How Governance Stirs the Representative Soup: An empirical test of Michael Saward’s Representative Claim Theory in contemporary urban governance contexts

This research investigates and explains the relationship between contemporary governance and political representation within the urban context of the city of Rotterdam. The shift from a hierarchical government to a cooperative governance approach (Pierre, 2000) raises the question how political representation is enacted, as electoral mechanisms become inadequate (Saward, 2005). The ‘constructivist turn’ in literature on political representation (Russo & Cotta, 2020) enables analysing representation by non-elective actors. However, current literature lacks a comprehensive understanding of the influence of contemporary governance contexts on the practice of political representation. This research, therefore, investigates three distinct modes of governance - co-creation, self-organisation and meta-governance - and explains how these modes influence the performance of political representation. The used method of inquiry is the co-variational approach (Blatter & Haverland, 2012), where the cases vary in the independent variable and the dependent variable is measured. The opted theoretical framework to measure the dependent variable, political representation, is derived from The Representative Claim Theory: a theory articulated by political theorist Michael Saward (2006, 2009, 2010), which posits that representation is not a fixed relationship but rather a dynamic process where actors make claims to represent others. The empirical test consisted of one case study per governance mode: the Rotterdams Weerwoord (co-creation), the Leeszaal Rotterdam West (self-organisation) and the Nationaal Programma Rotterdam Zuid (meta-governance). In each case, the emphasised claim mechanism associated with the governance mode was identified and analysed. The findings of this research suggest that governance influences political representation, because each governance mode ‘asks’ for a varying form of political representation to align with its operational needs, thereby trying to provide the demanded quality from the represented.