Making Sense of Citizens’ Sense of Being Represented. A Novel Conceptualisation and Measure of Feeling Represented

ABSTRACT

Although many studies point to the decaying relationship between citizens and their representatives, a proper conceptualisation and empirical measure of citizens’ feeling of being represented is still missing from the literature. This study, first, offers a multidimensional conceptualisation of feeling represented, focused on feelings of being substantively represented. Specifically, a distinction is made between the representative behaviour that people might perceive (whether representatives listen, know, act or succeed) and between the representative actors performing this behaviour or not (some or most representatives). Second, a measure that takes into account these different aspects of feeling represented is developed and tested on two samples of Belgian citizens. Confirmatory factor analysis and correlations with citizens’ vote intention and other indicators of political discontent demonstrate the validity of the novel measure. Also, the results point to the added value of the measure: not only may the different aspects of feeling represented be measured independently, they also lead to more nuanced insights into the current ‘crisis of representation’ than the currently available measures do.

KEYWORDS:

• Feeling represented
• subjective representation
• crisis of representation
• confirmatory factor analysis
• Belgium

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The RepResent Consortium is a collaboration between five Belgian universities (UA, KUL, UCLouvain, VUB, ULB). For more information, see URL (accessed 1 December, 2021): https://represent-project.be/

2 In the Belgian political system, determining whether a party is or is not in government is not entirely straight-forward, as federal and regional governments may differ in their composition. In this article, the least strict definition is applied: if a party is in either the federal or regional government, it is considered a government party. I redid the analysis applying a stricter definition (only federal government), and this led to similar results as only one party (N-VA) shifted from government to opposition.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Antwerp under internal grant FFB200323.

Notes on contributors

August De Mulder

August De Mulder is a PhD student at the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp, as part of the M²P research group. His main research interests focus on political communication and political representation. E-mail: [email protected]