Political representation is a corner stone of modern representative democracies. It builds on the strong assumption that parties/politicians undertake actions to listen and learn about citizens’ interests, to represent them within political institutions, and to convert them into public policies (Powell, 2004). However, in everyday politics these assumptions are hardly met, elites tend to represent some groups more than others, while citizens have unequal opportunities to be heard; which feeds (unequal) forms of representation. This is a challenge for both consolidated and emerging democracies around the world.
Most research on political representation is EU and US-centred. The very few studies focusing on Africa find it difficult to study political representation given the persistence of autocratic features and political instability in many countries. Moreover, the general view is that representation is essentially clientelistic and identity-based. Parties do not present clear programs and ideologies and citizens vote either to “placate the demands of their existing or putative patron” (Chabal and Daloz, 1999, p. 39) or to “place ethnic representatives in the arenas where, they believe, the national pie is divided” (Van De Walle and Butler, 1999, p. 26). This view implies that instrumental rather than substantive forms of representation prevail in Africa; yet recent work provides nuance. Studies have highlighted significant advances in terms of gender representation (Tripp, 2016), and the substantive representation of women issues in parliament (Albertyn, 2003), despite persisting gaps. It has also been shown that African MPs vary substantively in the way they embrace representation tasks, and that links between constituents and MPs vary at the individual-level and according to contextual and institutional factors (Cheeseman, 2016; Mattes and Mozaffar, 2016; Wahman, Frantzeskakis and Yildirim, 2021; Demarest, 2022; Osei, 2022; Sanches and Kartalis, 2024). Finally, citizens seem to value MPs roles as representatives, have strong demands for more substantives forms of representation (Mattes and Mozaffar, 2016; Adida et al., 2020) and make a retrospective evaluation of policies when deciding on how to cast their vote (Lindberg and Morrison, 2008). Hence, diverse forms of linkage between voters and representatives, along and beyond ethnic and clientelistic lines, exist in Africa.
This panel examines the patterns, causes and consequences of different forms of political representation in Africa analysing both the supply side (elites) and the demand side (citizens) of the representation process. Instead of working with a pre-set meaning of political representation, that would be specific to Africa, it takes a wide-encompassing approach that may cover different aspects – formal, descriptive, substantive, symbolic, delegate or trustees etc. (Dovi, 2014) – and find the proper signification of it within particularly contexts.
It welcomes research, utilizing different theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches, to study the relationship between representatives/politicians and their constituents/citizens, as well as the impact of individual-level factors (e.g. elite and citizens social and political standing), political institutions and contextual factors on political representation.