The politics of voter presence
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512120922902 |
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/
International Political Science Review
2022, Vol. 43(2) 157 –172
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512120922902
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Article
The politics of voter presence
Anthoula Malkopoulou
Lund University, Sweden
Lisa Hill
University of Adelaide, Australia
Abstract
By focusing only on the composition of representative bodies, the traditional ‘politics of presence’
approach has inadvertently diminished the value of participation for representation. It overlooks
that there exist ‘elite voters’ who reinforce discrimination against abstainers at the policy level
and create obstacles for improving the lives of the marginalized. We offer a remedy to persisting
patterns of political exclusion by arguing in favour of a ‘politics of presence’ at the polls. This
requires high and socially diverse turnout that will make representation more inclusive, broader
and qualitatively different; it will be more descriptive, not of group characteristics, but of the
interests, opinions and ideas of voters. Our alternative is a fusion of descriptive and substantive
representation ‘descriptive responsiveness’.
Keywords
Descriptive representation, politics of presence, responsiveness, voting, voter turnout, substan-
tive representation, participation, inequalities
Introduction
Since the 1980s, theorists of representation have urged representative assemblies to include
members from different segments of society in a manner that is proportional to their actual
share of the population. On these grounds, the ‘politics of presence’ has recommended
legislative, party and other quotas in order to bring marginalized groups like women and
ethnic minorities into decision-making bodies. Their explicit goal has been ‘to break the link
between social structures of inequality or exclusion and the political reflection of these in
Corresponding author:
Anthoula Malkopoulou, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Box 52, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden.
Email: anthoula.malkopoulou@svet.lu.se
158 International Political Science Review 43(2)
levels of participation and influence’ (Phillips, 1995: 13). By focusing only on the composi-
tion of representative bodies, however, advocates of the traditional politics of presence have
inadvertently neglected another crucial challenge to equal representation: low voter
participation.
In most industrialized, voluntary voting democracies turnout is low and steadily declining
(Dassonneville and Hooghe, 2017). In the context of the politics of presence, this problem is
exacerbated by the fact that it is declining in a socially uneven fashion whereby abstention is
increasingly concentrated among the worst off (see Hill, 2014: 132). Parliamentary seat
quotas alleviate to some extent inequalities in voter participation; put simply, when mar-
ginalized groups are guaranteed a seat in the assembly, members of that group are moti-
vated to go out and vote (for their peers) (Banducci et al., 2004). But this comes at a cost.
One problematic feature of parliamentary seat quotas is that they characteristically benefit
those already privileged within under-represented groups, creating what has been described
as a ‘creamy layer’ effect within those groups (Phillips, 2012; Bajpai, 2011). In other words,
in the context of women’s representation, gender quotas tend to bring white, highly edu-
cated, upper-class women into parliament rather than black, working-class ones. A similar
socio-economic bias besets voter participation. Just as gender quotas may bring with them a
creamy layer effect in terms of class, low turnouts have benefitted more socio-economically
privileged groups of voters (of both sexes), creating a corresponding creamy layer effect
within the voting population. These inequalities, in turn, are reflected in the composition of
legislative assemblies and the policies they favour. In sum, although guaranteed presence in
legislatures partly works to reverse political exclusion along gender and race lines, persisting
inequalities in voter participation remain an obstacle for equal political representation.
Hence, an exclusive focus on presence in elected bodies without presence in elections them-
selves does only half of the work that descriptive representation seeks to perform.
In this article, we offer one potentially powerful remedy for the problem of persisting
patterns of de facto political exclusion of socially marginalized groups and the challenge of
including them in the representative process. We do this by arguing in favour of a ‘politics of
presence’ at the polls, which has the effect of making representation more inclusive, broader
and qualitatively different. Universal turnout in elections, we argue, makes representational
activity and outcomes more descriptive of the interests, opinions and ideas of voters.
Our alternative approach, while criticizing the mono-dimensionality of the traditional
approach to descriptive representation, nevertheless incorporates its insights and strategies
in order to offer a fusion of descriptive and substantive representation.
Our argument proceeds in five parts. First, we discuss the limitations of traditional
approaches to descriptive representation, which focus on the selection of decision-makers.
Next, we draw on these approaches to present our normative justifications for the politics of
presence at the polls, and in the third part, we offer some empirical justifications for
voter presence. In the fourth section, we argue that the politics of voter presence makes
representation not just more substantive but more equally substantive. It therefore exem-
plifies how substantive representation can produce descriptive outcomes (in terms of ideas,
rather than identities), a dynamic that we describe as ‘descriptive responsiveness’. In the
fifth section, we offer support for institutional measures that ensure high turnout, such as
compulsory voting.
Note that our argument is limited to advanced democracies in industrialized settings due
to the fact that a properly functioning electoral regime is a basic condition for assessing the
democratic effects of turnout levels. This is because turnout levels cannot be credibly
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