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The growing number of women winning legislative seats in Latin America augurs important questions about the causes and consequences of women’s representation. The introduction to this book articulates a comprehensive theory of women’s representation that provides a multifaceted and integrated model of women’s representation linking together formal, descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. It then describes how this theory will be tested empirically with data from Latin American legislatures in the remaining chapters of the book.

This chapter returns to a large, cross-national study of Latin American countries to examine whether the use of proportional electoral rules and gender quotas (formal representation), having more women in legislatures (descriptive representation), and passing women-friendly policies (substantive representation) evokes greater support for government in the electorate (symbolic representation). It presents a statistical analysis using Americas Barometer (LAPOP) survey data and shows that all three forms of representation affect both men’s and women’s democratic satisfaction, perceptions of corruption, trust in legislation, and trust in government, though to varying degrees. Countries with greater formal, descriptive, and substantive representation of women also have higher levels of support for representative democracy.

Considers whether a case for ensuring the equal representation of women and men or proportionate representation of ethnic minority groups can be extracted from the twin democratic principles of political equality and popular control. It argues that it is necessary to move beyond these to an alternative justification grounded in existing structures of political exclusion. Four key arguments are explored: the importance of symbolic representation; the need to tackle the exclusions inherent in the party‐political packaging of ideas; the need for more vigorous advocacy on behalf of disadvantaged groups; and the importance of a politics of presence in opening up a wider range of policy options.

This concluding chapter discusses how scholars have established the utility of different types of representation for disadvantaged groups. Descriptive representation refers to the physical presence of a social group in the setting of decision making. Substantive representation occurs when the concerns, values, sensibilities, or interests of that group are expressed, acted upon, and ultimately influence the outcome in some way. Symbolic representation is defined as the notion that the group is capable of governing, that its exercise of power is legitimate. The book's findings suggest an additional type of representation. In order to obtain substantive and symbolic representation, a subordinate group requires that the conditions of discussion provide the group with authoritative representation.

Chapter 6 describes the factors that led to a shift in the discourse about dangdut, as its mass-mediated image changed from music marketed for the urban underclass to music marketed for a national audience. Commercial television played a crucial role as a medium for nationalizing dangdut in the 1990s. High-ranking officials strategically placed dangdut within the discourse of national cultural politics by appearing with dangdut stars on television, singing and dancing to dangdut in public, and promoting the music in popular print media. Cultural organizations helped to create the links between musicians, composers, and the state. In contrast to an aesthetic of camp and excess described in Chapter 5, nationalized dangdut was glamorous and subdued. Although it was intended to be more inclusive, as dangdut became more national, its established audience receded from the sphere of media representation. The chapter argues that the discourse about dangdut as a symbolic representation of the nation, was actually very selective and exclusive in terms of its form, representation, and meaning. Women as symbolic representations of the nation were crucial in this narrative project.

Naturalistic accounts of language and conceptual capacities more generally have heretofore been guided by the neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis. Niche construction and other aspects of an “extended” evolutionary synthesis suggest a different approach. This chapter develops a naturalistic account of the co-evolution of human organisms with language and other capacities for conceptual understanding, as forms of behavioral niche construction. Discursive practice is part of the normal developmental environment for human beings, which leads to its reproduction in subsequent generations; this environmental inheritance has changed the selection pressures on the human lineage. Grasp of a language is then a practical-perceptual skill in responding and contributing to a public discursive practice, rather than symbolic representation processing. Despite the rudimentary linguistic development of the bonobo Kanzi, which shows that capacities for linguistic acquisition are ancestral, a niche-constructionist approach shows why the evolutionary continuity between human and other animal minds led to discontinuous conceptual capacities in the human lineage. Other animals’ sensitive, flexible practical-perceptual responsiveness to their environments are a barrier to symbolic displacement and discursive understanding. This approach then highlights the challenge, taken up in subsequent chapters, of accounting for the rational normativity of conceptual understanding in its terms.

