Giving or Taking Voice: Representative Claims and Group Appeals in the Public Sphere

How do political actors give voice to or take voice from constituencies in the public sphere in Europe? Research on representative claims and group appeals has demonstrated that political actors and media actors draw attention to certain constituencies, mention groups to signal alignment or acknowledgment, claim to speak for constituencies, and render other constituencies absent by omitting, downplaying or attacking them. However, to what extent do these patterns vary across communicative arenas, governance levels, electoral contexts, and ideological positions? The aim of this Special Issue is to bring together scholarship examining the supply side of political communication in order to better understand under which conditions group appeals and representative claims are more likely to emerge and when they serve to give or take voice. We expect variation to reflect calculations about electoral incentives, coalition dynamics, and ideological commitments: some actors amplify minoritized voices while others construct groups as threats or deny them legitimate representation. Drawing on research analyzing parliamentary debates, party manifestos, social media posts, and public discourse in national and supranational contexts, the contributions trace how political and media actors refer to constituencies across the public sphere in Europe.

The contributions use a diverse set of methods, from qualitative content analysis to computational text classification, to examine a wide range of contexts and arenas. They analyse diverse groups, from structurally defined populations such as ethnic, economic, or age groups to more loosely constructed identities, revealing both group diversity and group-specific patterns.

More generally, this collection offers new theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights into studying how group appeals and representative claims intersect in the communication domain of representation, demonstrating that studying who speaks to, for and about whom remains essential to understanding representation in contemporary representative democracies. 

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