Project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR)

Project’s Duration : May 2016 – December 2020

Leading Researchers: Yves Sintomer (Université Paris 8, Institut Universitaire de France), Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal (CNRS-EHESS), Brigitte Geissel (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a. M.), Thomas Heberer (Universität Duisburg Essen)

While the established forms of political representation are currently in crisis and demands for renewing political representation are shifting worldwide, much of the current research on representation continues to focus on electoral representation/ mandate at a national level.

A comparative and global analysis of these new forms of representative claims (situations in which actors claim to speak and act on behalf of others) that have developed outside representative political systems is still largely lacking, and that the dynamics developing in countries in the Southern hemisphere, notably in undemocratic entities, remain neglected by Western research.

The CLAIMS project aims to fill this lacuna by putting into perspective the representative claims emerging in France and Germany on one hand, and in three BRICS countries - Brazil, India, and China - on the other.

These representative claims often assume the form of a denunciation of a deficit in representation that they claim to rectify. In the five jurisdictions under review, we will identify different situations in which (purported) new representative claims are developed, criticized, or championed.

By employing a shared methodological framework that has been carefully developed, our research aims to analyse the development of these claims from a global and transnational perspective.