what is representation power

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14.3 Representational Power, Layer Size and Depth ¶

The universal approximation theorem (Horniket al., 1989; Cybenko, 1989) states that a feedforward network with a linear output layer and at least one hidden layer with any “squashing” activation function (suchas the logistic sigmoid activation function) can approximate any Borel measurable function from one finite-dimensional space to another with any desired nonzero amount of error, provided that the network is given enough hidden units.

According to the universal approximation theorem, there exists a network largeenough to achieve any degree of accuracy we desire.

A feedforward network with a single layer is sufficient to representany function, but the layer may be infeasibly large and may fail to learn and generalize correctly. In many circumstances, using deeper models can reduce the number of units required to represent the desired function and can reduce the amount of generalization error.

Choosing a deep model encodes a very general belief that the function wewant to learn should involve composition of several simpler functions.

Apply to autoencoder ¶

Encoder and decoder are both feedfoward networks, they can individually benefit from depth or as a whole.

Autoencoder with a single hidden layer is able to represent the identity function. But mapping from input to code is shallow -> not able to enforce arbitrary constraints, eg: the code should be sparse.

Depth exponetially reduce: 1. computational cost. 2. amount of training data needed

Common strategy of training: greedily pretrain the deep architecture by train a stack of shallow autoencoder.

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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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• –––, 2008. “Citizen Representatives,” in Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British ColumbiaCitizens’ Assembly , Mark Warren and Hilary Pearse (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 50–69.
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• –––, 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
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G. Democratic Representation

• Castiglione, D., 2015. “Trajectories and Transformations of the Democratic Representative System”. Global Policy , 6(S1): 8–16.
• Disch, Lisa, 2011. “Toward a Mobilization Conception of Democratic Representation,” American Political Science Review , 105(1): 100–114.
• –––, 2012. “Democratic representation and the constituency paradox,” Perspectives on Politics , 10(3): 599–616.
• –––, 2016. “Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation,” The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory , Jacob Levy (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198717133.013.24
• Mansbridge, Jane, 2003. “Rethinking Representation,” American Political Science Review , 97: 515–528.
• Näsström, Sofia, 2006. “Representative democracy as tautology: Ankersmit and Lefort on representation,” European Journal of Political Theory , 5(3): 321–342.
• Urbinati, Nadia, 2011. “Political Representation as Democratic Process,” Redescriptions (Yearbook of Political Thought and Conceptual History: Volume 10), Kari Palonen (ed.), Helsinki: Transaction Publishers.

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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Media and Society

Production, content and participation, student resources, meaning, representation and power, chapter introduction.

The creation and control of meaning-making is critical to the exercise of power.

How is meaning made and controlled?

How does representation work as a social process?

How is meaning used to exercise power?

In this chapter we:

• Define meaning and power.
• Consider how meaning and power are related to one another.
• Examine several fundamental accounts of the relationship between meaning and power: hegemony, ideology, discourse and representation.
• Overview how media representations organise everyday life. 

Cases & Activities

Constructing meanings: #iftheygunnedmedown.

The shooting of Mike Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 drew attention to how news organisations draw on social media profiles to depict victims or perpetrators of crime.

Some news organisations ran a photo of Brown in his graduation cap and gown, while many others used a photo of Brown wearing a basketball singlet and making a hand gesture that naïve viewers might interpret as a gang sign.

The use of an image that implied Brown was a member of a gang, prompted many black Americans to post contrasting images from their social media accounts to Twitter using the hashtag #iftheygunnedmedown. Many featured young black men in formal dress for church, military or graduation in one image, while in the other image they wore street wear that could be used to suggest they are gang members.

Like the images used for Brown, people drew attention to the way that selective use of images from their social media profiles could be used to construct very different representations of their identities. By constructing their identity one way or another the media could invoke differing perceptions of the extent to which the use of force by police was legitimate. 

Consider these images. How do the two images of the same individual represent them in different ways? What ‘symbols’ in the images convey different meanings that you associate with that individual? How do the images position the individuals differently in power relationships?

Examine images of yourself on your own social media profile. Find two contrasting images. Consider the way in which the images represent your identity differently. If the media were reporting, could they use the images to tell different stories about your character? Would characteristics like your gender, ethnicity or sexuality be at play in the interpretation of those images? If not, would the images suggest different aspects of your character that might affect your reputation.

Links below to news stories about the #iftheygunnedmedown hashtag.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mrloganrhoades/how-the-powerful-iftheygunnedmedown-movement-changed-the-con

http://mashable.com/2014/08/12/iftheygunnedmedown-hashtag/

http://time.com/3100975/iftheygunnedmedown-ferguson-missouri-michael-brown/

http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2014/08/iftheygunnedmedown-calls-out-media-portrayal-of-black-youth-following-michael-brown-shooting.html

Representation as a social process: The Occupy protests and casually-pepper-spray-everything cop meme

Representation is a social system involving the continuous production and circulation of meaning. People interact with each other to represent events. Media representations work inter-textually. That is, meanings are transferred from one text to another. Texts make new arrangements of meanings that often depend on the capacity of readers to ‘decode’ them by understanding them in relation to other texts.

Internet memes demonstrate the inter-textual and social process of representation in action. 

The first image above is an image from a protest at the University of California (Davis) in 2011. The protest was part of the global Occupy movement. When students refused to disband a campus police officer sprayed them with pepper spray. The cop’s act was a ‘violent’ one. As an authority figure he used physical force against people. The police are licensed to do that by the state and the university. The act though is also a symbolic one. When police use force against citizens they demonstrate to them what will happen if they do not obey the law.

The cop’s act set off a change of events where the student protestors, university management, news organisations, and the public interacted with each other in an effort to represent the event in different ways.

The protest was videoed and uploaded to YouTube. In the video the crowd can be heard chanting ‘the whole world is watching’ as the cop sprays the protestors with pepper spray. The protestors captured the act on camera. The protestors understood that they could use video to ‘bear witness’ to the event. In doing so, they were able to ‘re-present’ it. They take the act from its original context and turn it into a media text. That text then circulated rapidly through social networks. The ‘re-presentation’ of the act symbolises the excessive use of force by the powerful. The Occupy protests aimed to represent the ‘99%’ of ordinary people against the world’s privileged ‘1%’. The representation of the cop pepper-spraying the protestors symbolises – ‘stands in’ for – the entrenched privilege and blatant use of power the Occupy movement as protesting against in its slogan ‘we are the 99%’.

The protestors’ videos of the incident became a news story. The university needed to respond to the way the video of the protest represented the institution and its relationship with students. The Chancellor of the university organised a media conference. This was an attempt to ‘counter’ the meanings and narratives circulating in conjunction with the pepper spray video. The university attempted to control how the event was represented. They did that by inviting selected media organisations to the media conference, and excluding students from the venue. The students responded to being excluded by forming a silent protest outside. When the Chancellor eventually emerged they formed a silent guard all the way from the venue to her car. This silent protest was also filmed and the video circulated widely online. The protestors used silence to represent their exclusion. In doing so they drew attention to how the powerful maintain power by controlling who speaks where and when, by attempting to control who gets to represent events. When the Chancellor excluded students from the press conference, she attempted to work with the police and media organisations to control how the event was represented.

Following this event, images of the cop pepper-spraying students were widely reappropriated and recirculated. The pepper-spraying cop ‘represented’ the use of excessive force, the attempt of the powerful to control who gets to speak, the disrespect for democratic values. The cop more broadly represented the use of force against ordinary people, the undermining of democratic rights, and the policing of public space. 

The powerful – like the chancellor and the police – use strategies to attempt to control media representations. They use their relations with media, their resources to organise media events, and control who gets access to those events. In contrast, ordinary people use tacts to resist those meanings.

One way this unfolded with the pepper spray cop was by using the cop as a symbol of excessive power and ‘remixing’ his image into other popular culture texts. The image of the cop worked intertextually to create new representations. In the image above the cop pepper-sprays Bambi. To make sense of this image we need to understand both texts it references: the pepper spray cop and the film Bambi. In the image above, the cop is crudely superimposed over a scene from Bambi. In doing so, the innocence of the scene from Bambi evident in the joyful expressions on the characters’ faces and the colourful animation is juxtaposed with the dark, menacing and violent presence of the cop. The cop is larger than the characters from the animation, towering over them and his head is cropped out of the frame, as if to make him a faceless and distant figure. This image is one of many examples where the cop was super-imposed onto another scene – a movie like Bambi, an important historical moment like the Declaration of Independence, or a cultural icon like a Renaissance painting. The creators of these images were able to repeat this juxtaposition by ‘photo-shopping’ the cop over images in this way. Meaning is created via the repeated gesture of imposing the cop in scenes that evoked the innocence of childhood memory or shared cultural history and values. We can see throughout this example how representation works as a social process, constructing how we understand and act in the world, and a process in which some people have more power than others.

Map out the array of actors involved in attempting to represent the student protest at UC Davis. What were their preferred representations of the event and why? What resources and techniques did they use to create their preferred representations? Who did they interact with to create their preferred representations?

Find other examples of the pepper-spray cop meme.

What texts are referenced in the memes?

How is meaning created in the interplay between the texts?

What do the texts represent?

Links below to the Casually-Pepper-Spray-Everything Cop meme.

Know Your Meme offers a history and explanation of the meme.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/casually-pepper-spray-everything-cop

Google image search for the meme.

https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1920&bih=910&q=casually+pepper+spray+everything+cop&oq=casually+pepper+spray&gs_l=img.3.0.0l2j0i5l3.606.6093.0.6909.39.19.1.8.1.2.446.2413.0j1j3j3j1.8.0....0...1ac.1.52.img..34.5.1361.J65A0TdfUes&gws_rd=ssl

Student video of the protest where the cop pepper-sprays students.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBntXr1QFnU

News report about the pepper spray incident.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCJEomwVMrw

Video of students’ silent protest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmfIuKelOt4

Fox News description of pepper spray as a ‘food product’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrx6DDgTH_w

Changing meanings

Consider the major societies and ideologies since the beginning of the twentieth century:

• Social Democracy
• Nationalism
• Conservatism

Consider discourses that some of these societies used to organise social and political systems:

• Imperialism: empires can organise development, trade and governance more effectively than indigenous populations.
• Decolonisation: Empires are bad. Indigenous populations should be given independence.
• Human rights: There are universal human values that all societies should respect.

Each of these ideologies was or is taken to be ‘common-sense’. Examine one or more and ask:

• What ideas did they take to be ‘common-sense’ and ‘natural’?
• What institutions, practices, rituals, words and images did they use to convey their ideas?
• Who conveyed the ideas?
• Whose interests did these common-sense ideas serve?
• Who opposed these ideas and why?
• Are these ideas still common-sense? If not, what happened?

Explaining representation with The Wire

In a famous scene in the television drama The Wire three members of a drug gang sit guarding territory called ‘the Pit’ in an inner-city housing estate. The scene uses a metaphor to create meaning between everyday experience, mental concepts and a shared language. The scene illustrates the social nature of representation, how it is embedded within our everyday lives and relationships, and how it embodies and mediates power relationships.

D’Angelo, the leader of the trio sees the two junior members – Wallace and Bodie – playing checkers on a chess board. ‘Hold up you to don’t know how to play chess do you?’ he asks, and sits down to teach them the rules. He begins by picking up the king.

D’Angelo: See this? This the kingpin, a’ight? And he the man. You get the other dude’s king, you got the game. But he trying to get your king too, so you gotta protect it. Now, the king, he move one space any direction he damn choose, ’cause he’s the king. Like this, this, this, a’ight? But he ain’t got no hustle. But the rest of these motherfuckers on the team, they got his back. And they run so deep, he really ain’t gotta do shit.

Bodie : Like your uncle.

D’Angelo : Yeah, like my uncle. You see this? This the queen. She smart, she fast. She move any way she want, as far as she want. And she is the go-get-shit-done piece.

Wallace : Remind me of Stringer.

D’Angelo : And this over here is the castle. It’s like the stash. It can move like this, and like this.

Wallace : Dog, stash don’t move, man.

D’Angelo : C’mon, yo, think. How many time we move the stash house this week? Right? And every time we move the stash, we gotta move a little muscle with it, right? To protect it.

Bodie : True, true, you right. All right, what about them little baldheaded bitches right there?

D’Angelo : These right here, these are the pawns. They like the soldiers. They move like this, one space forward only. Except when they fight, then it’s like this. And they like the front lines, they be out in the field.

Wallace : So how do you get to be the king?

D’Angelo : It ain’t like that. See, the king stay the king, a’ight? Everything stay who he is. Except for the pawns. Now, if the pawn make it all the way down to the other dude’s side, he get to be queen. And like I said, the queen ain’t no bitch. She got all the moves.

Bodie : A’ight, so if I make it to the other end, I win.

D’Angelo : If you catch the other dude’s king and trap it, then you win.

Bodie : A’ight, but if I make it to the end, I’m top dog.

D’Angelo: Nah, yo, it ain’t like that. Look, the pawns, man, in the game, they get capped quick. They be out the game early.

Bodie : Unless they some smart-ass pawns.

D’Angelo explains the rules of chess drawing on the shared conceptual map and language of the inner-city drug trade. In his analysis of the scene, Peter Honig writes:

D’Angelo uses the familiar world of the drug hierarchy to explain an alien and complex game to Bodie and Wallace. At the same time, (the writers) use this scene to explain the (presumably) alien drug game to their audience using the (presumably) familiar rules of chess.

The rules of chess are understood via the world the characters live in, and the rules of the drug trade are understood via the world the audience lives in. Representation maintains power relationships by creating ways of understanding them. Representations make themselves true, ‘all knowledge, once applied in the real world, has real effects, and in that sense at least, ‘becomes true’’ (Hall 1997: 49). We are not outside representations. They constitute us as much as we produce and relate to them. Our representations shape both how we understand the world and how we act in it. They construct a position for us as the ‘reader’ or ‘viewer’, and we work to locate ourselves in relation to them. Representation is the production of social knowledge and therefore the development and maintenance of power relationships. Our way of understanding ourselves, our lives and our material worlds is marked out in relation to others, some of whom have more power to structure the schemas within which we understand the world.

By explaining the rules of chess to his colleagues D’Angelo is marking out the power relationships of the inner-city drug trade. For Honig,

D’Angelo isn’t so much teaching them how to play chess as he is trying to help them see that the world they are in is far more complex than they realise. But they refuse to see it, or at least Bodie does. His questions about promotion show a fundamental misunderstanding of board games, and all games. He keeps using the word ‘I’, as in a single piece standing in as his avatar. He is only capable of seeing the drug game as it applies to him in his limited experience in the Pit. He fails to consider the fact that a chess player has to manage an entire army of pieces with a variety of skills and abilities. The concept of both chess and the drug game are bigger than he realises.

The scene demonstrates how representation is a system that can communicate simple material aspects of the world like the rules of a game involving moving objects around a board. At the same time, it can also communicate complex, immaterial, social aspects of the world like the power relationships between people in a criminal enterprise. But, even though D’Angelo intends to explain those more complex power relationships, that doesn’t mean that Wallace and Bodie will understand. Representing social relationships always depends on our place within those relationships. D’Angelo’s explanation of how chess works is grounded in the everyday life experience of the inner-city drug trade, but even so the more junior members of the gang fail to fully appreciate the power relationships D’Angelo describes because of their position in the power relationships D’Angelo is representing. Much later in the narrative, Bodie appears to develop a fuller appreciation of D’Angelo’s representation when he says to a cop, ‘this game is rigged, we’re like them little bitches on the chess board’. The ability to make sense of representations is interrelated with our life experiences. The kind of life we lead, the people we interact with, the material environment we live in embeds us within certain systems of representation. Representation is a system for understanding things we can’t see or touch, but which we know shape our lives. Representation is critical to creating and regulating relationships between people. And, the material world in which we live shapes our systems of representation.

Bodie’s final line might also demonstrate the on-going nature of representation. Meanings are only ever partially and temporarily fixed. On one level the ‘rules’ of the game are represented as fixed and immutable to the ‘players’. The ‘king stays the king’ in both the game of chess and the drug trade. But, when Bodie says, ‘unless they some smart-ass pawns’, he suggests that players understand social arrangements and their meanings are never completely fixed. Regardless of whether we think D’Angelo ‘gets’ the bigger game that his junior colleagues don’t, or whether we think Bodie deftly ‘gets’ the contingent nature of meaning and power, what we do see here is how an explanation of the game of chess is used to re-present the inner-city drug trade and its power relationships. An explanation of the rules of chess serves to hold ‘in place relationships between people and the world’, and both the characters and the audience locate themselves in relation to those representations and perhaps recognise that they are never ‘finally fixed’ (Hall 1997: 23). Representation always involves the active participation of senders and receivers, communication must be understood as a process of exchange between people.

Representations are important for creating, enacting, maintaining and understanding relations of power. They help us to consider how power is something continually ‘done’ via communication. Practices of representation and power are diffused into our everyday lives and relations with people. Representation is a process embedded within the world, as much as it is a reflection of events and relationships in the world. Representation creates reality in the sense that by constructing our view of the world it shapes how we act in the world. These relationships are enacted by people at all positions in social hierarchies and formations. The three drug gang members as much as they ‘understand’ the system of representation D’Angelo explains to them, also enact it in their daily lives and practices. We can only understand the world and our place in it via discourse (Hall 1997: 45). For Foucault, this representational system was a ‘discursive formation’ that constructed and regulated ways of talking about topics. The relationship between media and the social world is a dynamic one, each interrelating with the other. Just as media re-presents the social world to us, in doing so, it shapes that world. Practices of representation are always-already embedded in the social world. They don’t sit outside of or above events and relationships. They are instead a part of them, and therefore condition them.

Map out how the game of chess represents the power relationships between characters in the urban drug trade.

Reflect on the extent to which the characters understand their role in those power relationships.

Consider how the game of chess makes the drug trade sensible to the audience. What meanings about the drug trade are conferred by the game of chess? Does the scene naturalise and legitimize the drug trade and the underclass?

The ‘King Stay the King’ scene from The Wire (Season 1, Episode 3).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0mxz2-AQ64

Peter Honig’s blogs about The Wire.

http://www.thewireblog.net/season-1/episode3_thebuys/chess-as-a-metaphor-for-everything/

Further Readings

The work of Stuart Hall and Nick Couldry are both instructive in developing an account of media representation. Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding essay, originally published in 1973, provides a seminal account of the process by which meanings are inscribed into texts and deciphered by audiences. Hall’s book Representation published with several colleagues in 1997 (and in an updated edition in 2013) provides a clear and accessible explanation of the cultural and media processes of representation. In the past decade Nick Couldry’s work on mediatisation, media power and rituals has further advanced our understanding of media representations within a media-dense society. Couldry draws our attention to how practices of media representation are embedded in everyday cultural practices, social spaces and power relationships. In chapter 1 we also referred to Foucault’s notion of discourse. For more advanced readers his book Discipline and Punish is a good place to start. In that book he defines the relationship between power, knowledge and representation.

Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and decoding in television discourse (Vol. 7). Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham or Hall, S. (1991). Culture, media, language: working papers in cultural studies, 1972-79. Routledge: London.

Hall, S., Evans, J. & Nixon, S. (Ed.). (2013). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices . Sage: London.

Couldry, N. (2002). The place of media power: Pilgrims and witnesses of the media age. Routledge: London.

Couldry, N. (2003). Media rituals: A critical approach . Routledge: London

Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2013). Conceptualizing mediatization: Contexts, traditions, arguments. Communication Theory , 23 (3), 191-202.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish. Penguin: London.

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Title: the representation power of neural networks: breaking the curse of dimensionality.

Abstract: In this paper, we analyze the number of neurons and training parameters that a neural networks needs to approximate multivariate functions of bounded second mixed derivatives -- Korobov functions. We prove upper bounds on these quantities for shallow and deep neural networks, breaking the curse of dimensionality. Our bounds hold for general activation functions, including ReLU. We further prove that these bounds nearly match the minimal number of parameters any continuous function approximator needs to approximate Korobov functions, showing that neural networks are near-optimal function approximators.

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The power of representation in leadership roles.

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The recently-announced presidential election results are important and historic for many reasons. One of the most groundbreaking—or rather, ceiling-breaking—of these reasons comes from having elected the first woman and first Black and Indian person to the position of Vice President of the United States. 

Marian Wright Edelman famously said that “you can’t be what you can’t see.” That is because it is difficult to have the confidence to pursue professional goals, and even to have ideas of what goals are available to pursue, when you don’t see people that share your same identities and experiences in those positions. Having never seen a vice president that held her identities and background to emulate, Kamala Harris had to dream bigger and work harder to be such an iconic first. Due to that hard work, raw talent and unwavering determination, she became the first woman of color in this office, but she also blazed a trail for those coming up behind her. People who share identities that she holds can now see themselves in similar places of leadership. As she said in her victory speech , “While I may be the first woman in this office, I won’t be the last. Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”  

The importance of seeing role models that share one’s identities starts at a young age. Oftentimes, people’s dreams of what they “want to be when they grow up” require decades of educational and professional experiences to achieve. That is why it’s so important for children and young adults to have role models that look like them in the places they might aspire to. Studies have shown that children’s career aspirations are highly influenced by who they see in their lives and in the media, and that these aspirations vary based on gender, race and socioeconomic status. Priyanka Raha, an Indian-American mother of two children and CEO of PopSmartKids shared, “When my kids watch a leader on national television, I want them to see themselves reflected in the leader. That has been difficult when they have been told that they are ‘not American,’ solely based on the color of their skin. I want to raise my kids to have the same ambitions as the next kid in class—not as an exception, but as the most normal thing that children do: believe they can be whoever they want to be.” 

Biases about what people in leadership roles look like don’t end at childhood. People who hold identities that aren’t represented in positions of leadership have a more difficult time climbing corporate ladders as well, with the C-suite in corporate America being 21% women, and 3% women of color, according to the Women in the Workplace 2020 report. This lack of representation in corporate leadership can stem from the mental cost of assimilation when someone feels like an only , the toll that microaggressions can take on performance, and a lack of confidence that it’s possible to rise higher, when others that share someone’s identities aren’t there to inspire them.   

Seeing Kamala Harris - a Black and Indian woman, a child of immigrants and an HBCU graduate - elected to the second-highest office in the country opens up the ideas of what is possible for so many people that identify with those aspects of her background. Lydia Samuels is a Black woman with Jamaican immigrant parents, who went to the same school, Howard University, and belongs to the same Divine 9 group of sororities as Vice President-elect Harris. For her, seeing Kamala Harris elected to the office of Vice President means so much.

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“For centuries, Black women have been the backbone of America, but we are the last to be given opportunity. I am beyond proud to witness my own reflection in the second-highest office in the country. This is only the beginning as we embark on a path of restoration. There is much more work to be done, as many of us still live in an America where we are not heard, seen, or valued. It’s about time that we get to celebrate and shed light on the phenomenal Black women that we are,” Samuels shared.

While the outcomes of any presidential election are partisan in nature, the importance of seeing people that share one’s identities in places of leadership and power is nonpartisan. Every child and adult will dream bigger, take bolder leaps, and feel more seen and valued when they are not alone in their journey. For those that find solidarity in the many identities and experiences that Kamala Harris represents, this is a historic moment.

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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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Thoughts on cultural representation: power and resistance

• April 30, 2019

• Society & Culture

Jin-Theng Craven

Trained in broadcasting, finance and international political economy, Jin is now a creative director and producer working independently in media and the visual arts. Early exposure to the interdisciplinary English and American Studies programme at University of East Anglia opened her eyes to the potency of soft power in shaping world relations.

We often associate power with direct physical power. But power also has to be understood in broader cultural and symbolic terms, including the power to represent someone or something in a certain way. How should we navigate a legacy of established systems of representations, toward s  a conscionable “reality”?  

