In today’s hyperconnected world—characterized by a growing range of opportunities for digital platforming and canvassing—it has become increasingly easy for individuals to stand up and present themselves as the “voice of the new generation,” advocates for global peace, spokespersons of historically marginalized groups or “climate justice warriors.” For many of us, these efforts are short-lived. Busy personal schedules, conflicting responsibilities, failures to have an effect on decision-making or, increasingly also, fears of being subjected to hate speech, threats, and harassment make us quit our initial enthusiasm for canvassing, protesting or otherwise voicing our opinions publicly. Sometimes, however, individuals’ interventions in the public debate earn them the status of a “representative” for particular constituencies or groups—which raises complicated and fraught political questions, as Wendy Salkin explores in Speaking for Others.

Her famous “how dare you” speech delivered at the 2019 U.N. Climate Action Summit turned Greta Thunberg, then a 16-year-old climate activist from Sweden, into a global spokesperson for future generations. Yet not all efforts to self-present as the spokesperson of a social movement fare equally well. In 2014, the U.S. singer Beyoncé performed at the Video Music Awards annual award ceremony. Ten minutes into her performance, the words from Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 TEDx Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” popped up on the screen behind her. Beyoncé’s outing as a feminist received both acclaim and backlash. Her performance was called tokenistic, “feminist light” and critiqued for catering to a male voyeuristic gaze rather than boosting women’s empowerment. The alleged incompatibility between Beyoncé’s sexually charged performance and her self-presentation as feminist, in turn, sparked a debate on the (im)possibility of Black women reclaiming their sexuality while being taken seriously.

We can think of other instances still in which individuals or groups become political representatives “unwillingly” or “unwittingly,” as Salkin puts it (p. 77). In 2019, the Gilets Jaunes movement refused to speak for anyone but themselves yet became seen as the representative of the French working and lower middle classes, as Samuel Hayat describes in his 2022 article in the American Political Science Review. Similarly, many academics will relate to the uncomfortable experience of attending faculty meetings as the sole member of their department and, as a result, being treated as the department’s de facto representative.

Addressing these phenomena, Salkin opens her book by noting that, compared to formal political representatives (FPRs), we pay only little attention to “political actors who can be just as influential as our FPRs, and sometimes more so, who speak and act for us in a variety of contexts, who shape the terms of our public debates, who lead social movements that change the courses of our lives, and who somehow have these powers despite having never been granted them through formal, systematized election or selection procedures” (p. 1). She convincingly argues that informal political representatives (IPRs) deserve more than such “scant and passing attention” (p. 261). While IPRs may be conducive to democratic processes and help articulate and render visible the interests of disadvantaged or marginalized groups in society, these unelected figures may equally aggravate existing power inequalities by misrepresenting social groups, prioritizing the interests of privileged subgroups or displacing others who might have been more appropriate spokespersons. These dangers, according to Salkin, are genuine. IPRs’ lack of formal authorization and the absence of formal accountability mechanisms may strain the relationship they have with those they purport to represent. Dominant groups, in addition, tend to treat “members of subordinated groups as speaking or acting for the whole of the groups of which they are members, often based on the errant assumption that members of subordinate groups are doxastically or conatively homogenous,” Salkin notes (p. 79).

The book’s project is to unpack how IPRs may “permissibly undertake activities central to their roles without thereby harming or wronging those they represent” (p. 16). Salkin provides a rigorous and systematic exploration of informal political representation and lays out a coherent framework for understanding, and evaluating, the ethical dimensions of this practice. Salkin’s argumentation proceeds across two parts. In the first part, she clarifies the nature of IPR and how it is both different from and similar to FPR. Treating FPR and IPR as two species of a genus, Salkin clarifies that audience conferral is central to “becoming representative” (p. 43). In the second part of the book, she systematically reviews the duties of IPRs (introducing democracy within and justice without duties), clarifies when the represented may hold legitimate complaints (a typology centered on content, procedure, and power inequalities), and articulates whether and under which circumstances expert or descriptive representatives (as two types of “special knowledge”) may be preferable.

An original and valuable contribution of Speaking for Others is Salkin’s careful unpacking of the mechanism of audience conferral. It exposes the limitations of voluntarist accounts of representation, allowing us to see how actors may become representatives unwittingly and unwillingly and yet still hold, by virtue of the powers extended to them through conscription, duties toward the represented. The insight that conferral is often performed by a society’s dominant groups, and not by the represented themselves, invites the reader to consider how both the conferral and the withdrawal of representative status (think, again, of the public controversy over Beyoncé’s designation as a feminist) are embedded in the broader systems of domination (such as, but not limited to, sexism, racism, ageism, ableism, and heteronormativity) that continue to pervade contemporary societies. The question as to who we can and cannot conceive of as “representative” cuts to the heart of struggles for recognition. Against this background, Salkin clarifies the audience’s moral responsibilities and provides an original discussion of the grounds on which audiences can and reasonably must refrain from conferring representative status.

In her very balanced account, Salkin may, however, have overemphasized the element of audience conferral, thereby also exaggerating the differences between FPRs and IPR. While individuals may sometimes become “representatives” unwittingly (i.e., they are unaware of the effect which their actions or self-presentations may elicit), the dominant mode of political representation contains a degree of voluntarism, and the conferral of representative status is typically triggered by actors’ claims to speak for others. A constructivist account of representation (as one can find, for instance, in Michael Saward’s 2020 book, Making Representations) opens the possibility of FPRs acting simultaneously as IPRs. While legislators stand in a formal relationship of authorization and accountability with the members of their electoral district, they often feature also as surrogate representatives for constituents outside their own district, as Jane Mansbridge argued in her 2003 article in American Political Science Review, “Rethinking Representation.”

In 2019, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sworn in as the youngest woman and youngest Latina to serve in the U.S. Congress. As a “space invader” (see Nirmal Puwar’s 2004 book, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place), Ocasio-Cortez’ electoral victory rendered tangible the extent to which Congress remains a white- and male- dominated forum. Heavily mediatized as a “young Latina from the Bronx,” Ocasio-Cortez is conscripted (to use Salkin’s terms), as both the formal representative for New York’s 14th congressional district and as a “Latina representative.” Ocasio-Cortez is also a representative for the Democratic Party. In addition to clarifying how FPRs routinely also act as IPRs, the Ocasio-Cortez case helps clarify that representatives frequently speak for multiple and only partially overlapping constituents (here, “Democrats,” “New Yorkers,” “American Latinas,” and “Women”). How should representatives balance their duties to multiple constituents and social groups simultaneously? Regrettably, zero-sum conflicts are part and parcel of their decision-making. Consider, for instance, a scenario whereby additional investments in public school networks in New York imply budget cuts for gender action plans. Because of her focus on distinct social groups, Salkin’s discussion of ethics does not easily lend itself to a situation when the conflicting interests of multiple groups are at stake. (In this case, what would it mean to be a good representative of both women and New Yorkers?)

In her writing, Salkin frequently addresses the so-called sceptics of IPR and extensively details the potential dangers of IPR—most noteworthy of which are misrepresentation, essentialization, homogenization, and marginalization. This defensive stance effectively addresses the problems of underrepresentation and misrepresentation that may arise at the hands of IPRs. But it leaves unattended broader questions pertaining to the necessary correctives to privilege, power inequality and dominance involved in representation—problems which are evidenced by the continuing overrepresentation of white, male, heterosexual, and middle-aged bodies in politics (as Rainbow Murray argues in her 2014 article in the American Political Science Review). Although this is admittedly a topic for another book, Salkin’s focus on the dangers of IPR prevents a critical discussion on the overall system of representation in which individual IPRs and FPRs operate—and of the measures that must be taken to alleviate the obstacles faced by representatives from historically disadvantaged groups and that can improve the democratic functioning of today’s representative systems.