TY - JOUR A1 - Guasti, Petra A1 - Geißel, Brigitte T1 - Claims of representation: between representation and democratic innovations T2 - Frontiers in political science N2 - This article seeks to build a bridge between the empirical scholarship rooted in the traditional theory of political representation and constructivist theory on representation by focusing on the authorization of claims. It seeks to answer how claims can be authorized beyond elections - selecting three democratic innovations and tracing claims through the claim-making process. Different participatory democratic innovations are selected - providing various claims and taking place in different institutional contexts, i.e., (elected) members of the Council of Foreigners Frankfurt; individual citizens in participatory budgeting procedures in Münster; and citizen’s associations elected politicians in the referendum campaign in Hamburg. We first analyze the claims raised by the different claim-makers to identify their claimed constituency eligible to authorize claims. In the second step, we focus on the authorization by the claimed constituency and the relevant decision-making authority. The article finds that claim-making in democratic innovations is fractured and incomplete. Nevertheless, this is not the reason to dismiss democratic innovations as possible loci of representation; on the contrary, seen through the prism of claim-making, all representation – electoral and nonelectoral – is partial. Focusing on the authorization of claims in democratic innovations provides novel inferences about the potential and limits of democratic innovations for broadening democratic representation. KW - representation KW - representative claim KW - authorization KW - democratic innovation KW - constructivist turn Y1 - 2021 UR - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/61047 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-610478 SN - 2673-3145 VL - 3 IS - art. 591544 SP - 1 EP - 12 PB - Frontiers Media CY - Lausanne ER -