“The close-up is the opposite of a statistic” – John Berger  (1)

As a filmmaker who also studied international relations, I am deeply interested in how we perceive our world through different vantage points – whether geographical, cultural or political, for instance. As an inveterate observer of people, I offer  some thoughts here – from personal experience and study – about how carefully we should consider  our preconceptions when we relate to other people, claim moral or political high ground, and imagine worlds based heavily on what Stuart Hall calls “racialised regime of representation”  (2) .

Science. Religion. Rationalism. Mysticism. Conventions. Cultural difference. Whatever the framing device, we have called many into service at various points of human history: we want to make sense of our purpose and place in the world, to understand who we are, to understand where we stand in relation to others. Lacking metaphorical cosmic wisdom, our human systems of representation become our self-constructed bible of “truths” to enlighten us. A flawed enterprise, I suggest.

Within the realm of media generally – especially modern media and the exponential rise of fake news   – is a complex web of systems of representation. Modern media appear keen to facilitate our search for understanding complexities. This article is not a discussion about such systems, per se , but tracks intriguing historical links to examine the relationship between those who represent and those who are represented. The aim is to show how the process of representation has been, and still is, an exercise in power play – for political, economic and social advantage that exploits. With this in mind, this article explores how, in the name of equity, we can fruitfully engage with impulses as old as humankind: that is, our desire to connect with others while seeking benefit both through tribe and self. In particular, it is worth considering how we can manage the future agency of visual arts and media, for a sustainable future.

Power and representation

We often associate power with direct physical power. Scientific and rational intellect – in recent history they convey power, too. But power also has to be understood in broader cultural and symbolic terms, including the power to represent someone or something in a certain way.

Representation can be regarded as characterising people in a highly reductive and de-contextualised manner – not, I suggest, simply to make sense of complex human relations, but to create political advantage.

It can be further argued that this political advantage is desired because of an instinct to ‘manipulate to dominate’ at the full expense of another entity – for economic gain. Some call this power play the ‘ zero sum game ’. The zero-sum player’s goal is to gain all benefit available and leave absolutely none to the perceived opponent; this strategy contrasts starkly with a ‘ win-win ’ mentality that drives players in the field to seek solutions where everyone involved achieves their desires in one form or another.

Cultural representation is a concept cultivated by Stuart Hall. Hall is recognized as a major contributor to the cultural field, particularly in expanding its focus on cultural representations of race and ethnicity, as well as gender. In my work documenting the lives and work of people whom I find inspiring, and whose stories I believe the world should hear, I am acutely aware of my responsibility as a documentarian, the person with the power to represent another, and the ethics that come with representation. For example, in my film biographies on Chua Ek Kay   and Ahmad Zakii Anwar   – two eminent pioneering artists from Asia – I was confronted with the challenge of providing contextualised  analyses of their characters and subsequent legacies, that had wider implications for how we regard ethnicity and the examined society . I weighed up my ethical duties in my own acts of cultural representation, against contemporary media trends to be reductive and sensationalist. I wanted to use that power with care.

The long shadow of empire

Veracity was not the ethical imperative that drove European imperialist ideology, however. When European empire s  dominated, Balfour and Cromer   reduced humanity to cultural and racial essences (3) . Today, post-colonial, such reductionary tendencies would fly in the face of movements toward diversity in the West: increasingly, marginalised social groups are being re-represented . Implemented  with the right intent and context, this is a healthy development.

But empire can cast a very long shadow. For my discussion on how power-play persistently factors into acts of representation – and even re-representation – I draw connections between the motivations of European global colonialism (‘imperialism’), 21st century ‘post-colonial imperialism with a Malaysian twist’, and the ‘counter-cultural’ work of Malaysian artist Ahmad Zakii Anwar .

Ahmad Zakii Anwar is the subject for a documentary film Edge of Obedience   that  I completed in 2017 ,  and which reveals his contemporary efforts to counter politicised representations of identity, through his taboo imagery. (You can stream the film here: watch Edge of Obedience )  

Writer and intellectual critic Edward W. Said   suggests that the imperialist vision proposed by Arthur James Balfour just over a century ago justified British occupation of Egypt as a necessity, claiming British “knowledge” about the “Oriental” people  (4) . We now understand the term “ Orientalism ”, coined by Said, as “the kind of intellectual power ”  and  “ a family of ideas ” that the British used to explain the behaviour of Orientals. As Said put it, the imperialists “supplied Orientals with a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere; most important, they allowed Europeans to deal with and even to see Orientals as a phenomenon possessing regular characteristics.” 

In short, Balfour forwarded the concept that “Orientals” had an innate inability to self-govern, and represented this flaw as an immutable characteristic of the Oriental  people . What Balfour rationalised as his superior race’s duty to govern Arabs and peoples of the East, writer Rudyard Kipling memorably phrased as the “White Man’s Burden”  (5) .  Colonialist officer Lord Cromer in fact refer red to Balfour’s “Orientals” less elegantly as “subject races”. Whatever the label, such imperialist ideology ha d the hallmarks of a political strategy employed by the Europeans to impose dominance, so as to deepen their imperialist economy. Crucially, imperialist practice hinged on a forcefully one-sided act of representation by the documenting authority (dominant culture) upon ‘the represented’ (weaker culture).

In an interview with Jonathan Crary and Phil Mariani in Wedge , 1985 , reproduced in the book Power, Politics and Culture   (6) , Edward Said establishes a direct and dynamic link between (i) domination of a political, social and economic nature, and (ii) systems of representation that exist or are created. Said understands that the whole science of representation (for example, in anthropology) depends on the silence of the Other . That is, a dominant culture can represent another – weaker – culture, but not allow that weaker culture to have a say in how it actually wants to be represented. Said g ives  his own example: tutored in colonial schools Said became more conversant in English history than his own Arab history, of which he knew nothing by the time he was an adolescent. The corollary of that was a young Said conditioned to see himself as a less valuable economic agent than the English ruling class.

Another example of the political bias in historical representation: between 1810-1890, Orientalist artists, who were mainly French and English, populated their paintings with snake charmers, veiled women and courtesans who often resembled Westerners in Eastern dress. Such stereotypical representations are essentially male fantasy portrayals of an exotic ‘East’, a mythological geography created with little basis in actual experience. Conjure up the classic harem  genre work. Erotic nudes and sexual narratives. What an outlet for pent-up…emotions. In the 19th century, such art was sold widely because there was enough demand from Western viewers who bought into the experience, and who could maintain moral facade-by-guile with the argument that, well, they were not, after all, lusting after real women. Yet, such Orientalist representations became entrenched as ‘real’ in mainstream consciousness. More sinisterly, then, is how conveniently such stereotyped representations had colonialist propaganda value for Europeans, who were keen to conquer Eastern countries through exploitative political and economic relationships, often using weight of moral argument conveyed through the lens of 19th century Christian morality: apparently the represented subjects were not just morally and sexually depraved, they were also uncivilised and needed oversight.

As John Berger points out in Understanding a Photograph , th e selectively composed photograph is as much about what you leave out , as it is about what you choose to present inside the frame. The portrait, then, is a strongly calculated decision about what qualities, what character of the subject you want to highlight, versus a potential alternative narrative you decide to diminish or obscure. It is context redesigned. It is pictorial politics. It is a truth and untruth, simultaneously.

The case of Malaysia

Back to the present day  from those of empire: across contemporary art fairs to journalism to Hollywood film stories, Western media coverage in the 21st century suggest s  that a rebalance in cultural representation is indeed underway. But let’s not be blindsided. In a much overlooked part of the world, commentators are raising the alarm about a new – distinctly local – form of  imperialism in a  former British colony: Malaysia . Over the last 20 years, concern has grown about Malaysian leaders applying their own “regime of representation” to extend political power through Islamisation in the country. Farouk A. Peru, Malaysian editor of the book Critical Thinkers for Islamic Reform , has warned that Islam in Malaysia is on “a steady slide towards fundamentalism and even violence”, and that sharia law, whose authority has grown steadily in Malaysia, was developed within an expansionist, imperialist framework — “and usually against the letter and spirit of the Koran”  (7 ) . Eddin Khoo, an interviewee in  my documentary Edge of Obedience , declares that Malaysia is having “The Great Muslim Debate” about the true tenets of Islam. What is happening here?

Economically independent today, multi-cultural Malaysia – as a sovereign political concept and entity – is a 20th century outcome of the colonial adventures of the British Empire. To quickly recapitulate, the Portuguese were the first European colonial powers to establish themselves on the Malay Peninsula and Southeast Asia; they captured Malacca in 1511. The Dutch followed in 1641 ,  b ut the British ultimately secured their hegemony across the territory that is now Malaysia, after initially establishing key bases in the region and sealing an agreement with the Dutch via the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 that defined boundaries between British Malaya and the Netherlands East indies (which became Indonesia). The final flow of foreigners came in the form of Chinese and Indian migrant workers to meet the needs of the colonial economy created by the British .

During World War II, Japanese invasion ended British domination, while Japanese occupation of Peninsular Malaya, North Borneo and Sarawak (all British Crown Colonies) from 1942 to 1945 unleashed nationalism. In Malaysia, Malay nationalists lobbied heavily for Malay interests. Negotiations led to what finally became the independent, multi-racial Federation of Malaya on 31 August 1957 (later Peninsular Malaysia in 1963). The British were forced to surrender their plans for a ‘Malayan Union’ to house the eleven Malayan states as a single British crown colony. Malay sultans’ power and Malays’ primacy were restored. However,  when working on my documentary film, Edge of Obedience , examining the life and work of the Malaysian painter Ahmad Zakii Anwar, I came to learn that to this day, modern Malaysia continues to fiercely debate what represents its national identity and economic purpose . The constitutionally enshrined ideal of an equitable multi-racial enterprise is not  the reality in practice.

Malaysia’s dominant political party United Malays National Organisation  (UMNO) was formed in 1946 and has governed Malaysia since, suffering a defeat only in 2019’s general elections with political alliance Pakatan Harapan now in power. UMNO has therefore shaped Malaysia’s politico-cultural landscapes profoundly  from Malaysian independence to the present day . UMNO was founded on the principles of prioritising Islam and the needs of the Malay community. Race riots in 1969 led to the imposition of emergency rule; in 2019 restrictions on political and civil liberties remain. Malaysia’s National Culture Policy was introduced in 1970 in response to the 1969 riots, and defines the heart of the country’s identity as being indigenous Malay and Islamic. Malay Muslims make up roughly two-thirds of the population, and the policy largely ignores the other diverse cultural and ethnic groups within the nation : the Chinese Evangelical Christians in East Malaysia; the Indian community; the non-Muslim Dayak peoples of Borneo; and the multiple native tribes and mixed racial groups . Sabah and Sarawak indigenous peoples were always “Lain-lain” (“Others”) on Malaysia’s government forms, until 2015, 58  years after national independence. 

To boost Malay citizens’ economic prospects, Malaysia also has a long-standing race-based preferential policy that benefits Malays. Despite his pledge to overturn this policy after his successful political comeback in 2017, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad now refuses to ratify a United Nations treaty against racial discrimination . Pundits suggest he has succumbed to intense pressure from his Malay constituency and so Malaysia will not adopt the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).

Under UMNO’s watch, the official iteration of Malay identity has itself transposed over the last two decades: all Malays are now deemed automatically Muslim , even if in reality  some Malaysian Malays do – or wish to – make quite different personal religious choices. Malaysia is the only country in the world which automatically assumes that all Malays are also Muslim. A similarly motivated and more recent development would be the Israeli parliament’s highly symbolic passing of its controversial Basic Law   in 2018, that defines Israel first and foremost as a Jewish nation state.

UMNO’s long-standing political dominance allows it to focus on its Malay-Muslim majority for its concept of Malaysian identity. The politics of representation are in full play today as it was in days of Europe and its empire s . Ironically, this time the Malaysian leadership’s system of representation is strategically skewed to prioritise Malay citizens’ rights against the rights of the country’s non-Malay communities. However,  not everyone accepts the state’s blanket idea of ethno-religious nationalism. Farouk Peru   argues that Malays should be exposed to various interpretations of Islam consistent with a modern world, claiming that while freedom of religion is guaranteed in Malaysia’s constitution, “it is forcibly being taken away from Malay Muslims by sharia law” which he branded an “anachronistic throwback”  (7) . Clearly there are representations of both Islam (religion), Malays (ethnic group) and Muslims (religious adherents) that are being heavily contested. Grassroots voices are agitating against official narratives.

Ahmad Zakii Anwar   may well be Malaysia’s best-known artist. He is also controversial. Born into a traditional Muslim family in 1950s Malaya, he is a Malay painter who from the 1990s onward became famous for his photo-realistic animal pictures, still life paintings and expressive portraits, which offer a timeless reinterpretation of modern Asian society. Zakii says his works are semi-autobiographical, referring to his own journey exploring identity and beliefs. His art continues to defy convention in an increasingly radical Islamic world. Amidst local controversy over his images, he persisted with his paintings of naked male bodies that are both provocative and fascinating, especially in the context of Malaysia, a society that still regards nakedness and even being different as taboo. But in stark contrast to European empire s ’ lusty Orientalist depictions, Zakii’s nudes are representations of his Sufi   philosophy: metaphysical musings visually represented through the physical form of human body, and grounded in Sufism , the most liberal end of Islam’s wide theological spectrum. Ahmad Zakii Anwar’s nudes are stripped of Eastern, Western or other culturally symbolic clothing; each lone body is cryptically posed and often in ambiguous settings. The paintings instead invite viewers to offer their own interpretations of what the works mean. The artist is cleverly holding up a mirror to the viewer, understanding that each viewer brings his or her own cultural, moral and intellectual compasses to bear upon the nude. His work confronts various other sensitive  subjects through imagery of pig trotters, shamans, transgenders and portraits of people of different races. As I developed my documentary Edge of Obedience  on artist Ahmad Zakii Anwar , I came to understand how his exploration of identity through visual representation is fraught with prescriptive social, political and religious red lines. But the controversial painter is adamant: “Rebellion is not a career. You rebel because you want to change something.” Resistance  (8) .

Positive cultural re-representation is underway in the West now ,  b ut over in today’s Malaysia the issue of representation remains contentious, complex and unresolved. Some Malaysians seek an inclusive identity; others prefer an exclusive one. Malaysia in the late 20th century emerged steadily from the shadow of colonial representation as “subject races” to present itself as an independent and inclusive republic where constitutional democracy prevailed and being Malay was still distinct from being Muslim. Putting aside Malaysian ‘non-Malay identities’ ,  which are seeming afterthoughts in mainstream discourse about ‘national identity’, the leadership is now re-representing  to its local constituency an updated cultural identity that conflates  ‘Muslim’ with ‘Malay’ with no recourse for the represented. Not all Malays subscribe to this prescriptive representation. There is, therefore, within parts of the Malaysian / Malay / Muslim community itself, resistance to the re-representation . How then should a filmmaker (re)present Ahmad Zakii Anwar the man, who is officially  both ‘Malay’ and ‘Muslim’, and his work which, in the eyes of Islamic fundamentalists, is “haram” and “un-Islamic”? His realist work cannot be de-contextualised from his environment.

Author John Berger says: “The close-up is the opposite of the statistic”  (9) .  There is a value implication in this statement: the statistic is a tool of bureaucracy and political strategy that deliberately disregards human nuances and context; the close-up suggests an effort to understand and empathise – by seeking detail in character, there is a desire to discern what makes the subject human, and to find ways to relate. Whether we accept or reject what we see is a choice ;  y our politic al beliefs  are  your choice. Will you seek to see another human being as a unique individual, or as a generalised, composited or even caricatured character?

Concluding thoughts

In the  21st century, how equipped are we collectively to handle this next phase of political and cultural relations, to avoid falling into a vicious circle of equally exclusive practice with a different face? Do we fully understand how representation works and the tools we need to unpack the systems of representation around us?

Edward Said in 1978 regarded “Orientalism” as a set of attitudes within European  imperialism . For him, “Orientalism” was essentially an idea, a creation, with no corresponding reality, and was a device to control, manipulate and dominate the non-Western world. Almost 30 years later, Ed Husain, a former radical Islamist from Britain who now champions liberal Muslims, made this point in his significant book The Islamist : “We make the mistake of seeing the world in physical entities,” he says. “With ISIS it has always been about ideas. It’s not so much a caliphate, it’s an expansionist fascist mindset.” Husain is appalled at the way unelected and unaccountable Islamist groups are portrayed by the media as representative .

Whatever your political, social and religious affiliations, the point is that such statements reveal much about the dubious nature of placing too much faith in our human and often imaginary systems of representation – these days increasingly built on 10-second media feeds   – which we either impose on others, which others impose upon us, or which we are manipulated into believing as truth. Such simplistic structures can sometimes serve as useful starting guides for understanding our relations in the world, but ultimately, we need to approach our systems of cultural representation with critical yet open minds. We can also challenge ourselves: do systems of representation always need to be zero-sum games? The individual human being demands recognition  as a much more nuanced, expansive and reflective soul . There  i s something to be said for knowing others by understanding ourselves first. Intimately and unflinchingly. To be aware how our individual psyches construct “reality” or “realities”. The lens through which we perceive  others is built from the psychological essence within, after all ,  a nd that essence is mutable.

“Let’s make room for voices yet to be heard, for stories yet to be told.”

So proclaims film streaming media giant Netflix US in its 2019 marketing ( video ).  Historically, systems of representation are exercised by dominant social groups for political advantage. We now see a greater awareness about how such tools of representation work, and there has been a movement toward re-representations across the board of social minorities who want the right to say what is authentic about themselves, and reclaim lost power in how societies and economies are run. From movements such as  International Women’s Day to creative resistance by artists across the globe, we see more facilitators of that cause.

Compared to the centuries-old system of representations that came before, which were Europe-dominant, globally we are still  in  the  early days of this next phase of cultural transition: as understanding about systems of representations filter through, previously power-poor players desire a re-balance of power as social communities, as economic agents and as nation-states. The results of such a rebalance  remain unclear –  not least whe n  there is a prospect of pushback from those who do not want to see their political advantages slip away. What are the longer-term agendas of groups pushing for re-representation? Will we return  to a ‘zero-sum  game ’ or advance  to  a ‘win-win’  scenario ? These are questions yet to be answered.

The reality today is that from grass roots activism to worldwide action, we are entering an exciting period of history where the world expects balance. Balance drives a better working world: human economy is more sustainable. These are benefits of approaching “representation” as a ‘win-win’ strategy   instead of the ‘zero-sum’ option. The corporate world is a macrocosm or sub-set of the universal world of human relations. It is a specialised arena for competing agendas, wants and outlook. It certainly competes on the art of representation: branding, marketing and corporate ambassador training. It also harnesses  the  media of the day to further its goals. We can learn from this arena about how we should best relate to one another in an informed age, that is through fair negotiation rather than war, and apply such principles to the field of economics and international relations . As Harvard negotiation expert Roger Fisher   proposes:

“Peace is not a piece of paper, but a way of dealing with conflict when it arises.”

How do we achieve the ‘win-win’ scenario, going forward? Integrating age-appropriate media and other audiovisual literacy programmes into primary school curricula, for instance, will help youngsters understand media manipulation early on  in many fields of study . This will help create thoughtful resistance against the deluge of images and sounds that are constructed for ill gain. On the other hand , media-literate learners will understand how to appreciate good craft in the spectrum of creative work that can, hopefully, in turn yield benefits to society.

In the final analysis, like it or not, systems of representations are a form of human language –  with moving parts. Representations are a basic currency for human communication and connection. I doubt we shall ever fully escape  from the politics of representation, but we can mitigate negative outcomes by equipping ourselves with discernment and principles that favour inclusive rather than divisive communities. So being able to deconstruct one system and rebuild  it  as another is a future skill worth investing in , but we should act quickly. Fundamental to inclusivity is a shared vision. Yet technology and the media are undermining the way we connect socially , challenging our ability to collaborate, while values change quickly with passing trends and inconsistent narratives. Unanchored, we struggle to know who we really are, which is leaving the door open for the most intimate of manipulations.

References: John Berger, “Recognition”, Understanding a Photograph, ed. Geoff Dyer, Penguin Books, 2013 Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’: Contesting a Racialised Regime of Representation”, Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Culture, Media and Identities Series, 1st Edition, Sage Publications in assoc with The Open University (ed. Stuart Hall), 2003 Edward W. Said, “In The Shadow of the West”, Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005 Edward W. Said, “Orientalism”, Penguin Books, 2003 Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). “The White Man’s Burden”, 1899 “Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said”, ed. Gauri Viswanathan, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005 Quoting from report by Rowan Callick, “Islam in Malaysia ‘sliding towards fundamentalism and violence’, expert says”, The Weekend Australian (online), 2014. Further reading: Edip Yuksel, Arnold Yasin Mol and Farouk A Peru (ed.), “Critical Thinkers for Islamic Reform”, Brainbow Press, 2009 Howarth, C. “Representations, identity and resistance in communication”. In: Hook, Derek and Franks, Bradley and Bauer, Martin W., (eds.) The social psychology of communication. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. John Berger, “Recognition”, Understanding a Photograph, ed. Geoff Dyer, Penguin Books, 2013

Received: 11.02.19, Ready: 20.03.19, Editors: Federico Germani, Robert Ganley.  

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The Importance of Representation in Books

Verywell / Catherine Song

National Literary Accolades

The need for intersectionality in books, negative impacts of representation gaps.

• Publishing's Power Dynamics

How to Increase Diversity in Books

According to the Brookings Institution, there are more BIPOC folx than Whites under the age of 15 years old in the U.S. (The term "folx" is an alternative spelling to "folks" used to emphasize inclusion of marginalized groups.)

While the United States has a very diverse population, this diversity is not always reflected within children's books.

"Books about White children, talking bears, trucks, monsters, potatoes, etc. represent nearly three quarters (71%) of children's and young adult books published in 2019," reports the Cooperative Children's Book Center.

According to the first Diversity Baseline Survey from Lee and Low Books, 79% of those working in children's book publishing were White in 2015. By 2019, the Diversity Baseline Survey found this number had decreased to 76%. While these data indicate that there has been an increase in employees of other ethnic backgrounds, this change is quite minimal.

Additionally, this small change is disheartening because, despite initiatives such as We Need Diverse Books and the Children’s Book Council Diversity Initiative to improve representation in children's books, it's clear that substantial improvement is needed.

Far too often, folx have decided that "the classics" are the most influential literary works of a certain time period. This perspective often does not bode well for oppressed and marginalized groups.

While some may still believe that the caliber of a book is determined by national accolades, such a view fails to understand the reality of systemic barriers in the publishing industry.

Even when diverse books manage the rare triumph of getting published, they receive less recognition from mainstream channels.

A study looked at 100 National Book Award finalists and 20 winners between 1996 and 2015. The researchers found that of the 23 culturally relevant texts nominated as finalists (culturally relevant refers to "texts that are written about a culture by a cultural insider and engage students within that culture, who would not otherwise not see their culture reflected in a book"), only 5 of those books won the National Book Award.

This research shows that if the value of a book is solely determined by how many literary accolades it receives, it may lead to a lack of representation of the experiences of marginalized folx.

In addressing the need for more representation in children's books, taking intersectionality into consideration is essential.

If you are unfamiliar with intersectionality, it may be a good time to learn more about the work of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw , who coined the term in 1989 to center the unique experiences of marginalization that Black women face but acknowledges that it is an ever-evolving term that is meant to include diverse experiences of identity.

Identity Markers

Intersectionality is important because even if books depict Black characters—if they only show Black boys that play sports or fight for civil rights—they don't represent the Black folx who are disabled, gender non-conforming, or some other identity.

