The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation

Lisa Disch is Full Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Cornell University Press 1994), The Tyranny of the Two-Party System (Columbia University Press 2002), and co-editor with Mary Hawkesworth of the Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (Oxford University Press 2016). She works on feminist theory, democratic theory, and environmental political theory.

Mathijs van de Sande is Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Radboud University in Nijmegen. In 2017, he obtained his PhD at the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven with a thesis on the prefigurative repertoire of recent assembly movements (such as Occupy Wall Street). His main research interests are radical democratic theory (broadly conceived), political representation, activism, and social movement theory.

Nadia Urbinati is Full Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University, New York. She works on democratic theory; in particular, representative democracy, populism, plebiscitary leadership, and post-party representation.

1. Introduction: The End of Representative Politics
Lisa Disch

Section One
The Constructivist Turn: Anglo-American and Continental Intellectual Genealogies

2. Rethinking Representation: Eight Theoretical Issues and a Postscript
Dario Castiglione and Mark E. Warren

3. Machiavelli against the Venice Myth: The 16th Century Dialogue on the Nature of Political Representation
Jan Biba

4. Power without Representation is Blind, Representations without Power are Empty
Bernard Flynn

5. Two Regimes of the Symbolic: Radical Democracy Between Romanticism and Structuralism
Warren Breckman

6. Political Representation: The View From France
Raf Geenens

7. Democracy and Representation
Claude Lefort (translated by Greg Conti)

Section Two
The Constructivist Turn: Normative Challenges

8. Representation as Proposition: Democratic Representation after the Constructivist Turn
Samuel Hayat

9. Don Alejandro's Fantasy: On Representation and Radical Democracy
Oliver Marchart

10. Pinning Down Representation
Lasse Thomassen

11. Representative Constructivism's Conundrum
Nadia Urbinati

Section Three
Constructivist Representation: Critique and Reproduction of Power

12. Exploring the Semantics of Constructivist Representation
Alessandro Mulieri

13. The Improper Politics of Representation
Mark Devenney

14. The Constructivist Paradox: Contemporary Protest Movements and (their) Representation
Mathijs van de Sande