise, rather than just an adaptation.

The new show, created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, smartly adapts Fallout’s world and setting without attempting to retell any of the stories from the game series directly. There are Vaults, where cheery survivors of the nuclear blasts that destroyed most of America wait out the apocalypse. We’ve got the militaristic Brotherhood of Steel, along with irradiated surface-dwellers known as ghouls. And just about everything in the vast Wasteland and out is run by Vault-Tec. In other words, it’s a world that’s unmistakably rooted in Fallout’s canon. It’s a loving re-creation of the icons of the Fallout universe, but it’s also more than that, pushing the entire franchise forward into a new story and bigger world.

Fallout ’s story is mostly centered around Lucy (Ella Purnell), a Vault Dweller who leaves her home to find her father (Kyle MacLachlan). In her travels through the Wasteland, she meets Maximus (Aaron Moten), a squire in the Brotherhood of Steel; a bounty hunter simply known as The Ghoul (Walton Goggins); and plenty of other very strange denizens.

The show follows all of these characters as their paths cross and converge in the Wasteland of Los Angeles in search of a scientist who has escaped the Enclave with a dangerous technology that could change the balance of power in the Wasteland forever. In typical Fallout fashion, this story is mostly here to help push our heroes further into the world of the Wasteland to see all the strangeness it has to offer.

That world is one of the things Fallout nails from its earliest moments. The live-action Vaults have the same steel-caged Americana atmosphere that made them immediately effective in Fallout 3 ’s opening, with long, artificially bright hallways lined with cheerful mailboxes and blast-proof doors. But it’s on the surface where the show really starts to shine. Fallout was filmed on location and with gorgeous and grimy practical sets that make the Wasteland feel real and alive. Clothes are ripped and torn, walls are rough and patched, and everything from the guns to the technology feels cobbled together from the scrap of the world that used to be. All of this comes into sharp focus anytime the Brotherhood of Steel appears in its power-armored glory, looking terrifying in its completeness.

There are plenty of Easter eggs, as you might expect from a video game adaptation, but Fallout manages to make them seem like part of the world, too. It all feels real and believable as pieces of a whole existence that these people have scraped together, which goes a long way toward helping the show’s humor land. Even the Easter eggs feel carefully designed to fit into the world and the lives of the characters, rather than drawing focus away from them or sticking out as a glaring distraction. But as well-drawn as Fallout ’s world is, it’s the characters that really make the show stand both head and shoulders above other video game adaptations, and over most TV shows released so far this year.

In the show’s first few episodes, Lucy greets the Wasteland with nothing but fascination and kindness, giving us a window to experience the horrors of the surface by proxy. This too-innocent schtick is one that constantly threatens to wear thin but never does, thanks in large part to Purnell’s winning charm and laser-precise delivery of the show’s many punchlines. But even more impressive is the show’s commitment to giving her an arc. She constantly meets characters who tell her that the Wasteland changes people, sucks the humanity and goodness out of them until nothing is left but survival. A lesser show might use Lucy as a big-eyed, bumbling example of how goodness and kindness can win out in the end, but the Fallout creators strive to examine something more interesting: How can you keep your humanity when kindness is off the table? Her pluckiness and can-do attitude never die, but her values shift — sometimes subtly, as she realizes she can’t help everyone she sees in the Wasteland, and other times more abruptly, like when she meets a pair of cannibals on the road. It’s a literal and metaphorical journey, one that deepens a character that easily could have ended up as the boring and naïve archetype she seems like on paper.

This kind of impressive depth and creativity is all over Fallout ’s characters. Maximus gets a fascinating arc about coming to terms with the fact that the members of the Brotherhood of Steel might not be the paragons of virtue that he thought, and even Lucy’s little brother back in Vault 33 gets a fun mystery story about the nature of his Vault’s relationship to those around them. The show also excels in its brief, silly one-off stories about eccentric survivors that are nicer (or crazier) than our main characters originally assumed.

It’s no surprise that the characters are the strongest part of Fallout ; after all, it’s the shared middle ground between the game series and the medium of television. For all the qualities of their main stories, the real joy of Fallout games is exploring the Wasteland, finding its strangest inhabitants, and hearing their ridiculous stories and bizarre beliefs, or witnessing their comically absurd feats of violence and survival. Robertson-Dworet and Wagner’s Fallout captures this feeling perfectly, with characters in every episode stumbling into new situations that feel like they could easily be side quests taken straight from the games, like an organ-harvesting ring in an old supermarket or an open Vault where things are much stranger than they appear.

While all of this makes for an excellent and entertaining TV show — and a surprisingly effective adaptation of the series — Fallout ’s biggest coup is how much it effortlessly adds to the world of the games. Most of the series’ deeper lore implications come by way of flashbacks of The Ghoul’s life before the war. These snippets make up a very small part of the show’s run time, but they tell a compelling mystery story centered around Vault-Tec, giving us our best look yet at its origins and the political murkiness of Fallout ’s prewar period. It’s a thoughtful look at how Fallout’s world came to be so broken, all told through the lens of the kind of ’50s Hollywood noir film that would feel right at home as a reference in one of the games.