In a study of three early elementary classroom library collections, the books in each of the libraries were reviewed to determine if the books were representative of diverse identities and experiences. The protagonist of each story was scanned for identity markers. Examples of these identity markers include:

• Language use
• Family structure (nuclear, single parent, extended family, etc.)
• Topics of social significance (i.e., homelessness, incarceration, immigrant/refugee status, etc.)

When reviewing books for the presence of these identity markers, it highlighted the importance of utilizing an intersectional lens when considering diversity in books.

By paying attention to such a wide variety of factors, books can promote diverse intersectional experiences, with the understanding that elementary school libraries often supply books that can act as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors for its young readers.

In a 2016 content analysis from the Journal of Children's Literature acknowledged that children’s books tend to depict protagonists that are "predominantly upper middle class, heterosexual, nondisabled, English-speaking, and male."

This may make it hard for young folx to engage in learning if they are too marginalized to identify with such privileged characters.

Authentic and diverse representation in books has significant impacts for readers, especially given how they influence the way in which young folx come to make sense of themselves and the world around them.

When children read books that only depict one kind of protagonist, it can skew their perceptions of themselves in a negative way. Children may see less value in themselves because of such poor representation, which can potentially minimize, erase, and ignore their identities.

Diminished Sense of Self-Worth Among Marginalized Children

In a study of children’s board books published between 2003 and 2008 for representations of BIPOC folx, it was ascertained that "racial and ethnic prejudices often make it difficult for children of color to develop positive feelings of competency and worth."

Given that books have the potential to help or harm young BIPOC folx in terms of developing a positive sense of self, the issue of representation in books has far-reaching consequences.

Identity Erasure

Critical race theory scholars advocate that "giving voice to the marginalized, counter-stories validate their life circumstances and serve as powerful ways to challenge and subvert the versions of reality held by the privileged."

In this way, it is crucial for all folx to see authentic representations of themselves and others, especially if oppressed, as it may help them to see new possibilities for their lives.

Publishing's Power Dynamics

The issue of representation has a great deal to do with the power dynamics in the publishing industry.

Laura Atkins, Children's Book Editor

Children's publishing, in both the U.S. and the U.K., is dominated by White, middle class women at lower levels, and men at higher levels of management, which inevitably affects perceptions of audience.

Laura Atkins, children's book editor, describes how, in her line of work, books are shaped by the tastes of editors, the culture of publishers, and potentially biased perceptions about who will buy and read books about such diverse experiences. "Children's publishing, in both the U.S. and the U.K., is dominated by White, middle class women at lower levels, and men at higher levels of management, which inevitably affects perceptions of audience."

For this reason, Atkins recommends that "there needs to be more diversity in terms of who is employed. This reliance on stereotypes is more likely to take place when those acquiring and selling the books do not include greater diversity (in terms of race, class, or region)."

Because of this, Atkins advocates for more diverse hiring practices so that publishers may increase their ability to reach a more diverse readership.

Given the gaps with how decisions are made regarding national literary awards, researchers recommend that publishers, writers, academics, teachers, librarians, and readers should explore the books that were recognized by The Coretta Scott King Award, the Pura Belpre Award, the Printz Award, Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award, and the Stonewall Book Award.

In this way, a focus on more targeted criteria for book accolades may increase the diversity of experiences covered, especially for marginalized folx, as national book awards have left a great deal to be desired in terms of recognizing talent across all groups in the U.S.

What Makes a Book Diverse?

From a study of classroom libraries, these following recommendations were made to help teachers choose books that show more diverse experiences:  

• Books with characters that foreground intersecting identities
• Books that provide mirrors for students’ gender identities, family structures, and disability experiences
• Books that reflect socially significant and critical issues in the community, the nation, and the world
• Transitional chapter books with Black boy characters

Especially for those who are invested in teaching, the issue of authentic diverse representation deserves more attention to ensure that all folx feel included when learning.

It is as crucial for privileged folx to read about the experiences of those who have been historically oppressed, as such learning can help prevent atrocities of the past from being repeated in future. Research suggests reading can teach children to empathize with people from backgrounds different from their own and reduce the salience of harmful stereotypes.

A Word From Verywell

Books have the potential to make a meaningful difference in the lives of readers, but the issue of representation continues to limit the outcomes for the most oppressed folx.

For this reason, it is important to understand how much change is needed in the publishing industry so that more can be done to achieve this.

Given how little progress has been made in terms of increasing diversity despite targeted initiatives for this purpose, a great deal more investment is necessary from the publishing industry.

Brookings Institution.  Less than half of US children under 15 are white, census shows .

Cooperative Children's Book Center. The numbers are in: 2019 CCBC diversity statistics .

Lee & Low Books.  Where is the diversity in publishing? The 2019 Diversity Baseline Survey results .

Bickmore ST, Xu Y, Sheridan MI. Where are the people of color?: Representation of cultural diversity in the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and advocating for diverse books in a non-post racial society .  Taboo J Cult Ed . 2017;16(1):39-52. doi:10.31390/taboo.16.1.06

Carbado DW, Crenshaw KW, Mays VM, Tomlinson B. Intersectionality: mapping the movements of a theory .  Du Bois Rev Soc Sci Res Race . 2013;10(2):303-312. doi:10.1017/s1742058x13000349

Henderson J, Warren K, Whitmore K, Flint A, Laman T, Jaggers W. Take a close look: inventorying your classroom library for diverse books .  Read Teach . 2020;73(3):747-755. doi:10.1002/trtr.1886

Crisp T, Knezek S, Quinn M, Bingham G, Girardeau K, Starks F. What's on our bookshelves? The diversity of children's literature in early childhood classroom libraries .  J Child Lit . 2016;42(2):29-42.

Hughes‐Hassell S, Cox EJ. Inside board books: representations of people of color .  Libr Q . 2010;80(3):211-230. doi:10.1086/652873

Atkins L. What’s the story? Issues of diversity and children’s publishing in the U.K.   E-rea . 2013;(11.1). doi:10.4000/erea.3537

Newstreet C, Sarker A, Shearer R. Teaching empathy: exploring multiple perspectives to address Islamophobia through children's literature . Read Teach . 2019;72(5):559-68. doi:10.1002/trtr.1764

By Krystal Jagoo  Krystal Kavita Jagoo is a social worker, committed to anti-oppressive practice.

HUM2020: Introduction to the Humanities

sharing what is means to be human

Representation

The process of representation is shaped by social and cultural forces and systems of power.  This lesson will examine the different types of representation used in the humanities, address the role of the humanities in creating representations, and explore the socio-cultural politics of representing and being represented in the humanities.

Lesson Objectives

• identify the role of symbols and representation in the humanities
• interpret symbolic meanings through different mediums in the humanities
• analyze the relationship between symbols,  representation and power in the humanities

Symbols and Representation

Humans have a unique capacity to communicate meanings through representation , the process of producing symbols to represent ideas. Symbolic representation allows people to communicate about the past, present and future, and it also provides a means of conceptualizing abstract and intangible mediums such as feelings and emotions as well as philosophy, math, physics, and more.

Humans create symbols by assigning meanings to arbitrary signifiers. This means that the symbol itself does not possess an inherent quality or trait associated with the meaning it represents; the meaning has been assigned to the symbol by the creator. Consider language as an example. Language is a complex system of arbitrary symbols and their associated meanings (Saussure 1911) . Right now, you are looking at a collection of arbitrary symbols called ‘letters’ which are arranged together to form ‘words’ that are associated with meanings. There is nothing inherent to these letters that indicate their meanings. At some point in our lives, we both learned to associate these symbols with the same meanings, and through practice, we can now effortlessly translate the symbols into meanings without realizing we are doing it. It is through our shared knowledge of this collection of symbols and meanings, called ‘English,’ that we are able to communicate ideas about the past, present and future.

Can you understand the symbols and meanings below?

مع نفس المعاني، ومن خلال الممارسة العملية، يمكننا الآن ترجمة جهد الرموز والمعاني دون أن يدركوا أننا نفعل ذلك. ومن خلال معرفتنا المشتركة لهذه المجموعة من الرموز والمعاني، وتسمى باللغة الانجليزية، ونحن قادرون على توصيل الأفكار عن الماضي والحاضر والمستقبل

Δεν υπάρχει τίποτα που είναι συνυφασμένοι με αυτά τα σύμβολα που δείχνουν νοήματα. Σε κάποιο σημείο στη ζωή μας, εμείς οι δύο μάθει να συνδέσει αυτά τα σύμβολα με τα ίδια νοήματα, και μέσα από την πράξη, μπορούμε τώρα να μεταφράσει αβίαστα τα σύμβολα και τις έννοιες, χωρίς να συνειδητοποιούν το κάνουμε.

If you do not understand the system of symbols depicted in the above paragraphs, it is because you never learned to associate the system of arbitrary symbols with their assigned concepts or meanings.  This shows how associations between symbols and meaning vary cross-culturally according to the unique experiences shared within a community.

Symbolism and representation take many different forms.  Writers use symbolism to strengthen their writing, making it more interesting and adding a layer of deeper meaning. Symbolic interpretation of religious scripture has a very long history. In the case of Christianity, for example, Bruno Barnhart (1989) points out that symbolic interpretation was the dominant mode of religious study for the first thousand years of Christian history. He argues that symbolism in the biblical narrative gives z deeper level of significance beyond the literal meaning.

Since ancient times, symbolism has been pervasive throughout all forms of art and literature as objects, colors, and scenarios have been used to represent meanings intended to establish an aura or mood that is not captured through simple literal translation. Plants, animals, weather, shapes and colors are common sources for symbol-making that have been used to convey complex meanings, ideas or a set of ideas.

The poem ‘Harlem,’ by Langston Hughes about the African-American experience during the first half of the 20th century, uses objects like ‘a raisin in the sun’ and a ‘festering sore’ to communicate what happens when dreams are put off or deferred. Hughes’s poem moves beyond simply describing the details of a scenario; through symbols he communicates complex emotions and feelings. This provides the reader an opportunity to connect with Hughes through the shared experience of what it feels like to have a dream deferred, or it also helps a reader empathize with the experience of another human being.

It is important to note, however, that symbols and meanings not only vary cross-culturally, the same symbol can also be used differently to communicate contradictory meanings. The color red, for example, may be used to communicate emotions such as anger, power, or anxiety while at the same time it can also represent love or embarrassment in different creative scenarios. In his short fictional story, The Red Room , Paul Bowles describes a red room within a villa that has a particularly odd feeling. Once the reader learns of the significance of the room, the color red, lends a creepy sinisterness. After reading the story, it seems unlikely that the colors mauve, beige, or blue would provide the same effect for Bowles.  This is why it is important to not only learn about and identify the many different uses and modes for symbol-making, it is just as significant to situate symbology within its specific context.

It is impossible to thoroughly explore symbolism within a single lesson, or even a single semester. For now, however, we will take a brief look at a few of the most common types symbolic practices in the humanities and then move on to interrogate the ways that symbolism and representation can be situated within systems of power relations.

Symbolic Practices

A metaphor is a  figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable. A metaphor may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared with other types of figurative language, such as antithesis, hyperbole, metonymy and simile.

‘My love is like a red, red rose’ by Robert Burns (1759-1796) is one type of symbolism used in literature to represent romantic love, and more than 200 years later it continues to represent love in the primetime TV series, The Bachelor .  Both metaphor and simile use comparisons between two objects or ideas,

A simile makes a comparison of similarities between two different things. Unlike a metaphor, a simile draws on resemblance and relies on words such as “like” or “as” to make a direct comparison.  Simile adds beauty and effect to literature. Simile can add appeal and attention to the senses by encouraging the imagination to envision what is being communicated. It also infuses a life-like quality by compelling readers to relate feelings and personal experiences. This makes it easier for the readers to understand the moods and meaning of a literary text. In Lord Jim , Joseph Conrad used simile to compare the helplessness of a soul to a small bird in a cage.

“I would have given anything for the power to soothe her frail soul, tormenting itself in its invincible ignorance like a small bird beating about the cruel wires of a cage.”

Allegory is another type of symbolism found in literature where the use of story elements such as the plot, setting, characters or objects are used to symbolize something else. George Orwell’s 1945 novel  Animal Farm , uses allegorical meanings to make a commentary on oppressive institutions, and this type of symbolism remains throughout the entire literary work. In the plot of  Animal Farm , the farm animals rise up against their human masters, and this mirrors and critiques the political events in Russia in the early 1900s. The animal characters symbolizing real-life political figures such as pig named Napolean, who takes charge.

A parable is a short story that typically ends with a moral lesson. Common parables include The Boy Who Cried Wolf , The Turtle and the Rabbit , and  The Good Samaritan.   Parables rely on symbolism, similie, and metaphor to communicate a complex lesson in a succinct narrative. Parables are often used in religious texts such as the Upanishad, the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran.

In the second chapter of the Quran, ( Al Baqra  2: 259) for example, there is a story of a man who begins to doubt the ability of God to resurrect as he passes through a place where people died. Subsequently, God caused him to die, and then resurrected him after a hundred years. When God asked the man how long he slept, he replied only a day because the food he brought with him was still fresh. The man’s donkey, on the other hand, became a skeleton. God joined the bones, muscles, flesh and blood of the donkey and brought it back to life. This Islamic parable aims to teach a moral lesson in three ways: 1. God has control over all things and time; 2. God has power over life, death, resurrection and no other can have this power; and 3. Humans have no power, and they should put their faith only in God. Parables are great teaching tools to convey complicated moral and philosophical lessons in a way that is relatable and understandable to the reader’s personal experiences. Parables take common scenarios in day-to-day lives and use them to represent deeper meanings and messages. They are effective because the reader is guided to draw a conclusion and then apply the lesson’s principles in life.

There are a wide range of other forms of symbolic representation in the humanities, and we will take a closer look in future lessons. Now, we will examine the meanings and effects of symbolic representation of the body, particularly in terms if gender and race, within different mediums such as music videos, television, media and art.

Representing Bodies

The human body has been a central focus within the humanities since prehistory. Depictions of the human body are included in ancient cave paintings, paleolithic sculptures such as the Venus of Willendorf, classical Greek and Roman statues such as the David, the Terracotta Soldiers of China, and modern television series such as Sex in the City . Throughout history the human body has been represented in an infinite number of ways. Yet the body is more than just a biological object, bodies are socialized through the meanings we assign to bodies. This is evident in the ideas and values that we assign to sex, gender, race, nationality and other categories that not only assign meanings to bodies, they also influence the way the bodies are treated as well as the right, roles and responsibilities that are assigned to people according to the ways the body is classified and categories. This makes it possible to interpret cultures and sociel systems by the ways that bodies are represented.

Watch the video below to get a sense of the multiplicity of ways the body has been represented in painting. Considr the wide variety of techniques and considerations artist takes through realism, depth, dimension, arrangement, proportion and more to assign meanings to the human symbolic form.

The video above describes how an artist’s decisions are oftentimes influenced by cultural values, ideas and motivations. In many cases, the artist nor the viewer may be aware of the values and ideas influencing the work. This complicates the manner in which bodies are represented in the humanities, because the representation of a body is a representation of the people, class and culture to which the body belongs. This makes it critical to examine who is creating the representation, who is being represented, and for whom is the representation created.

Gender, Race and Representation in the Humanities

The humanities provides a lens through which people view themselves and their own culture as well as the way people view groups and cultures they are not a part of. Movies, stories, news reports, photographs and art deliver information about peoples and cultures to an audience that may have little or no prior experience engaging with the peoples and cultures being represented. This is why it is important to think critically about the ways people are portrayed in the humanities.

Critical Theory is an analytical approach to assess and evaluate how power informs social interactions. Studying representations of race and gender in the humanities allows us to learn about race and gender relationships throughout history and across cultures. By studying gendered and racialized representations in the humanities (such as in language, literature, art, music, and popular media), we can interpret how meanings and ideas are assigned to gender and race by certain members of a particular society. This is why it is important to identify the producer of the imagery and the individual or group being produced.

In his documentary, Dream Worlds , Media Studies professor Sut Jhally, examines how representations of women, gender and heterosexual relationships in popular music videos reflects a culture of male entitlement and the hyper-sexualization of women as objects for men’s pleasure. He also reflects on the ways that these representations can influence social and sexual relationships in the real lives of the audience.

Sut Jhally critically examines representation of gender, sex and sexuality in specific music videos by investigating the relationship between those who created the representation (men) and who is being represented (women.) By doing this, he is able to address how status and power relationships between men and women inform and are informed by gendered relationships in the society where the videos are produced.

Along the same lines, Byron Hurt’s documentary film, Hip Hop Beyond Beats and Rhymes, critically examines how race and gender is represented in hip hop music and videos. Hurt’s investigation into the hip hop record industry reveals that the industry is controlled by white record label executives producing music and imagery for a predominantly young white male consumer base.

Although Hurt and Jhally rely on music videos from the 90s, music and media produced by current viral sensation, Takashi 69, shows that the same pejorative representations of race and gender are pervasive today.

Like music videos, a critical and comparative examination of visual art, literature and storytelling can reveal information about gender and race throughout history.

In her book, The Serpent and the Goddess , Mary Condren analyzes how the declining status of women in ancient Ireland during Christianization parallels changes in the mythology of Brigid. The pre-eminent Goddess in early Irish religious traditions was initially considered a powerful female diety and served as the patroness of poetry, smithing, medicine, arts and crafts, cattle and other livestock, sacred wells, and serpents. During the Christianization of Ireland, however, stories and myths about Brigid changed over time. Pre-Christian folklore initially presented her as a woman of immense power and a triple diety. After the arrival of the Christian Saxons, new stories protrayed her as a weak goddess. In time, the goddess Brigid was transformed into a Christian saint of the same name. According to medievalist Pamela Berger, Christian “monks took the ancient figure of the mother goddess and grafted her name and functions onto her Christian counterpart.” Today, St. Brigid is associated with perpetual, sacred flames, such as the one maintained by 19 nuns at her sanctuary in Kildare, Ireland. Both the goddess and saint are associated with holy wells, at Kildare and many other sites in the Celtic lands. Saint Brigid shares many of the goddess’s attributes and her feast day on 1 February was originally a pagan festival (Imbolc) marking the beginning of spring.

Cultural ideas about men and masculinity are also reproduced within the humanities. Ancient mythology of the Greeks and Romans reflects classical ideas about men, power and authority as well as gender relationships between men and men with women. Religious texts codify roles and expectations for men, relations with women, and men’s role in marriage and families.

Representations of superheroes in popular American comics have traditionally presented a narrow focus on men, heroism, and masculinity. Representations of ‘superheroes’ provided hyper-masculinized representations for men and boys while at the same time challenging normative ideas. In the article, ‘ Superhero Masculinity ,’ Steven Jones points out that superheroes can represent new models for men and boys beyond power and authority by revealing binary or dual relationships such as superman and Clark Kent, Batman and Robin, and by presenting the first gay superhero, Northstar, in 1979 with an official coming out (‘I am gay’) in 1992. Changing representations of male superheroes reflects changing cultural norms and values about men, gender and sexuality.

Visit the MOMA learning module and read the brief lessons, The Body in Art and Constructing Gender.

The Politics of Power in Representing Races and Cultures

Critical theory in the late twentieth century identified how relationships of power and representation lend to distinctive patterns in the humanities. In most cases, representations are produced by those who have power, and the powerless are usually the ones being represented. This creates a bias in representative forms. In his book, Orientalism (1978), Edward Said points out the social and political implications associated with power and representation as he described the inconsistencies between representations of Arab men in media and film and his own experiences as an Arab man.

According to Said, representations of the Middle East and Arab cultures had nothing to do with the realities of life in the region and had everything to do with the unequal relationship of power in colonial domination. He defined Orientalism as a prejudiced outsider representation shaped by the attitudes of imperialists in order to justify the occupation of foreign territories and the exploitation of indigenous people who live in those territories.   In essence, Said argues that those in power represent the people they oppress in ways that justify their oppression. (fo rmore on this, watch the documentary “ Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood vilifies a people on Vimeo.)

Said’s analysis primarily targets artistic representations of the Middle East by European artists and writers, yet his critique on representation and power has been expanded to address pejorative representations of colonized and oppressed people throughout the world; Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the indigenous populations of North America. It has informed more critical analysis of race and representation within a cultural group by scholars such as Stuart Hall. The video below gives a synopsis of the underlying thesis in Hall’s work.

The work of Said, Hall and other scholars of critical theory reveals patterns of Othering, a process of creating a representation of a person or group that appears foreign, alien and strange to the viewer. The ‘Other’ is created through Binary Opposition , a key concept in structuralism (a theory of sociology, anthropology and linguistics) that states that all elements of human culture can only be understood in relation to one another and how they function within a larger system or the overall environment. Light is defined in relationship to dark, good needs evil, etc. Binary oppositions are prevalent in the humanities where relationships between different groups of people (rich and poor, white and black, men and women, gay and straight, etc.) are represented. A key aspect of Othering is that the producer and the receiver of what is produced (audience, viewer, listener) are of the same group, but the person or people represented is excluded.  These representations create or reinforce boundaries between groups of people and promote prejudice and discrimination of those who are othered in the representation due to fear induced by the representation.

As the identity lesson pointed out, the humanities also provides a platform for people to deconstruct pejorative representations from the past and reconstruct self-representations that present a new interpretation of life and culture from all perspectives. As artists, writers, film makers, philosophers and the like contribute to humanities as a practice, humanities as a field can benefit from the addition of diverse perspectives, unique experiences, and different ways of viewing the world.  Literary works such as the novella, A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid , provides a window into the lived experiences of post-colonialism in the Caribbean. Zora Neale Hurston  ( Their Eyes were Watching God ) and Alice Walker  ( The Color Purple ) are part of an elite league of African-American female writers who take the experiences of African American women from the margins and into the mainstream. Films produced by Spike Lee’s production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks , aims to redefine representations of blackness in Hollywood while the film, The Joy Luck Club , based on Amy Tan’ s first best-selling book, countered popular stereotypes about Asian women. African artists such as El Anatusi and Nnenna Okore are rocking the art world with a unique style that integrates ancient African techniques with cutting edge technologies.

As Thelma Golden points out in her Ted Talk below, the humanities not only reflects a culture, it can also provide a means to change it.

Symbols and Representation in the Humanities

When we enter into the next module which begins the analysis component in this course, it is important to contemplate the power of symbol-making and the socio-cultural politics of representation in the humanities as we dig deeper into various mediums such as literature, poetry, art, film, and other types of expression.

Questions to Consider

• What are symbols and how are they created?
• How can the human body be symbolic?
• How is critical theory applied in the humanities?
• Why is it important to identify the producer and the produced while engaging representations of people?

References and Readings

To learn more about symbols and representation in the humanities, explore the links below.

• Hall, S. (Ed.). (1997).  Culture, media and identities. Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices.   Sage Publications, Inc; Open University Press.
• Hall, Stuart. ‘Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation’ in Permutations of Difference.
• Living Arts Originals website.
• ‘Symbols in Art: Who’s who?’ Smithsonian education.
• ‘Symbols in Art’ Britannica online .
• ‘Electronic Empires: Orientalism Revisted in the Military Shooter’ Hoglund
• Orientalism, Khan Academy
• Students Against Othering
• Byron Hurt. Hip Hop Beyond Beats and Rhymes (documentary)

What did you learn about symbols and representation in this lesson? Take the ungraded quiz below to find out.

