Feeling Represented: A New Approach to Measure How Citizens Feel Represented Through Representative Claims

Political representation is an essential component of the liberal democratic systems we have in most of the world today. Hence, many studies have focused on whether citizens are represented by politicians in normative, descriptive, and substantive ways. Yet, we know surprisingly little about whether citizens feel represented. Constructivist scholars have further elaborated theoretically that representation is the result of a process in which linkage is created between represented and representative. Feeling represented is an essential part of establishing this representative relationship. In this paper, we operationalize “feeling represented” with insights from the literature on political representation and empirical psychology. Acknowledging the emotional application of this concept effectively goes beyond the distinction of descriptive and substantive representation and effectively builds on the constructivist turn in political representation. By incorporating cutting-edge research on psychology, especially work on affective processing, emotions and identity, this paper will pave the way in developing a valid measurement of feeling represented. Through an online survey embedded experiment, we investigate the dimensionality of the concept with an exploratory factor analysis. Hence, we contribute to knowledge on how and to what extent political representation works in practice.