This chapter explores whether the "Explanatory Gap"-the discrepancy that exists when comparing a phenomenal sensation to a neural spike-train correlate-can be approached via the concept that neural and phenomenal phenomena are situated at different representational levels. It is argued that David Marr’s multilevel notion of mind–brain organization can be modified to accommodate the functional and representational demands applying to conscious brain systems proposed earlier. This account ranges from the single-neuron level to functional ensembles and, hence, to unimodal meta-networks and the higher level of multimodal meta-networks. No saltatory transitions in neural-to-mental activity exist between levels. The relationships between levels is described as noncausal, with higher-level phenomena corresponding to, and supervening on, lower-level phenomena. Higher-level representational entities have no independent access to lower-level processing: what is experienced at a higher level as having meaningful content cannot be directly unmasked by the same subject as being merely “neural” at a lower level. In this view meaning, situated at a high level, arises from groups of symbols coded by ensembles, in a way that allows ontogenetically developing brain systems to make arbitrary representational choices within constraints defined by spatiotemporal consistencies in sensory input.

Symbolic representation is a relatively under-studied concept amongst feminist political scientists. Most existing research on women's symbolic representation in politics has tended to adopt a more wide-ranging approach to analyse the media's representation of women and the impact of women politicians as role models. This chapter illustrates various examples where, in common with both Labour and Conservative women MPs, Liberal Democrat women MPs have been subjected to trivialisation and objectification by the media. It also explores instances of representation where the descriptive and symbolic meet and questions whether the low number of women MPs impacts upon identification of role models. Prior to the 2010 election the Liberal Democrats had the youngest MPs in England, Scotland, and Wales, all of whom are women: this resulted in mixed press coverage. The women MPs had varying attitudes towards the media, some found it hurtful, whilst others identified it as a ‘necessary evil’. The intersection between women's symbolic and descriptive representation peaked during the infamous 2001 debate on the all-women shortlists. The most commonly identified role model was Baroness Shirley Williams.

This chapter argues that the origins, context, and form of Frank Gehry constitute an ethical strategy of symbolic representation for tourists on a grand scale. The Guggenheim Bilbao is the embodiment of creative risk taking, human exigency, and persistence in the face of uncertainty. Gehry's building is not superficially referential or casually symbolic in the way a Disney cartoon house is symbolic. Gehry's building rigorously and accurately models the structure of the symbol itself. Today, tourists who visit Spain think about going to Bilbao and express disappointment if they miss it. The people of Bilbao, even those who were displaced to make room for the museum, take pride in it and embrace it as their own. The initial design for the Guggenheim Bilbao was originally sketched for a Disney project. The Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles might have been first to receive this symbolic treatment.

This chapter defines expressive speech as used in this book. The concept of a composite acoustic waveform is presented, consisting of two components: the basic message and expression. The speaker plans an utterance, a listener assigns labels to that utterance, and arrives at a percept which recovers the intended message. This differs from other models which do not emphasize the assignment of labels or symbolic representation to the waveform. Another difference is the proposal that speaking occurs within an overall expressive wrapper. Short term and long term expression is discussed and the role of the listener is emphasized.

Evidence presented in previous chapters suggests consideration of an alternative to the coupled-oscillator approach to modeling human speech planning and production processes. One alternative approach is based on the symbolic phonemic representations of Generative Phonology. This approach requires a separate mechanism to translate these symbolic representations into the quantitative context-appropriate specifications that can produce the surface form of an utterance. To date models of this type have not included comprehensive versions of components that complete this symbol-to-quantification translation process. This chapter reviews the evidence that supports a three-component model of this process, with an abstract symbolic Phonological Planning Component to specify the goals of the utterance at the level of contrastive feature cues; a Phonetic Planning Component to translate these goals into acoustic targets with their articulatory realizations; and a Motor-Sensory Implementation Component to track and adjust the articulatory movements which create the vocal-tract configurations that realize these goals. Development of such a three-component model would allow direct comparison with performance of the oscillator-based AP/TD model.

It is now widely accepted that political representation is not merely a passive, ‘mirroring’ process, but that the process of political representation plays a constitutive role in the construction of citizens’ ideas and preferences. This chapter argues that French political philosophy points to an even more fundamental role for power and representation in the construction (or the ‘constitution’) of society and the self-image of its members. It focuses on a key argument of political theorist, Claude Lefort, who maintained that the specificity of a society is determined by the way power is organized and symbolically represented in that society. On this account, the importance of political representation goes far beyond the formation of opinions and the process of collective decision making. The organization and representation of power is instead seen as a key determinant of society’s self-understanding and of the way citizens within that society understand themselves and their mutual relations.

This chapter explores cognitivism and the cognitivist hypothesis. The central intuition behind cognitivism is that intelligence—human intelligence included—so resembles computation in its essential characteristics that cognition can actually be defined as computations of symbolic representations. The cognitivist argument is that intelligent behavior presupposes the ability to represent the world as being certain ways. Another cognitivist claim is that the only way one can account for intelligence and intentionality is to hypothesize that cognition consists of acting on the basis of representations that are physically realized in the form of a symbolic code in the brain or a machine. Ultimately, the cognitivist hypothesis entails a very strong claim about the relations between syntax and semantics.

Chapter 2 offers a re-reading of classic and newer research on women’s political representation. It is designed not to provide the reader with a comprehensive, global account of what has been said and found by multiple generations of scholars. Rather, by using more select work, the authors show through a critical reading that the dominant “dimensional approach” to political representation limits both conceptual understanding and empirical evaluation of the quality of women’s political representation. This tendency toward individual dimensions of representation—oftentimes discrete analysis of descriptive, substantive, symbolic, and affective representation—not only presumes that women’s good representation is somehow a simple question of adding up and taking away scores for each dimension, but it also makes it particularly hard to conceive, theoretically and empirically, when women are well represented, given women’s ideological and intersectional differences. Hence, the authors’ claim to redress intersectionally women’s poverty of representation demands that we conceive of representation as a mélange.

By introducing the concept of symbolic empowerment, the chapter bridges the scholarly literature on descriptive and symbolic representation. In it, the chapter argues that historic candidacies change the nature of political representation when a strong psychological attachment or affective intragroup emotion like pride heightens the value of intrinsic rewards associated with voting and participating in other ways, from proselytizing and attending a campaign rally or political meeting to donating money and wearing a campaign button. The aim of such “feel-good” candidates like Chisholm and Jackson, who elicited a positive intragroup emotion like pride, was to win the affection of voters and to stoke the desire to get involved in the electoral process. On the other hand, the aim of Clinton and Obama, for whom Chisholm and Jackson paved the way, was to secure the Democratic nomination.

This chapter discusses two new approaches to the analysis of narrative: critical narrative analysis and contextual discursive analysis. It examines each approach in relation to its theoretical orientation, central question, major concepts, and orientation to method. Each approach is illustrated with the work of the scholar who developed the method. Critical narrative analysis draws on psychosocial studies, constructionist theory, and psycho-analytic theory. The commonalities and divergences between critical narrative analysis and psychoanalysis are noted. Contextual discursive analysis emphasizes, by way of comparison, the societal genres and cultural stories on which discourse depends and, drawing on Kristeva's concept of the abject, on the ways in which individuals seek to represent what they cannot say symbolically. The limitations and strengths of each method are also reviewed.

This chapter considers how far the ethnic minority concern for equal opportunities and anti-discrimination policy is represented in the policy platforms of the major political parties, and also asks about minorities’ perceptions of substantive representation. Despite the increasing number of ethnic minority candidates and increased descriptive/symbolic representation, neither the Labour nor Conservative manifestos for the 2010 general election made any explicit new commitments for redressing ethnic inequalities or addressing racial discrimination. Nevertheless, minorities still perceive Labour as being much more supportive of their concerns than the Conservatives, quite possibly because of the legacy of previous Labour race-relations legislation. Curiously, even although the Liberal Democrats were the one party in 2010 to bring forward an explicit new policy to address ethnic inequality, minorities themselves did not seem to be aware of this.

This chapter explores actor-network theory — also called material semiotics — in the context of ‘corporate human-rights responsibility.’ It studies the symbolic representation of indicators within diagrams, maps, and even social-branding labels, and argues that indicators have a tendency to create secondary and even third-tiered indicators. It then analyses the ‘corporate human-rights responsibility’ as a social performance that is performed through regions and networks, which are two interacting social modalities.