[slickquiz id=5]

For Discussion in Canvas

In his article, Electronic Empires , Hoglund applied Edward Said’s theoretical perspective on Orientalism to show how the representations of Arab men in American video games contribute to a pattern of negative representations of Arab people created by people who are not members of the Arab community. Search the internet for another example of Orientalism / Othering in the humanities (film, art, song, games, etc.) and conduct your own analysis using Said’s and or Hall’s theoretical framework by answering the following questions:

• Who is represented and who is doing the representing?
• What types of meanings are assigned to the representation of the person or group?
• What type of bias or prejudice is communicated by the representation?
• In what ways does the representation serve to promote or justify the oppression, exploitation or inequality of the person or people being represented? 
• Be sure to embed or include a weblink to the image or representation in your post.

For Your Creative Journal

Create an ‘alternative representation’ that goes against the grain of popular cultural representations, or stereotypes, that are pervasive in media such as art, film, and literature. Use a representation that is taken for granted and reverse it. You can express your alternative representation as a character, short story, image, song, or any medium you prefer. Provide a brief explanation of your representation.

When you complete this lesson, study your notes for this module and prepare to take the quiz before moving on to the next module, Analysis I .

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WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

Helping writers become bestselling authors

Representation in Literature: Why It’s Important & How To Handle It

October 10, 2018 by ANGELA ACKERMAN

Happy to welcome Deborah Dixon , a passionate author, editor, and racial justice activist to talk a bit on Representation in Literature, a topic of importance and something I think many of us want to understand better so we can encourage the right sort of discussions and help bring about change. Please read on!

The issue of representation has become an important one in literature and throughout the entertainment industry. As an author and publisher of color, I am often asked to offer insight on how best to include characters of diverse backgrounds. Specifically, this means characters from minority or underrepresented groups, such as ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ persons, religious minorities, those with disabilities, and to some extent, socioeconomic minorities. In this article, I will use the term “minority” to refer to members of all of these groups.

First, my credentials: I am Jamaican, neurodivergent, and simultaneously a citizen of and immigrant to the United States, among other things. These credentials do matter, because the basis of a person’s regard for your opinion on these sensitive matters starts with your background. It isn’t the whole picture; not every minority person has the same breadth of experiences, and many majority members have been exposed to the problems that minority members face. Also, like anything else, background and privilege are nuanced. Even I have some sources of privilege: I am cisgender and not physically disabled.

Also valued is the nature of a writer’s privilege. I won’t discuss privilege and entitlement too much here, as there are plenty of resources on both, such as this exploration of the different elements of identity.

There are two primary reasons why representation is important: inclusivity and perception .

Seeing people who look, act, and experience life like them in media makes a person feel included in a society, and it reinforces positive views of themselves and what they can achieve in society. Also, members of other groups, especially majority groups, base their ideas of groups on what they see in the media . For example, a hiring manager who watches too many police procedurals might view candidates of minority races as having criminal tendencies.

For people who exist outside of these marginalized and underrepresented groups, it can be hard to imagine life with the experiences and hardships that minorities experience. Without those experiences, writing characters of diverse backgrounds can seem daunting.

A good start is to be cognizant of the problems that your character would face and when those problems would have to be addressed. People of minority groups are still people; we have similar needs and similar motivations. The main difference is in the ways that society and its structures are arrayed against any particular group.

Therefore, in some situations, it will be perfectly acceptable to write a minority character just as you would any other. If a character’s romantic relationships are never brought up, then their sexual orientation might be little more than a footnote. Likewise, a black student’s college career might be just like that of a white student if the college itself is diverse and tolerant.

However, if the character is placed in a situation where their identity would be a factor, then it would be irresponsible to overlook it. For example, a black character being pulled over by the police should be described as feeling exceptional anxiety over their possible treatment by the officers. Whether the writer feels that this is a legitimate fear is irrelevant; it is what black people experience, and it is a problem that we continue to battle . Any work that included a black character getting along famously with the police would be soundly ridiculed by the black community.

Also, it might be tempting to fall back on stereotypes, but these are harmful images that still negatively affect members of those minorities. Take, for example, the common use of Middle Eastern characters as villains , or the portrayal of Native Americans as oversexualized savages . If these are the characters that are being written, then we would rather not have them at all!

Remember that minority characters are not there to be “exotic” ornaments for your plot. One striking example I encountered as an editor was a white writer using an almost all-white cast who included an Asian woman as a manicurist. It was meant as a cheeky observation, but in practice, it supported yet another harmful stereotype, and it would have reinforced to readers that Asian woman are only fit to run nail salons.

Always Do the Research

There is plenty of first-hand material about the situations that minority groups face, and many companies, including mine , offer research specific to fiction writing. If you happen to know someone from the group that you are interested in writing about, then ask that person if they can offer any insight, and be prepared for them to possibly turn you down.

Finally, remember that this is a cultural exchange; you must offer something in return. Consider promoting minority authors. Don’t just tack on characters to be “diverse,” and don’t borrow elements from a group without context, such as European knights using scimitars because they’re “cool.”

For a well-known example of what not to do , observe J. K. Rowling’s approach to including Native Americans in the Potterverse. She combined the hundreds of Native American cultures into one homogenous “community,” reappropriated important cultural touchstones, and supported harmful narratives of Natives accepting white colonialism. Although she was called out on this , she has not publicly apologized or changed her approach.

The best recent example of representation being done right is a film: 2016’s The Accountant , in which the main character, played by Ben Affleck, is high-functioning autistic. While the character is written in a very predictable fashion—aural oversensitivity, emotional vacancy—Affleck’s performance provides nuance that elevates the entire story. It’s clear that he and his supporting cast did the research, and while the movie’s overall effect on the autistic community is debatable, many of us saw pieces of ourselves in its protagonist .

Although the entertainment industry at large is welcoming more content written by minority members, most stories that reach the mainstream are still ones written by the majority—white, straight people. The majority still has a much stronger voice. Use it to amplify positive portrayals of the people who need them the most.

As with anything else, when in doubt, ask.

Look for editors who specifically offer sensitivity reading as part of their processes. Many editors, like those at Shalamar, offer diversity feedback as a matter of course.  Here’s an additional resource to check out if you are incorporating diversity in your work:

Writing Diversity Checklist

We welcome respectful discussion–if you have questions or comments, debra is here to discuss.

Shalamar is a book publishing and author advocacy company based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Created in 2016 by a trio of writers, Shalamar aims to break down barriers to entry in publishing by offering accessible and affordable services to new and undiscovered writers.

The company also supports initiatives to amplify voices from underrepresented and marginalized groups. They can be found at @shalamarllp on Facebook and @ShalamarNOLA everywhere else.

Deborah Dixon is a cofounder, author, and editor at Shalamar . She has published two novels, seven novellas, and numerous short stories of her own.

She is a digital rights and racial justice activist, and her opinions on social issues, the publishing process, and Saints football can be found on Twitter at @Deboracracy .

Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers , a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.

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Reader Interactions

October 18, 2020 at 10:26 am

I believe that books are the essence of who we are and who we dream of being. Therefore, representation is a crucial component in building the identity of an individual and its sense of belonging. Reading about someone who looks like you makes you feel that you can achieve anything and that you truly belong in the society. Seeing someone just like me being reflected in a book makes me feel that I’m not the outsider that I always thought I was. However, there is indeed a lack of representation of minority groups in books. I totally agree that the lack of representation has become an important issue in literature and that minorities should be depicted more in books. In that being said however, any representation should not be accepted just because of the lack of it. Disrespectful and damaging representations of minorities should not be tolerated just for the sake of finally being represented in books.

August 13, 2019 at 11:26 pm

Great stuff, and the Shalamar tips before publishing are excellent and extensive! Thanks for this. Will help my Gr 12 English class think oppressive representation that occurs in some of these more subtle ways.

August 13, 2019 at 11:40 pm

August 22, 2019 at 3:51 pm

Thank you so much Wes, and best wishes for your English class! Glad you found this information and the resources helpful. Feel free to reach out if I can help further!

October 12, 2018 at 12:08 am

As a Native American author, I want to thank you for this post. Keep fighting the good fight!

It is hard to find books where people like me aren’t A) Sexy Shifters B) Poor C) Swindlers

Which is funny, since none of the Lenni-Lenape people that I know are any of those. Hang on… *runs outside, looks at the moon, tries real real extra super hard* Nope. Still not a shifter. Darn. 😉

My people also didn’t wear huge feather headdresses, live in teepees, say “howgh” for hello, or most of the other traits that perhaps were exhibited in the western tribes. We did, however, influence the creation of the original laws of this country, such as the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Obviously not well enough to be considered human until 1879, or be eligible to be citizen of the land we’d lived on for thousands of years until 1924, or get the Voting Rights Act fully nailed down (looking at two states right now…). But hey, we tried.

If anyone out there does have a book with well-written Lenni-Lenape characters, please track me down and drop a buy link. I’m always looking!

October 12, 2018 at 2:24 pm

Preach it! I would love to sit many, many non-Native writers (sadly, including some Black ones) down and have them write this sentence a few hundred times:

Native American communities are NOT monolithic.

As you can see above, I refuse to let Rowling live it down.

If anyone out there has a story will well-developed Lenni-Lenape characters, I just might publish it. 😉

October 11, 2018 at 10:02 pm

That’s definitely some great stuff, and I largely agree. I do take issue with simply saying there are some things you should “never do.” For example, making an autistic character have some unique strange ability can work if it’s done well or the usual cliches of the trope are subverted.

I’m not saying that just for the sake of debate. I have autism myself, and my current story in progress plays on that trope.

October 12, 2018 at 2:13 pm

Thank you Claire! And thanks for checking out our list!

The things that made it onto the Never-Do list aren’t there because they can’t be done well, but because when they are done (well or otherwise), they consistently cause harm to real, living people of that particular group.

Regarding autistic characters, I’ll go and change my wording on the list, but I did think specifically of powers that are related to a character’s autism, correcting the ‘imbalance’ of the disability. (An autistic character with, say, lightning powers, unrelated to her autism, would probably be okay.)

Objectively, a disability-superpower autistic character could possibly be done well, especially by an autistic writer, but I respectfully disagree that the character *should* be done even so. Even if the character was brilliant and an excellent role model, like a neurodivergent Wonder Woman, she would still be perpetrating objectifying stereotypes about how we need a ‘cure’ to balance out our deficiencies. It also isolates a model minority within the autistic community, as it elevates ‘superhuman’ autistics (ie savants) above others on the spectrum, valuing them more and devaluing the others as useless or helpless.

(Here’s an article that goes into model minorities more: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/why-good-doctor-is-bad-medicine-autism-1098809 )

So while this kind of character could work from a character-development standpoint, her existence would cause strain on those of us (like you and me) who deal with autism stereotypes regularly. My opinion is that the character isn’t worth the harm done, but we likely have different experiences and observations that lead to different conclusions. 🙂

October 11, 2018 at 9:15 pm

Wonderful! Very revelant!

October 12, 2018 at 1:29 pm

Thanks for reading, Traci!!

October 11, 2018 at 2:03 pm

First of all, Who Dat!!!

Thank you so much for writing this article, Deborah. I loved that you explained that a writer needs to remember that diverse characters are still human beings. I also hate that you had to say that.

I had a small press from Mississippi, where I’m from, reach out to me about wanting to work with me. The minute they found out I was a lesbian they quickly let me know that they could not work with a story with LGBTQ+ characters, because they wouldn’t know how to market it. It was shocking and saddening. Needless to say, I did not work with them.

Thank you again, and I look forward to checking out your company and your work!

October 11, 2018 at 4:12 pm

Yeah you rite Keli!!!!

I’m sorry to hear about your experience with that press! And yet I’m not surprised. The inclusion of underrepresented writers ourselves is another topic that I’m passionate about, and fortunately I get to work toward that goal through Shalamar.

Being treated that way, particularly by a press that sought you out, had to have stung, and rightfully so; but, with the benefit of hindsight, people that closed-minded would have been rough to work with anyway, so maybe it was for the better, rudeness and prejudice aside.

(Marketing professionals are specifically taught to adapt to different audience, genres, and trends, so that excuse is always code for “we don’t want to work with you.”)

I hope you found a much better home for your writing, and would love to hear from you anytime!

October 11, 2018 at 10:23 am

Glad to have you here discussing something that I think confuses a lot of people because sometimes we can see part of the picture, but not the whole thing and so we don’t necessarily realize the ripples that come from stereotypes or the level of inequity out there.

In our fiction it is our job to make the reader feel part of another’s point of view. I think as a Caucasian and a Caucasian author, I need to work harder to do what I can to make sure all voices are represented. Change comes about through understanding, and this happens at all levels from governing entities to the drivers of industries to the producers of content and the consumers of that content.

Thanks for being here!

October 11, 2018 at 9:06 am

Hi everyone! Angela, thank you SO MUCH for your help and your kindness! You are an inspiration to me as an author advocate. <3

Readers: Thanks for checking out this article! I am happy to answer any further questions you might have here. You can also contact me directly if you'd prefer a one-on-one conversation.

Much love from New Orleans!

October 11, 2018 at 9:03 am

Thanks for being here today, Deborah!

October 11, 2018 at 3:59 pm

Hi Becca! Thanks for having me! 🙂

[…] Ackerman talks about the importance of inclusivity and perception.   Inclusivity prescribes that the characters in the texts that we use should be as […]

[…] Deborah Dixon examine representation in literature: why it’s important and how to handle it. […]

Stuart Hall and Representation

What is representation.

Stuart Hall believed representation was the “process by which members of a culture use language… to produce meaning”. It is the organisation of signs, which we use to understand and describe the world, into a wider set of values of ideologies. These meanings are not fixed or “real”; they are produced and defined by society.

Systems of Representation

Hall (1997) identified two “systems of representation” – conceptual maps and language.

Conceptual Maps

The first system consists of the mental representations we carry around in our minds. You should have no trouble picturing your friends and family, or the places you have visited recently. Experiences and events remain vivid long after they have concluded. We have the ability to imagine abstract concepts and theories. Even fictional worlds and mythical creatures can be fully realised in our thoughts.

These ideas are all representations of what we might consider to be the real world.

Conceptual Map:

If you have seen a donut, you can visualise it in your mind.

Importantly, we can distinguish once concept from another because we are fully aware of their similarities and differences. We know doors are not the same as windows, up is the opposite of down, and there is a strong contrast between black ink on a white page.

We also recognise the complex relationships between concepts and group them into clusters and categories: colours, types of buildings, emotions, subjects in school, our neighbourhood, faith, the moon and the stars, and so on. By creating systems of concepts, or conceptual maps , we can give meaning to our world.

Although we are individuals with our own perspectives and histories, we actually experience most things with other people and form similar interpretations of the world. This makes it easier for us to exchange our conceptual maps by translating them into signs – gestures, written and spoken language, images and other methods of communication.

The language we use to communicate with each other is the second system of representation.

A Simple Exercise

Hall used a very simple exercise with his students to demonstrate how this representation process worked. First, he would ask them to take a good look around the room and focus on different objects. This would make them conceptualise each object in their minds.

He then asked them what they saw. Of course, his students would use words to refer to the objects which he was able to decode because he understood what they meant.

In this way, representation is the process that links our conceptual map of the world and the meanings we construct through language.

Approaches to Representation

Stuart Hall (1997) summarised three approaches to understanding the representation process: reflective, intentional and constructionist views.

The Reflective View

This approach to understanding representation suggests the signs we use communicate with each other reflect their true meaning because language acts like a mirror to the world.

Visual signs often have some sort of relationship to the physical form of the objects they represent so, in terms of semiotics, Charles Peirce might categorise these signs as icons. However, as Stuart Hall pointed out, a picture of a rose “should not be confused with the real plant with thorns and blooms growing in the garden”.

Ferdinand de Saussure debated if onomatopoeic words and interjections were evidence of the reflective quality of language, but he believed these signs were not organic and there was “no fixed bond between the signified and signifer”. In other words, signs are part of our culture rather than the natural world.

To what extent do news organisations reflect the real world in their reports? Join the debate in our guide to framing which outlines how their use codes and conventions can influence the audience’s interpretation of the story.

The Intentional View

By contrast, the intentional approach suggests we impose meaning on the world through the signs we use to describe it. When you are talking to a friend, the words you use to encode your message will mean exactly what you intended them to mean.

If you have read our guide to Hall’s encoding / decoding model of communication , you will already know he dismissed this approach to understanding the representation process. We may produce media texts, but their meanings are limited by the framework of knowledge of that particular period and culture. Hall also proposed the audience could have a negotiated or even an oppositional interpretation of the text. This leads us to the constructionist approach to understanding representations.

The Constructionist View

Things exist in the physical world. Our conceptual maps are based on reality, but representation is a symbolic practice and process. Remember, Saussure argued there is no natural relationship between the sign and its meaning or concept.

Put simply, we construct meanings by organising signs into a system.

Stuart Hall mentioned the language of electric plugs in the UK to illustrate this approach. Before 2006, red wires were used to carry the current from the power supply to the appliances. The system was changed to match the European standards so brown wires are now live. In this way, colours have no fixed meaning and their definitions can quickly change.

Further Reading

The Beauty Myth

Key Concepts in Post-colonial Theory

The Representation of Women on Magazine Covers

What is Media Framing?

Agenda-Setting Theory

• The Bechdel Test

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• Ferdinand de Saussure and Signs
• Roland Barthes
• Charles Peirce’s Sign Categories
• Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation
• Binary Opposition
• Vladimir Propp
• Tzvetan Todorov
• Quest Plots
• Barthes’ 5 Narrative Codes
• Key Concepts in Genre
• David Gauntlett and Identity
• Paul Gilroy
• Liesbet van Zoonen
• The Male Gaze
• bell hooks and Intersectionality
• The Cultural Industries
• Hypodermic Needle Theory
• Two-Step Flow Theory
• Cultivation Theory
• Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory
• Abraham Maslow
• Uses and Gratifications
• Moral Panic
• Camera Shots
• Indicative Content
• Statement of Intent
• AQA A-Level
• Exam Practice

What Exactly Is Representative Democracy?

You’ve probably heard the term “representative democracy” thrown around a lot – especially in reference to the United States of America being a representative democracy. But what does being a representative democracy really mean? Is it different in practice than it is in theory? 

There’s a lot to get into, from how representative democracy functions within the United States’ political system, to how it affects the creation of laws, regulations, and referendums, to how it impacts and inspires – or restricts – active citizen participation in government .  

Before we delve into the fascinating and complex realities around what constitutes a representative democracy, and how one representative democracy can be drastically different from another, we need to define some terms first, so that we’re all on the same page.

Defining Terms: What’s a Democracy? What Is Representation? 

Though it may seem like a no-brainer to an American audience, the definition of “democracy” isn’t quite as cut and dry as you may assume. Democracy, at the linguistic level, literally means “rule by the people” – it comes from the Greek “demos” (people) and “kratos” (rule) – and this should ring true to Americans, who are probably familiar with their political system being “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” 

However, who decides what the people truly want? How should power be carved up in order to serve what the people want? How should people interact with democratic systems of power at the local level vs. the national level? These are all issues that complicate what it means to be a democracy, and they’re why, for the most part, democratic participation in the political system tends to boil down to two main distinct varieties: representative democracy and direct democracy . 

In a representative democracy , the “representation” factor is borne out of the people voting, in a democratic process, for politicians and leaders to represent their wishes and points of view as a part of a larger institutional voting body. In a very real sense, voters from constituencies of various sizes (a town with a population of 13,000 or an entire nation with a population of 300 million) will elect an individual to represent what the majority of their constituency desires. 

Fed up with politics as usual?

Where does that representation occur? All over the political landscape. In Congress, in the Senate, in the White House, even the Supreme Court. These are all powerful political institutions that are incapable of digesting the individual ideas of all 300 million Americans. So by having states, cities, towns, etc. vote on and elect representatives, the system can have these representatives (Congresspeople, Senators, Presidents, etc.) work within these institutions on behalf of the larger populations who voted them into office – because not everyone can just drop everything they are doing to become educated on every single matter of political importance.

So, in a nutshell, representative democracy is all about preserving the will of the people, as best it can, in a manner that is logistically efficient. It can be difficult enough to quorum all 435 members of the House of Representatives for a legislative vote – imagine how difficult it would be to round up 160 million individual voters every time a new bill was introduced to the floor. 

This is the core difference that representative democracy strikes from its main counterpart, direct democracy. Direct democracy is any system in which every single eligible voter is asked to weigh in on matters of legislation and political functioning. So, for example, instead of 1,000,000 citizens voting on two Senators to cast votes on their behalf in the U.S. Senate, all 1,000,000 citizens will have to cast votes on whether they want a given bill to pass or not. 

At scale, the advantages of representative democracy begin to become clear, because it’s not realistic or feasible to expect all 1,000,000 people in Delaware to 

Have a well-rounded understanding of every single political and governance issue

Have the free time to thoroughly consider all options before forming their opinion

Be constantly voting on government and political matters all the time 

The solution for this logistical issue, representative democracy posits, is to elect representatives who have won the trust of their specific constituency to make legislative decisions on their behalf. It’s similar to having a lawyer represent you in a court of law – would you rather have someone who has spent their life educating themselves and training themselves in all manner of courtroom law, or would you prefer to represent yourself in front of a judge? Representative democracy traces along similar lines, except politically, not judicially. 

However, it is imperative to note that most democratic nations are not simply all representative democracies or all direct democracies. In many U.S. states, for example, voter petitions can make it to the ballot during election years, in which the broader electorate can directly vote yes or no on whichever propositions are on the ballot that year, and the results of that referendum will become law, based on the direct participation of the electorate.

For example, in 2016, citizens in California voted to approve Proposition 64 , legalizing recreational use of marijuana, with 57% of the vote. In a case like this, it was not elected representatives who voted on a bill in the legislative chamber, but rather a measure of direct democracy via voter petition. Not all state constitutions allow for voter referendums like this, however, so the practice is relatively scattershot throughout the union. But it does serve to illustrate that although it is a representative democracy, the United States does employ some methods of direct democracy from time to time. 

Pros vs. Cons Of Representative Democracy

Now that we’ve got a solid handle on what it means to be a representative democracy, the question remains: what are the benefits and drawbacks to organizing a political system this way? There’s no such thing as a perfect political system, or a perfect way to organize large-scale political systems, so every system will have its pluses and its minuses. In a nutshell, these are the relative pros and cons of representative democracies:

Advantages of Representative Democracy

Logistical efficiency: Because average citizens elect representatives to carry out governance and legislation on their behalf, not only do the average citizens free up more time in their days to be productive or for leisure, it also speeds up the process of policymaking in government. Needing to win a majority of 435 votes can be accomplished a lot more efficiently than winning a majority of 300 million votes. 

Specialization: Electing representative leaders allows for those individuals to specialize in their knowledge of specific issues and law. For example, citizens in the U.S. can vote on judges, who have an expert-level handling of judicial issues, vs. having every single citizen, who isn’t as familiar with the nuances of history and law, vote on every single trial themselves. 

Checks and balances: Voting on representatives in highly distinct branches of government allows each branch to provide essential checks and balances of each other. Congress generates legislation and oversees Cabinet and Supreme Court hearings, the Executive Branch signs laws and manages the military, and the judicial branch rules on the constitutionality of Congress’s laws. Without representative democracy, there would only be one single check and balance on every single issue and every single public figure: voting. 

Variable citizen participation: In representative democracy, it’s left up to the individual for how involved in the political process they wish to be. Many decide to tune out altogether, only voting in presidential elections or not voting at all. Others may decide to become activists or even run for office themselves to become a representative. A major advantage of representative democracy is that it allows the individual the freedom to decide how much they want to involve themselves in public politics.

Disadvantages of Representative Democracy

Limited citizen participation: One major con to representative democracy is that after a given constituency elects a leader to office, that leader is now free to vote however they please. Technically, they don’t have to listen to the community that elected them into office whatsoever – and many elected representatives make decisions and votes that go directly against the wishes of their own voters. There is a reason that the current approval rating in Congress is only 19% . Now, voting in line with their constituency’s wishes may help the politician’s chances at re-election, and voting against their wishes might threaten their chances, but the whole point is that the elected leader doesn’t have to listen to the voters if they don’t want to, or if they have other motives for voting the other way. 

