Institute of East Asian Studies

New Forms of Political Representation

A new joint research project on “(New) Political Representative Claims: A Global View (India, China, Brazil, Germany, France)”, supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and its French counterpart (ANR), was established within Prof. Thomas Heberer’s collaboration with colleagues from the universities in Paris and Frankfurt. 

Europe is currently experiencing a crisis in its established forms of political representation, visible for example in growing political distrust. At the same time, (new) representative claims are emerging all over the world. However, most contemporary research continues to focus on electoral/mandate representation and on single countries. As a result, there is a lack of comparative, global analysis of (new) representative claims. The research project intends to address this situation by considering representative claims in France and Germany – two leading democracies in Europe that are actively experimenting with new concepts of representation – and in three BRICS states: Brazil – the largest democracy in Latin America and one which has innovative participatory processes with competing representative claims; India – the world’s largest democracy and a pioneer in electoral quotas; and China – a non-democratic regime but still with specific representative claims. Funding period: 2016–2019.