Fallout justifies its existence by bringing new things to the universe it’s set in, without setting itself apart from that universe. Unlike other recent video game adaptations, such as The Last of Us , which capably and elegantly retell the story of their source material, Fallout expands on it by building out the world of the games that fans already love. The Fallout series’ open-world design makes any adaptation complicated, considering how much content the games can pack into their massive settings that players could spend hundreds of hours on. But building on a preexisting world like this is difficult. Fans are fiercely protective of the worlds they love — which is why a show like Halo built a separate timeline for its adaptation , or why Twisted Metal totally changed the lore of its bygone franchise. But Fallout pulls off the high-wire act brilliantly. Robertson-Dworet and Wagner’s admiration for the video game series is obvious, but what’s more important here is their ability to make a good TV show with a well-told story and interesting characters, which just happens to be deeply rooted in Fallout’s world and signature so-dark-you-have-to-laugh tone.

In the press tour for the show, its creators have frequently said that they thought of the Prime Video series more like Fallout 5 than just an adaptation of the video game franchise. And perhaps the highest praise the show earns is that it absolutely feels like a game sequel that happens to be transposed into another medium. And after a fantastic first season, it’s hard to be anything but excited for the next chapter of Fallout, whether that’s a new season of TV or a return to video games .

Fallout season 1 drops on Prime Video on April 10.

Your guide to Fallout’s vaults and wastelands

• All the Fallout season 2 news we’ve heard so far
• Fallout’s violence and gore are part of its charm
• Fallout’s first look has a Vault Dweller-Ghoul-Brotherhood showdown
• New Fallout trailer gives us our best look yet at Walton Goggins’ fascinating Ghoul
• Digging through the Fallout TV series’ trailer and everything else we know about the show
• Amazon’s Fallout TV series starts a new plot in the same universe as the games
• Amazon’s Fallout series gives us a look at power armor, ghouls, and a new vault
• Here’s a first look at Amazon’s Fallout TV series
• Everything Fallout has revealed about the NCR
• Every Fallout Easter egg in the Prime Video show
• Fallout fans spent years debating who dropped the bombs — then the show made a call
• Fallout’s glimpse of the Enclave is just the beginning
• The Fallout TV show gives the game’s mascot an origin story that matters
• The Fallout TV show reminds us: Vault-Tec really is that bad
• The Fallout timeline
• Bethesda and Microsoft: A tight relationship over two decades
• Bethesda sues Warner Bros, calls its Westworld game ‘blatant rip-off’ of Fallout Shelter
• A brief history of Bethesda’s many legal tangles
• Fallout: New Vegas endures because of big clunky story swings
• Fallout 76 will be free when the Fallout TV show debuts through Amazon Prime
• I spent 453 hours in Fallout 4 and all I got was this stinkin’ inner peace
• Fallout 76 still has a fan base that’s committed to the core
• How Fallout 76 handles the Brotherhood of Steel

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Lauren Boebert Gets Good News Out of Colorado

L auren Boebert won a major victory on Friday when she secured the most support out of those vying to be the Republican candidate for the House seat representing Colorado's 4 th Congressional District in November at an assembly meeting.

In total, the Donald Trump -supporting firebrand picked up 215 votes , just over 40 percent of the total, at the event in Pueblo placing her substantially ahead of the other candidates, according to Colorado Public Radio.

Boebert currently serves in the House as representative for Colorado's 3 rd Congressional District, but in December she announced she instead wanted to stand for the state's more reliably conservative 4 th District later this year .

To get on the Colorado Republican primary ballot for a House seat, a candidate is required to either get a minimum of 30 percent of the vote at a congressional district assembly, or to get a certain number of valid signatures to a petition and at least 10 percent at the assembly.

The number of signatures required for candidates going down this route is either 1,500 or 10 percent of the number cast in the last general election for the seat, whichever is lowest.

Former state Senator Ted Harvey who is also seeking to get on the Republican ballot received 135 votes on Friday, short of the 159 he needed to get 30 percent of the vote. This effectively knocks him out of the race.

Colorado state Representative Richard Holtorf and ex-state Senator Jerry Sonnenberg, who are also vying to represent the 4th congressional district in the House, got 81 and 96 votes respectively. This is over 10 percent of the total, meaning they will be on the primary ballot if their petitions of signatures are accepted as valid.

Speaking after the results were announced, Boebert said: "I'm so honored today to have these numbers showing that the efforts are working.

"I don't have to argue my record. I have that track record of doing exactly what I say. You know where I stand on the issues. And it's not a wonder to you what I will do as your representative in Colorado's 4th district."

The result means her name will be placed first on the GOP ballot in June.

Newsweek contacted representatives of Boebert's 2024 House campaign by email on Saturday at 5:30 a.m. ET. This article will be updated if they decide to comment.

Boebert announced her bid to move to represent 4th congressional district after its then incumbent, Republican Rep. Ken Buck, announced he wouldn't seek reelection . Buck then stepped down in March meaning a special election will take place in June between Democrat Trisha Calvarese and Republican Greg Lopez, who is expected to stand as a placeholder meaning he doesn't plan to vie for the seat again in November.

On April 1, Ike McCorkle, a Democrat who is running in his party's primary for the 4 th congressional district in November, published a poll his campaign commissioned from Gravis Marketing. This put him on 38 percent of the vote against 31 percent for Boebert in a hypothetical matchup between the two for the district.

CNN reported on Friday that Boebert was told she wouldn't be given any more alcoholic drinks at a GOP event in New York City in December 2023 because she had been "overserved," and that she was also instructed to stop trying to take pictures with former President Trump, who was headlining the gala.

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