Corruption: By electing representatives to work on behalf of the people, special interests have a very concentrated set of people they can work towards influencing for their own gain. It’s much easier to persuade 10 individual politicians who sit on a Congressional committee to either support or kill any given bill or amendment than it is to persuade an entire nation to vote one way or another, as it would be under direct democracy. And because elected representatives require ever-larger sums of money in order to win re-election and stay in office, monied interests are able to exert their influence and dominance over elected officials far more easily and successfully than if everything were run through direct democracy. 

Political polarization: Choosing individuals to represent their community in government has birthed the creation of political parties – large institutions that provide ideological, organizational, and financial resources for politicians seeking to win office or win re-election. In a direct democracy, in which specific issues are simply voted on in a yes or no manner, there is no need for political parties to even exist. But with representative government, political parties make it extremely efficient for certain individuals to run for office and to function in office – even if such polarization into two distinct parties leads to extreme gridlock, heightened conflict, and an “us vs. them” mentality that only serves to increase the power of the elected representatives, leaving behind the constituencies who actually voted them into office to begin with. 

Closing Thoughts

The inescapable reality is that whatever your opinion on representative democracy might be, it’s the status quo in America and will be for the foreseeable future. The question facing voters in America isn’t whether we should be represented by elected politicians, but who should represent us? 

As it stands, the current two-party duopoly is exerting a stranglehold on the functioning of American democracy, leading both parties to a race to the bottom in which the object of public representation isn’t to improve the lives of the people, but to increase their party’s own chances of remaining in power. 

That’s why organizations like GoodParty.org are devising tools and programs to help independent candidates seek and win office – now, more than ever, we need independent voices representing the people at all levels of government, because representation by either of the two major political parties is not delivering the results the American people want to see. Sign up and learn more about what GoodParty.org is doing to help usher in a more independent-minded future in American politics.

Constituent power and its institutions

• Critical Exchange
• Open access
• Published: 06 April 2021
• Volume 20 , pages 926–956, ( 2021 )

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• Joel I. Colón-Ríos 1 ,
• Eva Marlene Hausteiner 2 ,
• Hjalte Lokdam 3 ,
• Pasquale Pasquino 4 ,
• Lucia Rubinelli 5 &
• William Selinger 6  

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At least since the French Revolution, the idea of constituent power has been used to indicate the power the people have to create legal-political orders. As such, the history of constituent power is deeply tied to the principle of popular power and, through it, to the history of democracy, to its theory and to its practice. Not only does constituent power point to the process through which a democratic polity is instituted via procedures of constitution-making. It also acts as a reminder that the source of constitutional normativity lies in the will of the people. As a result, constituent power functions as a ‘bridge concept’ between the sphere of law and that of politics. This has traditionally resulted in two separate fields of academic scholarship. On the one side are those who think about constituent power to study the legal implications of the idea. They tend to focus on the workings of constituent assemblies and on the status of constitutional norms, their amendment procedures and their relationship to secondary law-making. This approach highlights the centrality of the idea of constituent power to the workings of the legal system. On the other side, are those scholars who look at constituent power to emphasise its political dimension. This is often part of a project of constitutional contestation, whereby constituent power is presented as an absolute popular power that can never be reduced to legal norms and that, as a result, exists alongside the constitutional system and is always potentially capable of overturning it. In this critical exchange, we aim to raise a different set of questions and ask how the idea of constituent power informs our way of thinking about some fundamental institutions of the modern democratic state: constitutional courts, legislatures, federalism, central banks and referendums.

At its core, the legitimacy of modern democratic states lies in the fact that they are structured around the principle according to which power belongs to, and springs from, the will of the people. This is evident at the level of the state’s structure, and much work has been done to determine the specific relationship that ties the liberal constitutional state to the democratic principle of popular power. Moreover, the legitimacy of single institutions depends on their consistency with the principle of popular power. This is not only true of well-studied institutions such as parliaments and constitutional courts, but also of relatively overlooked ones of the likes of referendums, federalism, electoral laws, bicameral legislatures and central banks, to name just a few. Yet the principle of popular power has no single meaning and can be articulated in a variety of different ways, which in turn offer different accounts of what makes state institutions democratically legitimate. In fact, depending on how the principle of popular power is interpreted, some institutions may appear completely legitimate, while others will not.

The history of the French Revolution offers a stark example. When debating the institutional implications of the newly established principle of popular power, representatives at the National Constituent Assembly of 1789 found themselves divided between at least two camps. Those, like Mirabeau, who understood the principle of popular power as expressed through the language of national sovereignty, believed that it could only be realised through the mediation of representatives in the assembly. By contrast, those, like Pétion, who relied on the idea of popular sovereignty tended to argue that only forms of direct or semi-direct democracy were consistent with the principle of popular power (Jaume, 1989 ). This divergence not only underscored different understandings of who the people were and what their political power entailed, but they also had divergent institutional implications: while supporters of national sovereignty defended the institution of the representative mandate, theorists of popular sovereignty argued in favour of the imperative mandate. The French National Assembly eventually opted for representative mandates, which became standard practice around the world. Yet the principle of popular power is still interpreted in a variety of ways which, in turn, correspond to different ways of assessing the democratic legitimacy of modern institutions. Among the various ways of conceptualising the principle according to which power belongs to the people is also the idea of constituent power, which is the subject of this Critical Exchange.

In what follows, we ask: what are the consequences of assessing the legitimacy of given institutions through the lenses offered by the notion of constituent power? To do so, we start from the premise that constituent power represents a specific interpretation of the principle of popular power. In other words, we take constituent power to be neither a term that indicates just any possible meaning of the principle, nor an abstract and indeterminate account of popular power. Instead, we believe that constituent power has a discreet meaning of its own and that, as such, it offers a specific interpretation of the principle of popular power. The specificity of constituent power derives from both its conceptual structure and its history. Starting with the former, and as the very words suggest, constituent power is part of a conceptual pair. It is a power that constitutes legal-political structures and that, as such, is in a direct conceptual relation with the idea of a constitut ed power. This indicates institutions as different as supreme courts and soviets, electoral laws and revolutionary assemblies. Yet they all have in common the fact that they have not constituted themselves. Instead, they owe their origins to a superior source of political legitimacy, i.e. the constituent power. Because of this intimate connection with the constituted powers, the idea of constituent power is conceptually different from other interpretations of popular power, including the more popular notion of sovereignty (Rubinelli, 2020 ). The latter, in all its various iterations, has no necessary conceptual connection to the institutionalisation of power. Sovereignty, by definition, is a power that is self-standing, and nothing in its conceptual structure suggests that it needs to be used to institutionalise power. Although the notion of sovereignty can of course be used to legitimise the creation of legal and political institutions, the concept itself does not bind it to a type of politics that is constituted. By contrast, constituent power, almost out of conceptual necessity, is strictly connected to institutional politics.

The specificity of constituent power as a way of thinking about popular power is also proved by the history of the idea. While different renditions of this history exist, the first modern uses of constituent power coincide with French revolutionary political thought and, more specifically, with Emmanuel Sieyès’ claim that, in 1789, the Third Estate was the bearer of the pouvoir constituant (Sieyès, 2014 ). This meant that only the productive part of society, as opposed to the nobility and the clergy, had the right to exercise political power and, through it, to constitute a new constitutional order. While arguing this case, Sieyès was careful not to confuse his own theory of constituent power with competing accounts of popular power channelled through the language of sovereignty. This was because, Sieyès maintained, the very term sovereignty entailed an absolute power that can never be restrained and that could be abused by its bearer, be it the people, the king or parliament. By contrast, constituent power is exercised only to create a constituted order, which is limited, regulated and kept in check by the fact that it is not the source of its own legitimacy and that, as such, cannot change its mandate. Starting from this first theorisation of constituent power, the idea was used widely in a variety of different contexts across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In each of these contexts, it offered slightly different interpretations of what it meant to say that political power belongs to the people, and it was used to legitimise widely different sets of institutional structures (Rubinelli, 2020 ). Yet all these different theories and uses of constituent power had one thing in common: they portrayed constituent power as being in a strict conceptual relation with the institutions of the modern constitutional state (Colón-Ríos, 2020 ). This relation, in turn, underscores the specificity of constituent power as a conceptualisation of the principle of popular power both from a historical and from a conceptual perspective. And it is precisely the specific relation connecting the idea of constituent power to what I have hitherto referred to as ‘institutions’ that is the subject of this Critical Exchange.

In the contributions that follow, the authors investigate the specific relation connecting the idea of constituent power to the following institutions: constitutional courts, referendums, federalism, central banks and legislatures. Some of these institutions, such as constitutional courts and legislatures, have a long historical connection to the idea of constituent power, whose features we aim to elucidate and problematize in the pages of this Critical Exchange. Other institutions, such as central banks, are not usually analysed in relation to the idea of constituent power or are mostly discussed with reference to ideas of sovereignty, as is the case of referendums and federalism. The theorists included here will take a different approach and suggest that there is much to be learnt from broadening the analysis of such institutions to include the idea of constituent power.

In the first contribution, Pasquale Pasquino examines the role of constitutional courts. He argues that courts are legitimate only insofar as they act as a ‘derivative constituent power’. This means that their role is limited to filling the gaps necessarily present in the constitution and to interpreting the principles and values informing the original decision of the constituent power. To do so, courts cannot act in the void, ignoring the specific socio-historical circumstances they are called to act upon. This means that, instead of blindly applying the values of the original constituent power, they ought to interpret them in the light of changing historical circumstances. Equally, courts cannot be captured by the executive or by the legislature and retain their legitimacy vis à vis the constituent power. On the contrary, they must maintain their independence as part of a wider system of separation of powers. It thus follows that the legitimacy of constitutional courts depends on their capacity to uphold the values expressed by the original constituent power, while integrating them with the specific interpretations of those values prevalent in a given society at a certain point in time.

Our second contributor is Joel Colón-Ríos, who asks: what are the theoretical and the practical consequences of thinking about referendums through the idea of constituent power? He argues that the very conceptual structure of the idea necessarily complicates the relationship between the referendum and democracy. If, as scholars often seem to believe, the referendum is an instance of direct democracy, then it cannot be an expression of constituent power, which is a creature of representative politics. According to the theory of constituent power, there must be a separation between popular authority and governmental power. If referendums are indeed expressions of direct democracy, then they abolish the distinction between constituent and constituted power, and transfer all powers in the hands of the people. Yet Colón-Ríos maintains that this argument is misleading. Referendums are themselves part of representative politics. They are organised according to legal procedures, often by representatives, who decide on the question to be put to the people and on the composition of the electorate. As such, the referendum is part of the constituted order, and expresses the will of the constituted powers, i.e. the representatives and the electors. It thus follows that the legitimacy of the referendum derives not from its direct appeal to the people, but from the fact that it is part of the institutional structure of the constitutional state. Yet, Colón-Ríos maintains, the constituted nature of the referendum can, at exceptional times, effectively channel the will of the constituent power. This happens only when the referendum is used to modify the constitution or to establish a mandate to create a new constitutional text. In these rare occasions, the referendum obtains legitimacy, not from the constituted order, but because of the constituent will it expresses.

In our third contribution, Eva Marlene Hausteiner analyses the role of constituent power in federal states. This question, she argues, demands special attention because of the peculiarly complex nature of federal constitutions. These are indeed prone to radical change, which takes place outside the limits imposed by the constitution but does not overthrow it. Good examples are processes of annexation and secession, or changes in the distribution of power across regional, state and federal levels. These changes are the expression of neither a constituent power of revision, as they are not regulated by the constitution, nor of a fully-fledged constituent power, as they do not create a new constitutional order. By contrast, Hausteiner suggests, we should consider them the expression of a re-constituent power. Further, the subject of constituent power is also different in federal states. While the source of legitimacy of unitary constitutions is identified in the will of a ‘unitary people’ – as fictional as this unity effectively is – federal states are made of a multi-layered demos . This means that the subject of constituent power expresses itself through a multi-layered process of decision-making which, Hausteiner suggests, adds up to a more demanding standard of democratic legitimacy and could be called pouvoir constituant mixte .

Hjalte Lokdam’s contribution to this Exchange questions whether central banks in general, and the European Central Bank in particular, are to be considered democratically legitimate. He argues that the idea of constituent power, although only rarely applied to central banks, can offer a valuable frame to answer this question. First, Lokdam maintains that, differently from other central banks, the ECB could effectively be thought of as a product of the European constituent power, although this should be seen as a multi-layered power acting through extraordinary representatives in a federal setting. Second, Lokdam asks what are the implications of thinking about the ECB through the idea of constituent power. While, on the one hand, associating the ECB to constituent power bestows it with democratic legitimacy, on the other hand it engenders some risks. This is because, if the mandate of the ECB comes directly from the people, then it must be a rigid mandate, which cannot be easily bent to changing political circumstances. Yet, in moments of crisis, such as the sovereign debt crisis of 2011, this very rigidity might become an obstacle to prompt and swift action and result in the suspension of the ECB’s democratic mandate. This, in turn, gives a free hand to the unelected experts and insulates their acts from democratic contestation. Whether a European constituent power could give a more flexible mandate, and hence bestow both legitimacy and flexibility on the ECB, remains an open question.

Our final contribution is by William Selinger. He asks how the role of the legislature would change if we assessed it in relation to the idea of constituent power. At first sight, Selinger suggests, it looks like the power of the legislature would have to be limited by the fact of being a constituted power. This argument is further strengthened by the fact that circumscribing the power of the representative assembly was one of Sieyès’ main goals when theorising constituent power. Yet, Selinger argues, if we stopped thinking about the legitimacy of legislatures in terms of sovereignty, and instead started referring to constituent power, we might come to a surprising conclusion. The idea of constituent power, when associated to legislatures, strengthens their power and that of the representatives who sit in them. This is because constituent power depicts the people as the original source of power, which, however, disappears in the background during times of ordinary politics. It thus follows that, differently from what happens with the idea of sovereignty, the people cannot be considered the ultimate decision-makers. On the contrary, this power is vested in the representatives, who nonetheless are a constituted power and thus have to act within the limits of their constitutional mandate. In other words, Selinger maintains that thinking about legislatures through the lenses of constituent power both limits and strengthens their power: it limits legislatures because it clarifies their constituted nature, but it strengthens legislatures because it insulates them from the idea of an overarching sovereign will of the people.

The aim of this Critical Exchange is to underline the conceptual and historical specificity of the idea of constituent power. Far from being just a synonym for sovereignty, it offers a specific way of interpreting the principle of popular power, one that ties its exercise to the fundamental institutions of the modern state. And when assessing their legitimacy through the idea of constituent power, it becomes clear that some institutions are, as a result, strengthened in their relationship to the principle of popular power (constitutional courts and legislatures), while others invite a thorough questioning of their function within the constitutional state (referendums, federalism and central banks). This proves that there is much to be gained from thinking about democratic politics through the idea of constituent power. Not only does it demand that we distinguish between different ways of conceptualising the principle of popular power; it also forces us to clarify how we assign democratic legitimacy to our institutions and why.

Lucia Rubinelli

Constitutional courts and amending constituent power

Constitutions, more specifically written liberal constitutions – the only ones I’m going to consider in the following remarks – are a set of rigid, entrenched legal norms concerning the structure of the government and the fundamental rights it must guarantee to the members of a political community. The well known exceptions in this family are the customary constitution of the United Kingdom and the mix of written but flexible laws and unwritten conventions making up the constitution of New Zealand. Rigidity refers to the existence of complex legal procedures (more demanding than those used to enact ordinary laws and often super-majoritarian) to modify the constitutional status quo, procedures, that include either at least part of the parliamentary opposition or more or less direct popular decisions (Albert, 2014 ; Albert, 2019 ; Report on Constitutional Amendment, 2009 ; Ehmke, 1953 ). It is important to emphasize that rigidity is no more than a legal quality of the fundamental laws of a country, and it is not, as such, equivalent to the stability of a constitutional order. The latter depends on concrete specific historical, political and economic circumstances, so it is not surprising, given the political history of the country from the Revolution onward, that France had many more rigid constitutions since 1791 than the United Kingdom, which instead slowly modified over time its flexible customary constitutional order (Bryce, 1901 , pp. 124–213; Lasalle, 1862 ).

It is even more relevant, given my focus, to distinguish the constituent power stricto sensu from the power to amend and modify the constitution – the French doctrine speaks of original and derivative constituent power. The theory of constituent power, introduced in the continental European debate, notably by Sieyes and further developed by Carl Schmitt in his Theory of Constitution ( 1928 ), refers to a foundational moment, which marks a radical break with a previously existing (mostly colonial or monarchical) legal order. In liberal democratic representative regimes, constituent power entails some form of popular participation in the process of ratifying and enacting the new fundamental order of the political community delineated in the constitutional document. Moreover, constituent power supports it over time.

The pouvoir constituant dérivé is instead a constituted power, typically specified in the written rigid constitution, a concept which has rarely been the object of systematic investigation (Levinson, 1995 ). As said, it is normally exercised either by a supermajority of the elected representatives, or by a mix of representative and popular decision-making, sometimes via referendum. Additionally, constitutional courts, in their own way, exercise some form of constitution amending power (for the South African exception, see Gloppen, 2018 ). This is not the original constituent power in its radical version: courts modify the constitutional order by filling its gaps or by interpreting its principles and values, and I shall try to explain briefly why and how.

To understand such unusual claim, i.e. that courts exercise a derived constituent power, we need to be aware that all written constitutions are inevitably ‘incomplete contracts’. Even the best and less short-sighted founding fathers cannot foresee all the possible questions, cases and controversies that can rise under the constitution they write. This is particularly true when the constitutional document is old and survived for a very long time, as in the American case. So, saying that a constitutional court is just ‘enforcing’ the constitution, when a case or a question emerges and the court is asked to adjudicate it, does not make much sense. It is implausible to argue that interpreting the constitution means simply looking back at the ‘original intent’ of the founders. It is a strange exercise to speculate about what the founders would have thought about questions unimaginable at the end of the eighteenth century (speaking of the US constitution), as is evident in the case of what should be done about internet regulation, or same sex marriage or Covid-19.

Instead, I will argue that constitutional courts act as derivative constituent powers by presenting two examples drawn from much more recent constitutions. The first has to do with the Italian republican charter enacted in 1948, the second with the French constitution of the Fifth Republic.

Among the powers that the constitution assigns to the Italian constitutional court there is the adjudication of the so called conflitti di attribuzione (conflicts of institutional competences) among high state organs – notably the legislative, the executive and the judiciary, or between the national government and the regions (see art. 134) . A similar competence exists in the German ( Organstreitigkeit , art. 93) and the Spanish constitutions (art. 161 c.). The Court is thus given the important task of defending the structure of divided power of any liberal constitution. When a conflict between the organs of a pluralistic authority emerges, the system needs a judge to avoid the derailing of the anti-monocratic authority established by the fundamental law.

On 19 October 1995 the Italian Senate voted a motion of non-confidence against the attorney general Filippo Mancuso, who sued the upper house before the constitutional court for the violation of art. 94 of the Italian constitution, which regulates the process of the government’s investiture as a single body. Mancuso argued that the constitution speaks of a vote of confidence and no-confidence concerning the government as a collegial body and that a no-confidence vote against a single member of the government was unconstitutional, so that, in his opinion, the entire government should have resigned. In its decision of 18 January 1996 (Sentenza Corte Costituzionale 7, 1996 ), the court rejected the interpretation of the constitution presented by Mancuso and declared that the articles of the constitution concerning the government’s political accountability vis-à-vis the houses of the parliament did not exclude the vote of no-confidence addressed to a single member of the cabinet.

In such cases, it is unrealistic to claim that the court is merely implementing the constitution. Through an interpretation of constitutional articles concerning executive accountability (based on the history of parliamentarism in other European countries – even though this research is not mentioned explicitly in the court’s opinion), the judges were filling a gap in the constitutional text. In fact, they wrote a little extension of the fundamental law, responding or supplementing the existent blindspot. In a limited, marginal sense they were amending or integrating the constitution – something that neither the parliament nor the minister would have been able to do, because an actor cannot be a judge in their own trial, without destroying the structure of divided power in liberal constitutions, and thereby establishing a monocratic sovereign state organ.

It may be noticed that even in the UK, where there is no written and rigid constitution, a court of justice – the supreme court – was recently asked to decide on a conflict between parliament and the prime minister, and not surprisingly it decided in favor of the consolidated doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. This judgement shows that the sovereignty in question is not so absolute as to exclude a conflict between the parliament and the prime minister that may emerge and thus will be judged by an independent judicial body (Miller (Appellant) v The Prime Minister (Respondent), 2019 ).

The second example supporting my claim is the decision of the French Conseil constitutionnel of 15 January 1975 concerning the statute on interruption volontaire de grossesse (abortion) voted by the parliament but referred before its promulgation to the council by a minority of representatives hostile to it. 1

The hybrid nature of the French constitutional council , which used to be a mix between a court of justice (as it largely is now) and a sort of executive organ of the constitutional system (as was the case in 1958) is the origin of a unique practice: the internal deliberations among the members of the council are recorded, and, as of 2008 the proceedings are publicly available – since the required 25 years have lapsed. The court decided to uphold the loi Veil, which legalized abortion (Mathieu et al., 2009 , pp. 266–286). The decision and the debate in the council are of special interest for a variety of reasons, among others the fact that in 1975, no member of the council was expecting that the transcript of the debate would have been made public. Here I shall focus only on the arguments of the juge rapporteur François Goguel, which was accepted by the council. Goguel, a Catholic believer, declared himself to be personally against the norm approved by parliament, but he nonetheless admitted to seeing no obstacle in the constitutional text as to the constitutionality of the statute, notably because the constitution did not say anything about the question. 2 Here again it seems that what is not forbidden by the fundamental law may be considered compatible with the hierarchy of norms it enshrines, provided that the court agrees on that compatibility. Therefore we can safely say that in this case the constitution was integrated and expanded by the decisions of the court.

The constituent power of the courts is thus mostly based on a process of integration of the constitutional text. This integration is marginal, because there needs to be no strong opposition in public opinion and/or among the elected representatives. It thus follows that the type of amending power that lies in the hands of constitutional courts’ judges is incremental. The scope of this power depends largely on the cultural and political circumstances of each given society. By their decisions, courts may be able to simultaneously preserve and refine the constitutional structure of a liberal regime and to enlarge the understanding of the rights it is meant to guarantee. In that sense, they cannot change the basic structure of the constitution, but they can marginally interpret and rewrite its content – for as long as they keep their relative independence vis-à-vis the political (democratically elected) actors.

Courts are certainly not all-powerful institutions. They only work thanks to the support of public opinion and acceptance by the elected representatives. As a counterexample, one can think of the constitutional courts of Hungary and Poland captured by the executive after the illiberal turn of those regimes, whose legitimacy is seriously contested. In liberal societies, based on the principle of divided power and its polyarchic structure, constitutional courts are actors exercising a limited, incremental derivative constitution-rewriting power.

Pasquale Pasquino

Constituent power and referendums

When the idea of constituent power is deployed in contemporary constitutional discourse, it is often associated with referendums. This is hardly surprising, for in contemporary societies, referendums are the key mechanism for the formal involvement of the citizenry in the making of political decisions. Upon closer examination, however, the connections between referendums and constituent power are much more tenuous than what may otherwise appear. This is not to deny that the prevailing view rests on apparently strong grounds. On the one hand, referendums are historically related to the imperative mandate, and in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the imperative mandate was frequently seen as the means through which the constituent subject controlled the actions of those sitting in the constitution-making assemblies. On the other hand, although the theory of constituent power presupposes a representative form of government (i.e. a distinction between constituent and constituted authority), the democratic exercise of constituent power seems to require the type of direct popular involvement facilitated by a referendum. This contribution explores the connections and disconnections between constituent power and referendums from a theoretical perspective and from the perspective of actual constitutional practice. On the theoretical front, it argues that while referendums cannot exhaust the nature of constituent activity, they can play an important role in the exercise of constituent power. The practical implications of this view, my contribution shows, have been exemplified in the jurisprudence of the Colombian Constitutional Court.

Referendums are the main formal mechanism of direct democracy in societies whose size makes it impossible for the entire citizenry to assemble in a single law-making body. In theory, they allow the electorate to make decisions about specific political issues and, in many if not most constitutional arrangements, those decisions are binding on all representative and governmental institutions. The institutionalisation of the referendums is, in this sense, a democratic correction to representative democracy which, apart from the episodical vote to elect representatives, does not require any form of direct popular intervention in the making of political decisions. Referendums are typically (though not exclusively) reserved to moments of constitutional change, times where the electorate is asked to authorise a modification of the fundamental laws of the state. It is in those moments, and not during the adoption of ordinary laws or policies, that democratic principles seem to demand direct citizen involvement. If constituent power is understood as the popular power to create and change constitutions, and if referendums allow the electorate to ratify or reject a draft constitution or a proposed change to an existing one, then they seem to be the obvious mode of exercising constituent power in contemporary constitutional orders.

That is how the relationship between constituent power and referendums is generally understood by constitutional lawyers. This approach assumes, wrongly in my view, that the ideal institutionalisation of the exercise of constituent power would be direct democracy. The theory of constituent power is in fact a creature of political representation: in a direct democracy, a system where all laws, including the fundamental ones, can be drafted and adopted by the entire citizenry, there is no need for the theory of constituent power, which is a theory about a separation between constituent (popular) and constituted (governmental) authority. Accordingly, if referendums are to be understood as a possible institutionalisation of constituent activity, the fact that they are a formal mechanism of direct democracy is not enough. Indeed, there may be other mechanisms that, because of their deliberative, participatory, or inclusive nature, may be more appropriate for the exercise of constituent power than a simple yes or no vote in a referendum (In the second part of my contribution I consider the reasons why the traditional view, despite overstating the connections between constituent power and direct democracy, is nonetheless right in attributing to referendums a key role in constituent activity).

Now, like constituent power, the institution of the referendum is also a creature of political representation. The raison d’être of referendums is the need to submit to the citizenry certain decisions that, because of their constitutional significance, should not be left solely in the hands of representatives. Seen from this perspective, referendums play a similar role to that assumed by the imperative mandate at different points long before the great revolutions of the eighteenth century. Before its almost universal abolition, the imperative mandate served as an important link between representatives and the voters who elected them. The idea that representatives are bound by citizens’ instructions, although in theory applicable to every kind of decision, usually acquired a special importance in the context of constitutional change, that is, during the exercise of constituent power (Wood, 1998 , p. 191). The imperative mandate appeared, in the eyes of some, as the means through which the citizens who sat in primary assemblies and town meetings could control and influence the conduct of delegates called to engage in constituent activity. While the abolition of the imperative mandate meant that citizens could not influence the actions of those delegates ex ante , the referendum allowed them to control them ex post . In fact, as Pedro de Vega has shown, in the Middle Ages, the word ‘referendum’ was used to refer to communications between delegates and their electors about issues that emerged before the assembly and that had not been specifically included in the former’s mandates. Delegates would express opinions on those issues, ad referendum , that is, subject to the subsequent ratification of their constituents ( 1985 ). Despite these connections, the difference between the imperative mandate and the referendum (the first one taking the form of an ex ante instruction; the second one of a potential veto) has important implications in the context of constitutional change in current legal systems.

Consider the participation of the electorate in constitutional reform, one of the instances in which contemporary constitutions tend to require the direct participation of the electorate. In the context of constitutional reform, the electorate does not act as a constitution- maker but as an institution of control. It does not create new constitutional forms or is even necessarily consulted about what those forms should be, but rather vetoes or confirms decisions about constitutional content made by others. Those others could take the form of an elected constitution-making body, of a legislature acting through a special majority, of an ordinary legislature, or even of a non-elected commission of experts. Moreover, the referendum will be subject to a set of legal procedures that limit in important ways the extent of popular participation (e.g. a yes or no vote, no formal deliberation), that may only identify as voters those individuals that had previously met certain more or less arbitrary eligibility criteria (e.g. criteria about age, residency), or that may give more weight to the votes of the minority (as any decision-rule other than 50%+1 would do). Those kinds of procedural limits seem more consistent with an electorate playing the function of a state organ, of a constituted authority, than with a popular exercise of constituent power. The question then becomes whether the electorate, when it acts through a referendum, could ever be understood as exercising constituent power. I now turn to consider a possible answer to that question. Can the electorate be understood as more than a state organ playing a discreet function within a larger process of constitutional reform? Can it be (or should be) seen as a juridical manifestation of the constituent people (Colón-Ríos, 2020 )? Some constitutional theorists have explicitly considered these questions. Carl Schmitt, for example, maintained that ‘even the constitutional powers and competencies of the “people”, which is to say the state citizens entitled to vote’ (such as the referendum and the initiative under Articles 73 and 76 of the Weimar Constitution), are not ‘powers of the sovereign people, who give themselves a constitution and engage in acts of the constitution making power. They are, rather, competencies in the context of the constitution that is already provided’ (Schmitt, 2008 , pp. 145–146). For Schmitt, to the extent that a referendum only allows the electorate to act according to a legally controlled process of constitutional reform, it cannot be a means for the exercise of constituent power. According to Schmitt’s understanding of the limits of the power of constitutional reform, this means that a constitutionally regulated referendum will not be enough for the legitimate alteration of the material constitution (i.e. the constitution’s fundamental content, which Schmitt called the ‘substance of the constitution’), something that falls under the exclusive jurisdiction of the constituent subject and that cannot be subject to determinate constitutional procedures (Schmitt, 2008 , pp. 77–79).

This view has been embraced by the Colombian Constitutional Court in a series of judgments. A democracy, the court has maintained, cannot be participatory unless the people can also appear as the bearer of the power of constitutional reform (Schmitt, 2008 , pp. 77–79). In Colombia, this was facilitated through what the court identified as the ‘constitutional referendum’ regulated by Articles 377 and 378 of the Constitution of 1991. But the court made sure to point out that the inclusion of the referendum as part of the mechanism of constitutional reform was not equivalent to the establishment of a ‘pure direct democracy, not subject to judicial control’ (Judgment, C-551/03 (n 49) para 44). ‘The power of constitutional reform, even when it includes a referendum’, the court stated, ‘is the deed of neither the originary constituent power nor of the sovereign people, but an expression of a juridical competency organised by the Constitution itself’ (Judgment, C-551/03 (n 49) para 40). For that reason, the court maintained, such a power is always limited by the impossibility of replacing the constitution. Otherwise, the power of constitutional reform would become equivalent to the originary constituent power (Judgment, C-551/03 (n 49) para 40; the French Constitutional Council rejected this kind of approach in its decision no 62-20 DC, 6 November 1962). Some years later, the same court made this point even more expressly: ‘The referendum as a mechanism of constitutional reform is always a manifestation of the derived constituent power [i.e. the limited power of constitutional reform that has been delegated to the ordinary institutions of government] and not even the intervention of the electorate…has sufficient juridical force to transform a referendum into a foundational, primary, or originary constituent act’ (Judgment C-141/10, Colombian Constitutional Court, para 1.3).

The type of electoral acts examined in those judgments can be identified, as suggested by the court itself, as constitutional referendums . That is, referendums through which a proposed constitutional change is approved or rejected as part of a procedure established by the constitutional amendment rule. But not all referendums are like that. Indeed, the Colombian Constitutional Court has distinguished between situations where the people, acting ‘outside of any normative channel, decides to alter the constitution or give itself a new one’ and situations ‘where the citizenry acts as a constituted organ, and accordingly, as a limited one’ (Judgment C-140/10, Colombian Constitutional Court, para 1.4). In the former scenario, the people act as the constituent power and, in the latter, it operates as a constituted one (Judgment C-180/07, Colombian Constitutional Court, para 2.2.2.2.1). Importantly, the court included within the latter type of situations those cases in which, ‘according to constitutional provisions, the people is convened to decide whether to call a national constituent assembly’ ((Judgment C-180/07, Colombian Constitutional Court, para 2.2.2.2.1). That view is problematic, because such a referendum would be authorising an entity to replace the existing constitution or to alter its material content. The fact that it is convened according to law does not seem to be a sufficient reason for depriving it of a constituent nature.

As Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde stated, it is true that there can be a juridical distinction between ‘the people as an organ and the people as sovereign; however, the two cannot be separated as though they were two distinct and real entities: in the final analysis, they are the same “people”’ ( 2017 , p. 179). ‘[A]nytime the people takes an active role as an organized entity’, he added, ‘the unorganised people of the pouvoir constituant is also involved and present in some way’ ( 2017 , p. 179).

Authorising and ratificatory referendums, as long as they involve the alteration of the material constitution, should be understood as constituent referendums , i.e. instances in which the people exercise their constituent power directly. In the case of a referendum calling for a constituent assembly authorised to adopt a new constitution (within or outside the established amendment rule), the electorate could be understood as commissioning that entity with the production of material constitutional content. That is, an instance in which ‘the people’ acts through the electorate and may set conditions to which a constitution-making body will be subject. Such conditions may include the creation of a specific type of constitutional content within a certain period. They may also require the submission of the new constitutional text to popular ratification. In that final referendum, the people, acting once again through the electorate, not only accepts or rejects a draft constitution, but also confirms that its mandate has been respected.

To conclude, I hope to have shown that the relationship between constituent power and referendums is not as clear as it is sometimes thought. While there are important affinities between the institution of the referendum and the exercise of the power to create new constitutions, there are also significant tensions between them. These tensions emerge from the fact that a referendum will normally be regulated by a set of norms potentially inconsistent with the exercise of a truly popular constitution-making jurisdiction. Simultaneously, however, a referendum provides a means for the entire electorate to participate in the authorisation of a constitution-making episode, as well as in the ratification or rejection of important constitutional changes. In such a context, I argued, referendums can be understood as a key part of the exercise of constituent power in contemporary societies, when a people, acting through the electorate, participates directly in the alteration of their country’s material constitution both by issuing a mandate for the creation of new constitutional content and by determining if such a mandate has been respected.

Joel I. Colón-Ríos

(Re-)Constituent power and federal change

The concept of constituent power revolves – not least due to its prominent role in French revolutionary thought – around at least two focal points, which endure in spite of the idea’s highly contested history (Rubinelli, 2020 ). On the one hand, constituent power is still frequently associated with political founding; on the other, many theorists continue to tie it to questions of popular sovereignty in unitary democracies. These emphases in the conceptualization of constituent power, however, divert attention away from constellations both more complicated and more common than the founding of unitary states.

The locus and legitimacy of constituent power should be examined not only with regard to the moment of founding. Political orders can also substantially transform after their foundation in ways not projected by the founders and yet without undergoing revolution. This raises the question of who authorizes and directs such changes: Where does re- constituent power, understood as political power effecting non-revolutionary but radical transformation beyond constitutional confine, reside after the founding? I define re-constituent power – as I will elaborate further below – as different from amending power or pouvoir constituant constitué , in that its transformative power does not operate within the rules of the constitution, including the rules for constitutional amendment. Re-constituent power is thus related to what Yaniv Roznai has called the sporadic ‘re-emergence of the primary constituent power’ ( 2017 , p. 25) – but it emphasizes the potentially new configuration of the constituent subject in a situation of re-constitution.

With regard to the second conceptual limitation, constituent power has been closely connected to the idea of a state constituted through the will of one demos – even if this demos is potentially pluralist. But many modern democracies are constitutionally structured in political layers, resting on the political fusion and co-operation of multiple citizenries: they are federal, and as such they not only distribute power through a complex institutional structure. Moreover, this structure is often assumed to have been originally constituted by multiple collective actors. Federal polities consist of different spheres of rules, which significantly complicates the sharing and exertion of power – even when the constituting populations are not thought of as separate peoples, let alone nations. This layering and sharing of power among multiple collectives also affects (re-)constituent power.

The dynamics of deep transformation engrained in federations concern both these aspects of constituent power – its continued importance in established institutional settings, and its complications in heterogeneous polities – and they raise questions that have so far remained unresolved: How can (re-)constituent power be located in federal political orders? And how does this power relate to the territorial and political segmentation of the demos into sub-units, with both the federal and the regional level involved in the democratic process?

From the vantage point of these questions, federal polities are a particularly interesting and difficult area for identifying the locus and essence of constituent power, because here the ‘paradoxes’ of constituent power (Loughlin and Walker, 2018 ) as the power to (re)constitute a political order, are intensified. Does the power constitutive of federations coincide with the power that transforms them? Does, therefore, the founding constituent power constitute an ongoing constituent power? The main interest in the following lies less in gauging the conceptual depths of constituent power through the lens of federalism, but rather in asking: what can the lens of constituent power contribute to our understanding of the complicated functioning and transformation of federal democracies?

Carl Schmitt, whose emphasis on political decision with regard to constituent power is well-known, saw the fate of federal political orders as largely outside the control of political decision-makers. Federations, and particularly federal democracies, were bound to move almost automatically towards homogeneity – towards centralization up to the point of unitary statehood (Schmitt, 1928 , pp. 363–391). 3 Even if we question this thesis of a centralizing magnetism, Schmitt’s view succinctly highlights the dynamic character of federalism. Federalism, as an institutional framework, may carry the promise of stability and balance under often tumultuous circumstances, and federal constitutions are frequently marked by a high degree of rigidity – but most federations regularly undergo changes and conflictual dynamics of varying magnitude.

Some of these dynamics are regular and expected elements of the political and constitution-amending process – for instance the drawn-out negotiations and compromises between levels of government and their respective executives and legislatures, or the re-setting of boundaries on competences, for which oftentimes constitutional court decisions are necessary (Bednar et al., 2010 ). These balancing acts within a multi-layered, complex polity have been extensively analyzed (e. g. Benz and Broschek, 2013 ).

But federations are prone to much more fundamental transformations, which raise the question of constituent power. Discussing radical centralization, Schmitt has named just one of the directions such transformation processes can take. The shift from politically decentralized to centralized statehood can – depending on the political system – occur through legislative or judicial routes but also through more informal redistributive effects. But federations also frequently expand or contract in terms of membership. Finally, what has been called ‘federal failure’ can also be regarded more neutrally as disintegration (Franck, 1968 ; Patberg, 2019 ) – a process requiring, as other types of deep federal transformation, collective authorization in order to be democratically legitimated. All these types of transformation can be considered changes to the polity’s essence, in the sense that they shift its composition, power distribution, and political rules.

Although in some existing federations, the modalities for federal transformation are prescribed by the constitution (Aroney, 2017 ), only very few countries regulate all the types of deep and lasting transformation. 4 In Germany, for instance, the overall federal structure is an inalterable element of the constitution, 5 but the competences of both federal centre and states can be – and have been – rearranged through constitutional amendment; as for the accession of new member states, the Basic Law until 1990 contained only an enlargement provision. Article 23 (1949) was supplanted by the so-called ‘Europe-article’, which allows for the transfer of competences to the supranational level – itself a provision for a different federation-transforming act. Similar, though much more elaborated, procedures exist in the EU’s treaty framework – but here as in many other federal contexts, both regulated and unregulated modes of federal transformation co-exist. In the EU, unregulated centralization over time towards a tightly integrated federal order on the one hand, as criticized by Weile ( 1991 ), is accompanied by a tightly regulated accession process on the other (cf. Schimmelfennig and Sedelmaier, 2002 ). In the United States, the process of increasing centralization has been continuing almost since the founding – propelled not only by Supreme Court decisions, but also resource redistribution, population movement to the coasts, and, of course, the Civil War.

Surprisingly often, therefore, fundamental changes in the essence of a federation are not provided for in its constitution, but take place nonetheless. This practice of informal or unregulated transformation concerns not only drastic centralization but also changes in territory and the number of sub-units. Not only do some federal constitutions not provide for enlargement: very few provide for secession or expulsion – a fact that does not prevent these transformations, as the example of the separation of Singapore from the Malaysian Federation in 1965 shows (Hausteiner, 2018 ).

It is here that a key tension becomes apparent. Federations are oftentimes designed to ensure stability under conditions of diversity, conflict, and strong centrifugal forces, and this desire for stability becomes manifest in a certain degree of constitutional rigidity (Aroney, 2017 , p. 7). This very rigidity, however, clashes with a key characteristic of federalism – its dynamic character. This dynamism arises out of the multiplicity of territorially entrenched collective actors and their political goals. Federal arrangements may be founded in the hopes of avoiding fundamental re-constitution, but the conflicts around power and particularly around the terms of membership – both between federal and regional levels and among the sub-units – tend to build pressure toward re-arrangement. This characteristically federal dynamism can amount to a fundamental restructuring of the overall polity: its extent, its governing rules, and its self-conception.

Since federations are characterized by this tendency towards deep structural transformation, the question arises of the nature of constituent power within established federations. How is constituent power embodied in federal states – what constitutes it, who exerts it, and when can it be deemed democratically legitimate? Here, three points are of particular relevance.

Firstly, any consideration of constituent power in federations needs to determine the threshold beyond which federal transformation amounts to re-constituent action. Surely, constitutional amendments – as inbuilt and pre-regulated elements of the political system – are below this threshold of constituent power. Even if they produce fundamental changes – such as an increase of competences for the federal centre or new rules for the admission of new members to the federation – they are not operating outside the existing political rulebook but are part of the amending power or pouvoir constituant constitué provided for by the constitutional framers.

However, if federations undergo transformations short of full-fledged revolution yet fundamental and outside the bounds of the constituted order, it is plausible to speak of re-constituent action. As explained earlier, due to efforts for federal stability, many constitutions do not provide for the eventualities of expansion, secession, expulsion – thus leaving room for the not-too-unlikely case of extra-constitutional transformation. If these eventualities of federal re-arrangement are not covered by the constitution, they alter the constitutionally established order. Importantly, even these transformations do not operate wholly outside the existing rulebook, but are to some extent pre-structured by it. In the case of Singapore’s expulsion from Malaysia, for instance, both the federal parliament and the federally elected (though mainland-dominated) executive claimed the authority to move against the recalcitrant member state. Even if re-constituent power therefore is not simply a pre-constituted amending power, it is related to the powers constituted through federal foundation: the latter creates the political preconditions for further transformative action. 6

This leads to a second point: the characteristically non-monolithic nature of constituent action in federal constellations. Here the link between constituent and re-constituent power is of particular relevance. Especially in what Alfred Stepan has called the ‘coming-together’-type of federation (Stepan, 1999 ) – a federation formed through a joining of several political entities – the federal structure itself is a result of collective decision-making among multiple polities. For understandings of constituent power which emphasize its close connection with popular sovereignty, the split character of the federal demos is especially relevant. This is due to the internally pluralist structure of constituent action. In a polity defining itself through territorial segmentation, the likelihood that re-constituent action – be it direct popular action or action relying on popular approval – emanates from complex coalitions is considerable; and this complexity can grow after the federal founding, if multi-level pluralism is combined with the pluralism of democratic society. This diagnosis of twofold pluralism runs directly counter Schmitt’s description of federal democracy, the key characteristic of which is an inevitable tendency towards homogeneity. (Re-)Constituent power in democratic federations is thus shaped by its multi-layered and pluralist environment. This also means that there is a particularly high threshold for constituent action to be democratically legitimate, since a plurality of groups and actors must be considered in unstructured processes of deep transformation. Centralization, expansion, or expulsion at the initiative of actors from only one sub-unit, or from only the federal level, would hardly satisfy the legitimacy requirements associated with popular sovereignty.

Finally, this high legitimating threshold at the same time holds the promise of a particularly substantial legitimacy of (re-)constituent power. As Peter Niesen has argued with regard to the federal structure of Europe, the mechanism of a pouvoir constituant mixte – a term applied by Jürgen Habermas to the case of the EU 7 –, in which each citizen exerts power both through her member state and the European parliament, facilitates supranational legitimacy. This theorization of mixed constituent power is, according to Niesen, not primarily concerned with constitutional transition, but it considers its operation beyond the foundational moment and potentially throughout the existence of the federal arrangement ( 2016 , p. 220).

Additionally, more radically transformative change, situated in the space between the founding and revolutionary politics, can gain particularly substantive legitimacy thanks to the peculiar structure of federalism. Ideally, federal structures are not only able to secure civic participation and accountability on multiple levels: they also prepare citizens to consider more than one political arena for engaging in transformative political action. (Re)constituent power in federal constellations can therefore draw from more than one source of democratic legitimacy, due to the dual role of each citizen as a citizen both of a sub-unit and of the federal polity – a role firmly defined for ‘regular’ political processes through the constitution, but also relevant for moments of federal re-ordering.

For federations, therefore, the answer to the question of legitimate substantive change outside of formal constitutional provisions is particularly significant because of their tendency toward such transformations – and because of the pluralist nature of democratic authority entrenched in their structure. The language of constituent power can illuminate these dynamics if it eases its focus on political founding as well as on the territorial unity of the demos – and takes into account the complicated ways in which the original constituent power shapes later constituent action, without firmly predetermining it. As federal histories show, pathbreaking foundational moments can, in a risky balancing act, both stabilize a polity and leave open significant space for political change.

Eva Marlene Hausteiner

The central bank and the constituent power

Can central banks be institutions of the constituent power? If so, what does this mean in terms of their political role and their legitimacy? In tandem with the increasing involvement of politically independent central banks in governing our economic lives, the question of their democratic foundations and legitimacy arises. This is because central bank legitimacy fits uneasily within the mechanisms of ordinary democratic politics. Elections are rarely, if ever, decided on questions of monetary policy, and it is often unclear what power, if any, elected politicians have over central banks. The question of the relationship between the central bank and ‘the people’ is therefore of some importance.

This does not have to involve the question of the constituent power, but it may. With reference to the European Central Bank (ECB) – one of the few central banks in the world that can meaningfully, albeit controversially, be considered an institution of the constituent power – this contribution discusses the consequences of thinking about central banks through the lens of constituent power. While reference to the constituent power promises to establish a firm democratic foundation for the central bank, the elevation of the central bank’s mandate and authority to the constitutional level comes with certain problems. In particular, it risks rendering the mandate of the central bank too rigid to be practical in crises, thereby prompting a politics of suspending or altering the mandate in an emergency situation. This, of course, is often anything but democratic.

Most central banks are not institutions of the constituent power. Their position within the modern state has developed gradually and been entirely elite-driven. They are constituted powers, of course, but their authority is derived from other constituted powers that can withdraw or alter them at will. They are products of secondary law, not the primary law of the constitution, and were created by ordinary political representatives working within constituted legislatures, not ‘the people/nation’ or its extraordinary representatives in revolutions or constituent assemblies. As such they could be called ‘secondary’ constituted powers as opposed to the ‘primary’ constituted powers that create them (typically legislatures).

Some central banks, however, have been created in extraordinary political moments. The post-World War II German central bank, for instance, was created a year before the Basic Law constituted the Federal Republic in 1949, and it enjoyed an extraordinary position in the life of the West German state. Following its creation, the Bundesbank quickly became a symbol of a break with Germany’s past and presented itself as a bulwark against the dangerous excesses of politics. Through actively cultivating public opinion in its favour, the Bundesbank successfully established itself as an independent power within the state on a par with the legislature and government. In conflicts with the government, the Bundesbank appealed to ‘the people’, and, more often than not, it carried the day (Mee, 2019 ). The Bundesbank, however, was formally still a secondary constituted power, as the Bundestag held the right to alter or abolish it through ordinary legislation. If there was a connection between the German people and the Bundesbank, it was informal – but no less effective for that.

When the European Central Bank was created, the Bundesbank was the main source of inspiration. Like the Bundesbank, the ECB was created in a moment that marked a transformational break with the past. Like the Bundesbank, the ECB was to be independent of political instruction. Unlike the Bundesbank, however, the ECB’s mandate and institutional status were fixed in primary law, the Maastricht Treaty. This means that no constituted power has the right to alter or abolish the ECB through ordinary legislation. Its acts cannot be vetoed, and it cannot, in principle, be compelled to do anything against its will. In matters pertaining to its Treaty mandate, it can legislate without the involvement of other constituted bodies and execute its will throughout the territory of the Eurozone without the involvement of Member State authorities. The only check on the ECB’s powers is judicial: it must act in accordance with the mandate given to it by the Treaty.

Such powers, combined with the independence from political authorities, make the ECB unique among central banks. The question is whether it is an institution of the constituent power.

The answer to this question depends to a certain extent on how the constituent power is conceptualised. In Dictatorship, Carl Schmitt ( 2014 , p. 123), referring to Sieyès, defines the constituent power as

the primordial force of any state … From the infinite, incomprehensible abyss of the force [ Macht ] of the pouvoir constituant , new forms emerge incessantly, which it can destroy at any time and in which its power is never limited for good. It can will arbitrarily. The content of the willing has always the same legal value like the content of a constitutional definition.

In this definition, there is nothing inherent in the idea of the constituent power that precludes the possibility of central banks being institutions of the constituent power. Nothing, after all, can prevent the nation/people from creating whatever constitutional forms it desires. Thus, while central banks are not ordinarily institutions of the constituent power, it is a theoretical possibility.

Possibility, of course, is not actuality, and there are some difficulties associated with the concept of the constituent power in the context of the European Union. One of these is that the treaties were not products of constituent assemblies (except the failed Constitutional Treaty), but rather intergovernmental conferences. The primary law of the EU is thus not a product of a formless constituent power, but of an agreement between several constituted powers. Again, however, the theory of the constituent power, as formulated by the Abbé Sieyès ( 2014 , p. 91), can allow for this through the concept of extraordinary representation. What distinguishes the adoption of the EU treaties from other international treaties is that it transforms the political status of the signatories – ‘from nation states to Member States’ (Bickerton, p. 2012 ) – as well as how they govern themselves (Larsen, 2021 ). In the Eurozone this is particularly clear, as the creation of the ECB introduced a transnational power that can implement its will within the territories of the member states without involving national authorities. The ratification of the Maastricht Treaty can thus be seen as an extraordinary political act that profoundly altered the constitutional order of both the EU and its member states. The ordinary representatives that signed (heads of states and governments) and ratified the Treaty (in most cases, parliaments) thereby acted as extraordinary representatives.

However, even if the concept of extraordinary representation is accepted, the EU cannot be characterised as the product of the will of a single constituent power. Jürgen Habermas ( 2012 ) has sought to overcome this problem through conceiving of the treaties as products of a pouvoir constituant mixte that consists of the citizens of Europe in a dual capacity: as citizens of the EU and of their respective member states. Notwithstanding the problem that citizenship is of course a constituted legal status, this highlights that if the concept of constituent power is to make sense in the EU context, it must be in the plural. The ECB ( 2002 , p. 46; emphasis added) strikes a similar note in describing its foundations of authority: ‘It was the sovereign decision of the peoples of Europe (through their elected representatives) to transfer the competency for monetary policy and the other tasks enumerated in the Treaty to a newly created European body, and to endow it with independence from political interference’. The ECB thereby strikes a chord similar to that of legal scholars such as Dieted Grimm ( 2015 , p. 48) and Miguel Poiares Maduro ( 2008 , para. 21), who argue that the EU treaties are attributed to the peoples of Europe, not the governments or parliaments of the member states. In this account, the ECB, and the EU in general, derives its right to govern from the same source as the member states themselves. The will of the European peoples may have been conveyed by elected representatives, but it is the will that matters, not how it is represented.

One can dispute whether the ECB was ‘really’ the will of the peoples. Few peoples were asked, and the German Chancellor at the time, Helmut Kohl, later admitted that in forcing through Germany’s adoption of the euro he acted as a dictator (Paul, 2010 , p. 293). While this may disqualify the ECB’s claim to be a product of the will of the peoples, it does not necessarily mean that the ECB’s public law does not operate on the assumption that it is. In a sense, the ECB’s extraordinary powers and its independence in exercising them have to be attributed to the constituent power of the peoples. That there are multiple constituent powers involved, however, raises certain problems.

The ECB takes the idea of central bank independence to its extreme conclusion. Through the effective constitutionalisation of the ECB’s price stability mandate (art. 127 TFEU) and independence from political actors at both the European and Member State levels (art. 130 TFEU), the ECB derives its right to govern monetary affairs from primary law. No constituted power can alter its status or mandate through ordinary legislation. This is intended to insulate it from political pressures that might compromise its single-minded pursuit of price stability. In principle, the ECB and its powers can be altered or withdrawn only by a new ‘sovereign decision by the peoples of Europe’. This means that unless the constituent power of any of the member state peoples is abrogated, leaving them no longer a people in the legal-political sense, all hold veto power over any change. The mandate of the ECB is thereby potentially even more rigid, and thus inherently conservative, than that of institutions subject only to a single constituent power.

The ECB’s independence means that no constituted powers can hold the ECB accountable for its acts and omissions. The ECB must ‘report’ to other constituted powers at the European level (art. 284(3) TFEU), but these institutions have no means of punishing it if they think it is failing its obligations. The ECB’s ‘input legitimacy’ is thus limited to the founding moment, and it is, through its ‘output legitimacy’ (informally) accountable only to the peoples who gave it its mandate.

The ECB’s constitutional status also reflects Sieyès’ ( 2014 , p. 89) principle that ‘[n]o type of delegated power can in any way alter the conditions of its delegation’. Just as no other constituted power can alter the ECB, so it cannot alter its own mandate. It is thereby controlled by law and judicial review alone. It is thereby part of a system of checks and balances that is supposed to ensure that its governmental discretion is constrained by ‘a clear and limited mandate’ (Issing, 2002 , p. 28) that it cannot control itself. This ‘clearly defined mandate’, according to the ECB ( 2002 , p. 50), ‘lies at the very heart of the … “contract” between the people and the independent central bank’. It is an institution whose mandate, and the basic principles and values according to which it governs, are placed outside the ordinary political process by the founding act.

The practical and democratic consequences of the ECB’s constitutional position are wide-ranging. In ordinary times, it entails that the mandate of the central bank is almost impossible to adjust in accordance with changing macroeconomic values. Attributing the central bank’s mandate to the constituent power thereby attaches an inherently conservative bias to monetary policy, which at the same time constrains what member state authorities are able to do in terms of macroeconomic policymaking. The democratic legitimacy of this arrangement is questionable. It demands, at least, a strong popular attachment to the objective that the central bank pursues (in the case of the ECB: price stability).

The emergency situation raises further problems. The rigidity associated with the mandate in ordinary times is, in principle, carried over into the emergency situation. The central bank’s policymaking flexibility to address the crisis is thereby limited. The problem arises precisely because no constituted authority is empowered to alter, adjust or suspend the mandate. It is fixed between constituent moments. In a crisis, however, the restrictions of the mandate may threaten to exacerbate the crisis and prevent an effective response to it. As such, the central bank faces the age-old dilemma of emergency politics: honour the law but risk undermining the existence of the constituted order, or act beyond the mandate but violate the constitution. This was precisely what happened during the Eurozone crisis, which was understood as an existential crisis for the euro. At the peak of the crisis, the ECB famously stepped in to do ‘whatever it takes’ to rescue the euro. However, the acts that put this promise into practice – the so-called outright monetary transactions programme and the public sector purchases programme – violated one of the most fundamental principles of the ECB’s mandate (the art. 127 TFEU ban on monetary financing) and radically transformed and extended the powers of the ECB and its involvement in governing the Eurozone.

Due to its independence, no political authorities were involved in deciding on the ECB’s emergency political acts. There may, of course, have been support from governments across the Eurozone, but this was informal and ‘behind the scenes’. The ECB carries sole responsibility for acts that in effect transformed the constitutional construction of the Eurozone by, among other things, turning the ECB into a lender of last resort for the member states (see De Grauwe, 2013 ; Baldwin et al., 2015 ). This may be seen as a welcome development, but in introducing it the ECB itself effectively acted as an extraordinary representative of the constituent power. The absence of effective revolt against its acts may then be interpreted as a form of ‘acclamation by silence’ by the European people, in the name of whom the ECB now claims to act (see Lokdam, 2020 ).

This points to the problem with constructing the central bank as an institution of the constituent power. The constitutionalisation of the central bank’s mandate, in principle, restricts the flexibility of a central bank in dealing with unforeseen circumstances, because there are no institutionalised means of authorising (or punishing) new approaches to, or objectives for, monetary policy. The central bank as an institution of the constituent power is thereby (supposed to be) an inherently conservative power between moments of extraordinary politics. When the mandate proves untenable, however, the absence of institutionalised means of altering or suspending it means that the question of how to alter the mandate becomes opaque and inaccessible to democratic politics and contestation, as it did in the Eurozone crisis. If anything, then, the case of the ECB as an institution of the constituent power highlights the danger that rigid institutions of the constituent power present to a meaningful democratic politics.

Hjalte Lokdam

Constituent power and the legislature

There is a strong case to be made that the whole purpose of the idea of constituent power was to limit the power of legislative assemblies. By the time Sieyès gave his famous account of constituent power in What is the Third Estate? there was already widespread agreement about what one might do to limit the power of the executive. First, ensure that the legislature possessed the power of the purse, making the executive financially dependent on the legislature. Second, give the legislature the power of impeachment, so that it could remove executive officials who violated the law. Finally, if these two first steps were insufficient, strictly separate executive and legislative officials so that the executive could not intervene in the legislative process at all.

But the question of how to limit the power of the legislature was more difficult. An executive capable of regularly checking the legislature was a frightening prospect and one that would inevitably violate the separation of powers. This would also introduce the prospect of endless stalemate and gridlock, a danger that might equally arise from having a second legislative chamber. As for the people themselves directly controlling legislative representatives through binding mandates, this would make it impossible for the legislature to serve as a space for national deliberation.

Sieyès’ idea of constituent power was a way out of this bind. It was a strategy for taming the legislature that did not require mandates, a strong executive, a senate or a house of lords. Instead of being directly checked and controlled by any of these other agents, the powers of the legislature would be made strictly subject to a constitution that it was unable to change or amend. The constitution could only be changed or amended through an entirely different process that was separate from the normal process of passing legislation, and which ideally would involve an entirely different representative body. Sieyès declared to the French National Assembly:

We have as a fundamental and constitutional principle that the ordinary legislature will not be able to exercise the constituent power…the ordinary National Assembly will not be more than a legislative assembly. It will be forbidden from every touching any part of the Constitution. When it will be necessary to review and reform some part, it is to be done by an express Convention, limited to this unique object, that the Nation will decree the changes that appear to it useful to make to the Constitution (Sieyès, 1789 . p. 19).

Limited in this way by a constitution, and unable to exercise the constituent power, the legislative assembly would be incapable of infringing on the rights of citizens.

These reflections on the origins of the concept of constituent power might lead one to suppose that this concept would be of little value for thinking about legislatures in contemporary politics. After all, most legislative assemblies today are limited – whether through a written constitution that it is beyond the power of the legislature to change, as Sieyès proposed, or through the sort of checks that he opposed. Yet I want to suggest that this is not the whole story. If the constituent power were to become widely accepted as the grounds of political authority, the power and prominence of legislatures would be likely to radically increase.

If constituent power was originally a way to tame the power of the legislature, it also raised the practice of the legislature, the practice of representatives coming to a decision through deliberation and parliamentary procedure, to new heights of importance. As Jack Rakove noted about the constitutional convention that wrote the United States Constitution in 1787, ‘the politics of the Convention resemble that of any legislative body, and its votes become grist for the fine-milling techniques of roll-call analysis that are commonly used to explain decision-making in Congress’ (1996, p. 15). The state assemblies that ratified the Constitution resembled legislative bodies even more than the original Convention did – and this is even more true of the French National Assembly which, to Sieyès’ dismay, was forced to engage in actions that went well beyond the limited role of an ideal constituent assembly. This is a trend that has lasted throughout the modern era: the Weimar National Assembly of 1919 and the Indian Constituent Assembly were among the many instances of large representative bodies exercising a function for constituent power.

According to Sieyès, deliberation by a group of representatives was essential to carrying out the task of the constituent power and formulating a constitution. A constitution must be a national act, which is made in the general interest. Yet the general interest was not obvious or given in advance. It was necessarily a composite of countless smaller particular interests. The only way the general interest could be achieved was through a consensus enacted by deliberation:

In every deliberation there is a kind of problem to be solved. This is to know, in any given case, what the general interest would prescribe. When the discussion begins, it is not possible to identify the direction it will take to reach the discovery with certainty…hence the clash and coincidence of opinions….All these individual interests have to be allowed to jostle and press against one another, to take hold of the question from one point of view, then another, each trying to push it according to its strength towards some projected goal. In this trial, views that are useful and those that are harmful will be separated from one another. Some will fall while others will maintain their momentum and will balance one another until, modified and purified by their reciprocal interaction, they will end up becoming reconciled with one another…just as in the physical universe a single more powerful movement can be made up of a multitude of opposing forces (Sieyès, 2003, p. 39-40).

Sieyès’ use of the concept of constituent power and his opposition to the idea of popular sovereignty are related to this approach to achieving the general interest. Whereas the concept of popular sovereignty makes the will of the people, usually as evinced by a plebiscite, the underlying source of legitimacy for a constitution, the concept of constituent power makes the creation of a constitution one particular task or function, which is to be carried out by representatives like other tasks or functions. This is difficult to justify unless one thinks that creating a constitution is an act that requires bringing together the representatives of different interests and perspectives who can arrive at a decision in the general interest.

Although the convention that exercises the constituent power is not the normal legislative assembly, it is inevitably a body with some resemblance to a legislative assembly, and which deliberates in a somewhat similar fashion. And although the normal legislative assembly does not exercise the constituent power, it somehow approximates the sort of political deliberation that occurs in the act of constitutional founding. The various interests and opinions that go into a constituent assembly are unlikely to disappear – they are likely to also be represented in the normal legislature, meaning there will be some continuity between the debates in the constituent assembly and normal legislative debates.

According to the general idea of popular sovereignty, the people which rules delegates power to different political actors – to executive, legislative and judicial officials – none of which can claim to speak for the people definitively. In practice, however, it tends to be the executive that expresses the best claim to represent the people, since the choice of a president or prime minister comes closest to being a decision in which the whole nation is involved.

If constituent power were to become widely accepted as the grounds of constitutional legitimacy, this situation might change radically. It would remain the case that no ordinary power – executive, legislative or judicial – could claim to speak for the people definitively. Yet the legislature would arguably have a better claim to do so than the other powers. It alone among the constituted powers can plausibly attempt to achieve a ‘general interest’, since it is the only constituted power that allows a range of ‘individual interests…to jostle and press against one another, to take hold of the question from one point of view, then another, each trying to push it according to its strength towards some projected goal’ (Sieyès, 2003, pp. 39–40).

The concept of constituent power would alter the relationship between the legislature and the people no less radically. It is easy to presume, when thinking in terms of popular sovereignty, that the people are simply the masters of their representatives – after all, it is the people who possess sovereignty, their representatives are merely those delegated by them to carry out tasks that they wish. The concept of constituent power renders this relationship significantly more complex, since it denies that the people have the kind of final authority that goes with sovereignty. Put another way: the electorate that chooses the members of the legislature is itself a constituted power. It is not prior to constituted institutions, as we might think a sovereign people is, but is constituted like them through the constitution. The selection of representatives to the legislature is merely one moment in the process of law-making, accomplished by one constituted power among several. It is not a moment that reveals the sovereign will of the people. If Sieyès sought, through his concept of constituent power, to limit the power of the legislature, he also limited the claim to power of the electorate, and thus in another way preserved a degree of autonomy for the legislature that is harder to justify in a system based on popular sovereignty.

This contribution has been something of a thought experiment. If we were to rethink the foundations of political legitimacy in terms of constituent power rather than popular sovereignty, where might it lead with respect to the role of the legislature? And the somewhat unexpected conclusion, given Sieyès’ intention, is that this could very well lead to legislatures that are more prominent and more autonomous of the electorate. Yet I suspect that this is also why constituent power is unlikely to become our dominant political conception any time soon. In her important recent book Constituent Power: A History ( 2020 ), Lucia Rubinelli has documented how Sieyès’ distinction between constituent power and sovereignty was lost in the twentieth century. Since Carl Schmitt, constituent power has been increasingly interpreted as no different from sovereignty. But we might ask whether this is because the sort of politics that constituent power tended toward has become increasingly unrealistic. On the other hand, the fact that this concept is still part of our political language, and that constitutional conventions remain an important institution, suggests that we should not entirely discount constituent power and the kind of politics Sieyès envisioned either.

Will Selinger

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NPR spoke with Appalachian fiction and nonfiction writers about this moment and how they are building a tapestry of what they know as home.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis , the 2016 memoir from Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, once again began flying off the shelves after former President Donald Trump named Vance as his running mate. Many have turned to the memoir to find out the story of Vance’s upbringing, a core part of why he’s on the Republican ticket to begin with. But the book also brings along a host of assumptions that many authors still find not to be true.

Pulitzer-winning author Barbara Kingsolver said she felt that it was her duty to tell a different story of Appalachian life than the one that Vance presented in the book.

“It used the same old victim-blaming trope. It was like a hero story: ‘I got out of here, I went to Yale,’” Kingsolver said of Vance. “‘But those lazy people, you know, just don't have ambitions. They don’t have brains. That’s why they’re stuck where they are.’ I disagree. And that’s my job, to tell a different story.”

Vance’s has been mired in controversy since its 2016 publication, especially by authors who cover the region. Vance, who writes that Appalachian culture “encourages social decay instead of counteracting it,” says this upbringing is central to his political ideology and thinking.

Many Appalachian authors, like Kingsolver, have worked tirelessly to combat what they feel is a misleading and even harmful depiction of the region. Her novel Demon Copperhead , a fictional window into the same communities, was named one of the New York Times ’ best books of the century just days ahead of the Republican National Convention. Last year, it won a Pulitzer Prize.

As hundreds of thousands more read about the plights of the Appalachian region, these authors are fighting back against what they describe as Vance’s assumed norms.

Overcoming “Hillbilly Elegy”

Vance writes in Hillbilly Elegy that he grew up most of his life in Middletown, Ohio, but spent summers and his free time until the age of 12 in Jackson, Ky. Vance adds that Jackson “was the one place that belonged to me.”

Vance’s first stop after the RNC was to a rally in Middletown, where he declared, “I love every one of you, and I love this town, and I'm so grateful to have been formed by it, because I wouldn't be who I was without it.”

But Vance’s claim to the area has created a cultural rift between him and those from Appalachia.

Kingsolver said that when she saw Vance’s recently resurfaced interview calling several Democrats “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” it reaffirmed her disappointments with Hillbilly Elegy .

“When I read JD Vance’s memoir, I resented it all the way through. There was just something about it that kept telling me, he’s not from here, he doesn’t get us,” Kingsolver told NPR. “I thought, OK, you are not from here because when I think about my childhood, many of the most important women in my life who saved me, who took care of me, were childless women. It’s not just blood that defines community here.”

It’s not just Kingsolver who has an alternate narrative.

Meredith McCarroll and Anthony Harkins co-edited Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, a blend of scholarly, poetic and narrative rebuttals to Vance’s tale published in 2019.

Harkins, an assistant professor in history at Western Kentucky University, said that Hillbilly Elegy loses its footing by generalizing one person’s narrative into a definitive account of the entire region.

“It’s totally legitimate for anybody to tell their own story and how they see it,” Harkins told NPR. “But to then present it as the story of Appalachia, to speak of a memoir of a culture, is problematic particularly because that region has so often been stereotyped and misrepresented through recent history.”

McCarroll, director of writing and rhetoric at Bowdoin College and an Appalachian native of Waynesville, N.C., said that the duo’s goal with the book was to spotlight a chorus of Appalachian voices in response to Elegy’s immense popularity, both existing on their own and in opposition to the text.

“My inclination was to gather a lot of different voices, both that are challenging him but not speaking to him at all,” McCarroll told NPR. “It’s this weaving together of a lot of different authentic perspectives that can give a sense of how layered and complex this 13 state region is.”

McCarroll added that beyond Hillbilly Elegy, she wanted Appalachian Reckoning to counter the idea of Appalachia as a monolithic place.

“The back half of the book moved beyond Hillbilly Elegy, and really is just a collection of narratives from the region that you can’t read and come away thinking you understand Appalachia,” McCarroll said. “No one should say, ‘I read one book, and so I understand this region.’”

Writing the full truth

For these writers, telling the honest story of Appalachia is tantamount–even if they start difficult conversations.

Elizabeth Catte, historian and author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, published in 2018, said that books about Appalachia fall short for her when authors lean on inauthentic stereotypes in pursuit of authenticity.

“Sometimes people try to make up for personal knowledge or experience or study of a region by laying a bunch of tropes on a book and calling it authentic,” Catte told NPR. “Sometimes you don’t get a sense that Appalachia has a history, that it’s just a place full of problems, but none of those problems have an origin, or the origin is uninteresting to the author.”

Vance’s story has resonated with conservatives and non-Appalachians alike. In the wake of the 2016 election, the book became an explanation of sorts for some liberals as to who Trump’s supporters were and how he managed to win the presidency. One op-ed described Bostonians as “ lapping up ” the tale.

The book became a best-seller and later was adapted into a movie. But for those from the region, crucial pieces of the puzzle that Vance painted are missing.

Harkins said that when discussing Appalachian history, texts must keep economic context in mind, like Appalachia’s political and cultural history with coal , when thinking about how the past has turned into the present.

“You can’t speak about the experience of Appalachia in the last hundred years without thinking about the massive effects that economic change have brought to it, in a place that is often the product of extractive industry, whether it’s lumbering or coal or fracking,” Harkins said. “One of the concerns I have with seeing it through the prism of Hillbilly Elegy is often that most of that stuff is not part of the story.”

Vance’s politics might not land with all readers, but he focused much of his Republican National Convention speech, which he gave just two days after being named to the ticket, on his relationship with his mom and grandma. These relationships are where these authors have found a common ground. For Kingsolver’s fictional quest, it was similarly important to keep Demon’s humanity front and center, both for the reader and for herself.

“I was kind of scared to write this novel for several years because you can’t bludgeon people with sadness or with truths that are hard to bear,” Kingsolver said. “Unless you give it a really delicious package. You have to give people a reason to turn the page. You have to give people characters that they love and believe in, that they honestly start to care about as their friend.”

The power of representation

Kingsolver said that when Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize last year, Appalachia rejoiced like Appalachia does.

“It was like fireworks all up and down the mountain,” Kingsolver said. “So many people from here, even my mail carrier and the cashier at the grocery store, said, ‘This is amazing. We won.’”

The novel has appealed to more than Appalachians: It unanimously won the 2023’s Women Prize, and more recently, it ranked No. 1 on the New York Times ’ readers’ “Best Books of the Century” list–and No. 61 on the critics’ list.

