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Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics
Hanna Pitkin's "Concept of Representation" Revisited
This article is part of a research project on the substantive representation of women, the elderly, and migrants, which has been made possible by a research grant from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO, project number G.0083.08N).
When are "the people"--with all its different groups--represented? It is commonly accepted that democratic representation implies that no significant parts of the population are excluded from the right to vote or to stand for election and, similarly, that parliaments and even governments should, to a certain extent, mirror the represented and governed population. If authorization and accountability indicate the democratic quality of the formal dimension of representation (i.e., it is democratic when it is accountable), then representativeness allows for evaluating descriptive representation (i.e., it is democratic when it is representative of society) (see also Celis 2009). But what are our standards for judging the democratic quality of substantive representation? According to Hanna F. Pitkin, that normative standard is the representative's responsiveness: substantive representation is "acting in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them." Responsiveness turns what representatives do into substantive representation of the demos. It is a metacriterion for democratic representation in the sense that accountability and descriptive representativeness need also to ensure responsiveness. But, again, questions arise: How should we understand responsiveness? How do representatives establish it? Where and when does responsiveness need to be established?
How substantive representation is achieved and the conditions for its realization are, in my view, the key questions for future representation studies.1I side with Pitkin in rejecting too strong a focus on descriptive representation because that diverts attention from substantive representation, which she believes is a far more important dimension of representation. This was challenged by feminist research on political representation, which attaches great importance to the descriptive representation of women. Feminist scholars have done so for intrinsic reasons--democratic values such as fairness, justice, inclusion, and legitimacy--but also to further the substantive representation of women. In earlier work on the substantive representation of women, I argued that our understanding of women's representation would benefit from shifting the attention from the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation...