The Subject of Representation

Who does, and who can, represent women? How and where do they do it? What are we to make of competing claims to represent women? Is a higher number of women in parliaments the key to better representing women’s interests? These are some of the key questions tackled by the articles in this special issue of Representation on the substantive representation of women. And it quickly becomes evident that to tackle these questions one must also confront in turn the fundamental questions that lie behind them, above all ‘What does it mean for one person or group to represent another?’. The idea and practice of political representation has, of course, long been subject of debate, in the UK and well beyond. This journal has played its role in charting and contributing to these debates, not least in the area of electoral systems and the styles of representation they produce. In recent years, a new set of controversies has arisen around representation. Varied aspects of ‘globalisation’ have led commentators to question how representation can or should work on regional or global levels (Held 1995; Dryzek 2006). Environmentalists have questioned the ability of our existing representative systems to encompass the interests of ‘nature’, future generations of people, and non-human animals (Dobson 1996). And political parties, supposedly the key vehicles of representation, have lost members and support, as large numbers of people in many countries and regions turn to social movements, or away from mainstream politics, in seeking to ‘have their views represented’ (van Biezen 2003; Mair 2006). Among academic observers and political actors there is a widespread sense that we are facing a crisis of representation. Perhaps not surprisingly, a sense of crisis, or at least renewed concern, about the adequacy of our existing machinery of political representation is also proving to be a time of creative thinking about what representation may mean, and where we can find it. This special issue both shows how that creative thinking has occurred with respect to the critical issue of the representation of women, and seeks to make its own original contribution to the analysis of representation in general, and of women in particular. The emphasis in the articles that follow is on the idea of representation, but the discussion is rooted in cases and examples from the European Union in particular, but also from other regions such as Latin America. Indeed, one message arising from these articles is that we need to look at the theory and the practice of representation as part of a single process, if we are to capture ‘what is going on in political representation’ (a phrase that guided contributions to the European Consortium for Political Research workshop in Helsinki in 2007, directed by Karen Celis and Sarah Childs, on the substantive representation of women which gave rise to this special issue). At the heart of each of these contributions is questioning and argument about the subject of representation, in two senses—(1) what is it about? and (2) who does it? Take the first of these. What political and indeed other (e.g. artistic or cultural) phenomena should we look at when we think about political representation? Commonly, we think of