McCarroll said that with novels coming out today like Demon Copperhead, it is hard to stay upset at the negative aspects of Hillbilly Elegy. 

“What’s so exciting is that there are so many really diverse, beautiful stories that are really offering complicated perspectives, and so it’s like I don’t feel like I have to stay mad at Hillbilly Elegy ,” McCarroll said. “There’s a long history of Appalachian literature, too.”

McCarroll added that a variety of stories is important because they add texture to a region too often boxed into one corner.

“What a Black Appalachian coal miner in Pennsylvania is experiencing might be very different from a Mexican migrant worker in Western North Carolina is experiencing, which might be really different than what a third- or fourth-generation farmer who is white in Kentucky is experiencing,” McCarroll said.

Kingsolver said that when writing Demon Copperhead, it was important to combat assumptions made by mainstream media outlets about Appalachia.

“I think they miss our diversity. They think we’re all white, and we’re not. It was important for me to reflect that in this novel,” Kingsolver said. “I wanted it to be the great Appalachian novel that kind of puts our whole region in a context. We didn’t choose to have poverty and [high] unemployment. We didn’t ask for that. This came to us.”

Kingsolver added that it has been especially gratifying hearing from people whose perspective on Appalachia changed after reading her novel.

“I have heard from lots and lots and lots of people in other parts of the country who said, ‘This book asked me to evaluate my prejudices, and I thank you for that,’ ” Kingsolver said. “It’s amazing.”

When Kingsolver received news that she was at the top of the Times’ readers’ list last month, she said she had to “lie down on the floor” and think about its weight. Kingsolver said that a less obvious reward, though, was readers celebrating a story of an imperfect, wholly Appalachian character.

“I can’t even tell you how many people have written to tell me I’m still worried about Demon, I wake up at night worrying about him,” Kingsolver said. “As if he’s become their kid. He’s the world’s kid. That’s how you navigate it, that’s how you have to.”

Though Hillbilly Elegy might loom large once again, Appalachian authors, whether through fictional tales like Demon Copperhead or nonfiction deep dives like What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, are finding strength in their resistance and dissent.

Reacting to news of being on the New York Times' list, Kingsolver wrote in an Instagram post:

“With a certain other ‘hillbilly’ book suddenly ascendant, my duty. No elegies here. Thank you.” Copyright 2024 NPR

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'Hillbilly Elegy' is back in the spotlight. These Appalachians write a different tale

Clayton Kincade

A photograph of Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance. Bill Tompkins/Getty Images/Michael Ochs Archives hide caption

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis , the 2016 memoir from Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, once again began flying off the shelves after former President Donald Trump named Vance as his running mate. Many have turned to the memoir to find out the story of Vance’s upbringing, a core part of why he’s on the Republican ticket to begin with. But the book also brings along a host of assumptions that many authors still find not to be true.

Pulitzer-winning author Barbara Kingsolver said she felt that it was her duty to tell a different story of Appalachian life than the one that Vance presented in the book.

“It used the same old victim-blaming trope. It was like a hero story: ‘I got out of here, I went to Yale,’” Kingsolver said of Vance. “‘But those lazy people, you know, just don't have ambitions. They don’t have brains. That’s why they’re stuck where they are.’ I disagree. And that’s my job, to tell a different story.”

29 days: how Democrats had to overhaul their convention in a hurry for Harris

Vance’s has been mired in controversy since its 2016 publication, especially by authors who cover the region. Vance, who writes that Appalachian culture “encourages social decay instead of counteracting it,” says this upbringing is central to his political ideology and thinking.

Many Appalachian authors, like Kingsolver, have worked tirelessly to combat what they feel is a misleading and even harmful depiction of the region. Her novel Demon Copperhead , a fictional window into the same communities, was named one of the New York Times ’ best books of the century just days ahead of the Republican National Convention. Last year, it won a Pulitzer Prize.

As hundreds of thousands more read about the plights of the Appalachian region, these authors are fighting back against what they describe as Vance’s assumed norms.

Overcoming “Hillbilly Elegy”

Vance writes in Hillbilly Elegy that he grew up most of his life in Middletown, Ohio, but spent summers and his free time until the age of 12 in Jackson, Ky. Vance adds that Jackson “was the one place that belonged to me.”

Vance’s first stop after the RNC was to a rally in Middletown, where he declared, “I love every one of you, and I love this town, and I'm so grateful to have been formed by it, because I wouldn't be who I was without it.”

2024 Election

Trump team responds after 'republicans for harris' call trump 'unfit' to be president.

But Vance’s claim to the area has created a cultural rift between him and those from Appalachia.

Kingsolver said that when she saw Vance’s recently resurfaced interview calling several Democrats “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” it reaffirmed her disappointments with Hillbilly Elegy .

“When I read JD Vance’s memoir, I resented it all the way through. There was just something about it that kept telling me, he’s not from here, he doesn’t get us,” Kingsolver told NPR. “I thought, OK, you are not from here because when I think about my childhood, many of the most important women in my life who saved me, who took care of me, were childless women. It’s not just blood that defines community here.”

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) speaks at a campaign rally at VFW Post 92 on August 15, 2024 in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images hide caption

It’s not just Kingsolver who has an alternate narrative.

Meredith McCarroll and Anthony Harkins co-edited Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, a blend of scholarly, poetic and narrative rebuttals to Vance’s tale published in 2019.

Harkins, a professor of history at Western Kentucky University, said that Hillbilly Elegy loses its footing by generalizing one person’s narrative into a definitive account of the entire region.

“It’s totally legitimate for anybody to tell their own story and how they see it,” Harkins told NPR. “But to then present it as the story of Appalachia, to speak of a memoir of a culture, is problematic particularly because that region has so often been stereotyped and misrepresented through recent history.”

McCarroll, director of writing and rhetoric at Bowdoin College and an Appalachian native of Waynesville, N.C., said that the duo’s goal with the book was to spotlight a chorus of Appalachian voices in response to Elegy’s immense popularity, both existing on their own and in opposition to the text.

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Npr staffers pick their favorite fiction reads of 2024.

“My inclination was to gather a lot of different voices, both that are challenging him but not speaking to him at all,” McCarroll told NPR. “It’s this weaving together of a lot of different authentic perspectives that can give a sense of how layered and complex this 13 state region is.”

McCarroll added that beyond Hillbilly Elegy, she wanted Appalachian Reckoning to counter the idea of Appalachia as a monolithic place.

“The back half of the book moved beyond Hillbilly Elegy, and really is just a collection of narratives from the region that you can’t read and come away thinking you understand Appalachia,” McCarroll said. “No one should say, ‘I read one book, and so I understand this region.’”

Writing the full truth

For these writers, telling the honest story of Appalachia is tantamount–even if they start difficult conversations.

Elizabeth Catte, historian and author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, published in 2018, said that books about Appalachia fall short for her when authors lean on inauthentic stereotypes in pursuit of authenticity.

“Sometimes people try to make up for personal knowledge or experience or study of a region by laying a bunch of tropes on a book and calling it authentic,” Catte told NPR. “Sometimes you don’t get a sense that Appalachia has a history, that it’s just a place full of problems, but none of those problems have an origin, or the origin is uninteresting to the author.”

Vance’s story has resonated with conservatives and non-Appalachians alike. In the wake of the 2016 election, the book became an explanation of sorts for some liberals as to who Trump’s supporters were and how he managed to win the presidency. One op-ed described Bostonians as “ lapping up ” the tale.

J.D. Vance autographs a book after a rally Thursday, July 1, 2021, in Middletown, Ohio. Jeffrey Dean/AP hide caption

The book became a best-seller and later was adapted into a movie. But for those from the region, crucial pieces of the puzzle that Vance painted are missing.

Harkins said that when discussing Appalachian history, texts must keep economic context in mind, like Appalachia’s political and cultural history with coal , when thinking about how the past has turned into the present.

“You can’t speak about the experience of Appalachia in the last hundred years without thinking about the massive effects that economic change have brought to it, in a place that is often the product of extractive industry, whether it’s lumbering or coal or fracking,” Harkins said. “One of the concerns I have with seeing it through the prism of Hillbilly Elegy is often that most of that stuff is not part of the story.”

Vance’s politics might not land with all readers, but he focused much of his Republican National Convention speech, which he gave just two days after being named to the ticket, on his relationship with his mom and grandma. These relationships are where these authors have found a common ground. For Kingsolver’s fictional quest, it was similarly important to keep Demon’s humanity front and center, both for the reader and for herself.

“I was kind of scared to write this novel for several years because you can’t bludgeon people with sadness or with truths that are hard to bear,” Kingsolver said. “Unless you give it a really delicious package. You have to give people a reason to turn the page. You have to give people characters that they love and believe in, that they honestly start to care about as their friend.”

The power of representation

Kingsolver said that when Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize last year, Appalachia rejoiced like Appalachia does.

“It was like fireworks all up and down the mountain,” Kingsolver said. “So many people from here, even my mail carrier and the cashier at the grocery store, said, ‘This is amazing. We won.’”

The novel has appealed to more than Appalachians: It unanimously won the 2023’s Women Prize, and more recently, it ranked No. 1 on the New York Times ’ readers’ “Best Books of the Century” list–and No. 61 on the critics’ list.

McCarroll said that with novels coming out today like Demon Copperhead, it is hard to stay upset at the negative aspects of Hillbilly Elegy. 

“What’s so exciting is that there are so many really diverse, beautiful stories that are really offering complicated perspectives, and so it’s like I don’t feel like I have to stay mad at Hillbilly Elegy ,” McCarroll said. “There’s a long history of Appalachian literature, too.”

McCarroll added that a variety of stories is important because they add texture to a region too often boxed into one corner.

“What a Black Appalachian coal miner in Pennsylvania is experiencing might be very different from a Mexican migrant worker in Western North Carolina is experiencing, which might be really different than what a third- or fourth-generation farmer who is white in Kentucky is experiencing,” McCarroll said.

Kingsolver said that when writing Demon Copperhead, it was important to combat assumptions made by mainstream media outlets about Appalachia.

“I think they miss our diversity. They think we’re all white, and we’re not. It was important for me to reflect that in this novel,” Kingsolver said. “I wanted it to be the great Appalachian novel that kind of puts our whole region in a context. We didn’t choose to have poverty and [high] unemployment. We didn’t ask for that. This came to us.”

Kingsolver added that it has been especially gratifying hearing from people whose perspective on Appalachia changed after reading her novel.

“I have heard from lots and lots and lots of people in other parts of the country who said, ‘This book asked me to evaluate my prejudices, and I thank you for that,’ ” Kingsolver said. “It’s amazing.”

When Kingsolver received news that she was at the top of the Times’ readers’ list last month, she said she had to “lie down on the floor” and think about its weight. Kingsolver said that a less obvious reward, though, was readers celebrating a story of an imperfect, wholly Appalachian character.

“I can’t even tell you how many people have written to tell me I’m still worried about Demon, I wake up at night worrying about him,” Kingsolver said. “As if he’s become their kid. He’s the world’s kid. That’s how you navigate it, that’s how you have to.”

Though Hillbilly Elegy might loom large once again, Appalachian authors, whether through fictional tales like Demon Copperhead or nonfiction deep dives like What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, are finding strength in their resistance and dissent.

Reacting to news of being on the New York Times' list, Kingsolver wrote in an Instagram post:

“With a certain other ‘hillbilly’ book suddenly ascendant, my duty. No elegies here. Thank you.”

Correction Aug. 18, 2024

A previous version of this story mistakenly identified Anthony Harkins as an assistant professor in history at Western Kentucky University. Harkins is a professor of history. Additionally, an earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Bowdoin College as Bowdoin University.

• Barbara Kingsolver

• Security Council

Africa Has Provided Clear, Compelling Vision for Security Council Representation, Speakers Stress in Historic Debate on Enhancing Continent’s Participation

Africa has articulated a clear and compelling vision for its representation on the Security Council, that body heard today at a historic high-level debate on enhancing the continent’s effective participation in the United Nations organ tasked with maintenance of peace and security.

The meeting was convened by Sierra Leone, Council President for August, and chaired by that country’s President, Julius Maada Bio. Speaking in his national capacity, he said:  “Today, I speak as a representative of a continent that has long been underrepresented in the decision-making process that shapes our world.”  Setting out the aspirations of its fifty-plus countries and over 1 billion people, he stated:  “Africa demands two permanent seats in the UN Security Council and two additional non-permanent seats, bringing the total number of non-permanent seats to five.” The African Union will choose the continent’s permanent members, he said, stressing that “Africa wants the veto abolished; however, if UN Member States wish to retain the veto, it must extend it to all new permanent members as a matter of justice.” 

This is the Common African Position, as espoused in the Ezulwini Consensus and the Sirte Declaration, he said. As the Coordinator of the African Union’s Committee of Ten, his country has spearheaded efforts to amplify the continent’s voice on the question of its representation.  Noting the bloc’s admission to the Group of Twenty (G20) as a welcome development, he said it is absurd for the UN to enter the eightieth decade of its existence without representation for his continent.  It must be treated as a special case and prioritized in the Council reform process, he stressed. 

Highlighting the way slavery, imperialism and colonialism have shaped current global power structures, he noted the persistent stereotype of Africa “as a passive actor” in global affairs.  The continent’s inclusion in the permanent membership category will ensure that decisions affecting it are made with direct and meaningful input from those most impacted.  This will not only unlock Africa's full potential; it will also improve the Council’ legitimacy, he added. 

“The cracks” in the Organization’s foundation “are becoming too large to ignore”, António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations acknowledged during his briefing.  The Council was “designed by the victors of the Second World War and reflects the power structures at that time,” he said, recalling that in 1945, most of today's African countries were still under colonial rule and had no voice in international affairs.  As a result, there is no permanent member representing Africa in the Council and the number of elected members from the continent is not in proportion to its importance. 

It is unacceptable, he underscored, that “the world's pre-eminent peace and security body lacks a permanent voice for a continent of well over a billion people”, whose countries make up 28 per cent of the membership of the UN.  While Africa is underrepresented in global governance structures, it is overrepresented in the challenges these structures address.  Nearly half of all country-specific or regional conflicts on the Council's agenda concern Africa, and “they are often exacerbated by greed for Africa’s resources” and further aggravated by external interference, he said. 

“Reform of this Council membership must be accompanied by a democratization of its working methods,” he added, drawing attention to the need for more systematic consultations with host States and regional organizations.  Enhancing Africa’s representation in the Council is not just a question of ethics; “it is also a strategic imperative that can increase global acceptance of the Council’s decisions,” he reminded that body.

Echoing that, Dennis Francis (Trinidad and Tobago), President of the General Assembly, said:  “We cannot continue to take [the United Nations’] relevance for granted.”  Instead, he added, “we must earn it, daily, with the actions we take”,  including meaningful reform.  Highlighting the Assembly’s active engagement on Council reform, he said the current draft of its input to the Pact of the Future calls for redressing the historical injustice to Africa.

The continent, he pointed out, is home to 54 of the UN’s 193 members, accounts for 1.3 billion of the world’s population and hosts the majority of UN peacekeeping operations.  “The fact that Africa continues to be manifestly underrepresented on the Security Council is simply wrong,” he said.  Alongside the growing calls for a Council that is more representative and transparent, he noted, there are also calls for a revitalized General Assembly.  Member States are asking that body to assume a greater role in peace and security matters but also hold the Council more accountable for its actions — “and, indeed, inaction” he said. 

The United Nations is clearly suffering from a legitimacy crisis, Sithembile Mbete, Senior Lecturer of Political Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Pretoria noted, adding that younger generations are witnessing its failures in “real time” on social media platforms.  She described Africa’s experience of the UN system over the past 80 years as one of “misrepresentation and underrepresentation”.  This has become evident in the perpetuated narratives of Africa as a continent of “backwards societies” reliant on aid as well as in the continent’s exclusion from permanent membership of the Council and inadequate representation among non-permanent members. 

Detailing the historical context for this, she recalled the four centuries of European slave trade starting in 1450 and devastating Africa’s population, culture, and economies, as well as the 1884 Berlin Conference that imposed colonial States, which still impacts the continent’s economic relations with rich nations.  In the 30 years since the end of the cold war, African subjects took up nearly 50 per cent of the Council’s meetings — but while Africa was on the menu, as was the case in Berlin 100 years ago, it still does not have a permanent seat at the table.  By 2045, Africa will have 2.3 billion people, making up 25 per cent of the global population, she said, asking diplomats to summon “the courage” to confront the power relations that are preventing meaningful reform. 

Lounes Magramane, Secretary-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Community Abroad of Algeria, pointed to the hotspots on his continent, from the security, development and humanitarian challenges in the Sahel region to the Sahrawi people’s struggle for their right to self-determination.  Yet, Africa is the only group not represented in the permanent category, he said, reiterating the call for allocation of two permanent and two non-permanent seats.  Permanent members must commit to support the reform process, he said, calling on them to participate constructively in the intergovernmental negotiations. 

China’s representative was one of several speakers who traced the connection between colonialism and Africa’s under-representation.  The brutal legacy of Western colonial rule, the inhumane slave trade and resource-plundering impoverished the people of that continent and artificially interrupted their development.  This is the root cause of all historical injustices in Africa, he asserted.  “Some Western countries still cling to the colonial mindset,” he said, interfering in Africa’s internal affairs using financial, legal, and even military means to exert their influence in currency, energy, minerals and national defence.  He urged those countries “to change course and return the future of Africa to the hands of the African people”. 

Eight decades ago when the Council first met, the United States’ delegate said, “its architects could not have imagined then what the world would look like today, as we cannot imagine what it will look like 70 years from now”.  In 2050, one in four people on the planet will be African, she noted, adding that Africa has the fastest-growing population of any continent.  “We all benefit when African leaders are at the table,” she said, adding that the upcoming Summit of the Future should be a platform for meaningful progress.  At the same time, “Africa’s problems are not Africa’s alone to deal with,” she said, as she warned against the attempts of some States to obstruct Panels of Experts.  They represent a critical UN tool that provides the body with credible information about security threats, she added.

General Jeje Odongo Abubakhar, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Uganda, said that despite being “the market of the world” and a leading contributor to UN peacekeeping operations, Africa has been “unjustly excluded from positions of power and influence” in the Council.  A stronger presence will give the continent a “much-needed platform for engagement with the international community as an equal and significant partner,” he said.  Voicing support for the intergovernmental negotiating process, he noted that “it is taking too long to conclude”. 

Mozambique’s delegate noted that this topic has been long addressed in many different fora, including the negotiations on Assembly resolution 62/557 concerning “Question of equitable representation on and increase in the membership of the Security Council and related matters”.  Yet, regrettably, “the Security Council’s engagement in that process has been modest to say the least,” he said, adding that the body’s position has not changed much since the 1965 expansion that added the four elected members to the organ.  To those who argue that expanding membership will diminish the Council’s efficacy, he pointed out that legitimacy and efficacy are interlinked and mutually reinforcing. 

Shinsuke Shimizu, Ambassador for International Economic Affairs in Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, commended the continent’s effort to shoulder more responsibilities at the Council, highlighting the landmark resolution on financing of African Union-led Peace Support Operations.  The Council must be reformed with an expansion in both permanent and non-permanent membership, he asserted.  Also supporting the expansion of both categories of membership was Lord Collins of Highbury, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office for the United Kingdom. In order for the Council to be as effective as it can be, it must urgently include permanent African representation, he said. 

The representative of France stressed the need to strengthen the Council’s legitimacy whilst preserving its decision-making ability.  The reform is “possible”, and Africa should serve as the “catalyst” for this change, she said, adding that the ambitious goal of expansion must be included in the text of the Pact of the Future.  She also urged Member States to join her country’s initiative to limit the use of the veto in cases of mass atrocities.

The Council also heard from several members of the African Union’s Committee of Ten Heads of State and Government, also known as C-10, which was established in 2016.  The speaker for Equatorial Guinea noted that the Common African Position has received much support from Member States in the Assembly as well as the five permanent Council members, “but we have not seen such support become a concrete reality and lead to actual reforms.”  He invited them to clearly define that support and take action.  Congo’s delegate said that given the five permanent Council members’ recognition of the historic injustice done to Africa, there is a real opportunity to advance this reform, encouraging Member States to consider seriously the proposals in the Common African Position. 

The representative of Kenya said the “marginalization is getting worse as the powerful countries seek after their own interests” while Namibia’s delegate, who recalled the Council’s lack of support for his country during its struggle against apartheid and colonialism, underscored that enhancing Africa’s representation is “not a favor to the African continent”.  The continent’s patience should not be mistaken as acquiescence, he warned.  The representative of Senegal rejected “interim solutions that relegate new members to second-class roles” adding that “permanence is not a matter of privilege; it is a question of representativeness”.

While speakers expressed broad support for reforming the Council’s membership, some voiced reservations about certain aspects of the proposed reforms. 

The representative of Italy, speaking for Uniting for Consensus, which he described as a reform group dedicated to achieving a more democratic Council, suggested increasing the number of seats in a reformed Council to a maximum of 27, out of which Africa would obtain 6 seats, thereby “becoming the group with the largest number of elected seats”.  Intergovernmental negotiations have shown increasing convergence on the expansion of non-permanent seats based on equitable geographical distribution, he observed.  At the same time, Africa’s aspiration to serve for longer periods on the Council is legitimate, he said, noting his group has proposed longer-term re-electable non-permanent seats to provide continuity of tenure.  This will maintain a system of democratic accountability “without creating additional and unjustifiable privileged positions”, he said.

Along similar lines, the representative of the Republic of Korea, who reaffirmed his country’s support for Council reform, “standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Africa”, also cautioned that increasing permanent membership will mean that the vast majority of the UN membership would inevitably be further marginalized.  “The Republic of Korea’s consistent and strong reservations about expanding the permanent membership are thus based on the rational and logical conclusion that this antiquity needs to be contained, not proliferated,” he underscored.  The immediate priority should be expanding the non-permanent membership, he said, adding that “any fixed composition of new permanent members will serve at best as a still picture or a snapshot of one moment of history”.

Guyana’s delegate rejected the proposal for expanded permanent membership without the veto privilege, cautioning that this will create hierarchies of members in the permanent category.  Moreover, it will perpetuate injustice by restricting the prerogatives of new permanent members, including from Africa.  While firmly supporting the abolition of the veto, she contended that “as long as it continues to exist, all new permanent members should have the prerogative of its use”.  Notwithstanding, the use of the veto must be curtailed, she stressed, adding that it should never be used to paralyze the Council in cases of mass atrocities such as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

The representative of Pakistan said the veto is the principal reason for the Council’s frequent inability to take effective collective action.  “The problem cannot be the solution,” he said, opposing the addition of new permanent members on the Council as demanded by four individual States, viewing it as a move to promote narrow national interests.  Advocating for a “regional approach”, he expressed support for “special regional seats” to be occupied by States selected by the region and elected by the General Assembly.  Similarly, the concept of longer-term and re-electable seats within each region — proposed by the Uniting for Consensus Group — can be considered as a way to achieve these objectives. While the veto cannot be abolished, it must be severely constrained, particularly in the case of the genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, he said.

The representative of the Russian Federation, however, expressed support for retaining the mechanism of veto, which ensures the adoption of realistic decisions.  Describing his country as a “consistent supporter” of Security Council reform, he cautioned, however, against creating a Council that is “too broad” to maintain its “effectiveness and authority”.  He also pointed to the need for the redistribution of “penholderships” which are currently dominated by former colonial Powers in the Council.  All efforts to correct this situation are “sabotaged by Western countries”, he said, adding that “they are more concerned with ensuring that their NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] bloc allies are included in the permanent pool of the Council alongside countries from the Global South.”

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