Abstract
Social media is a worldwide phenomenon we experience daily, and political content is not excluded. Politicians speak to us on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube as friends or popular entertainers, and users react to them almost in real-time (Meikle 2016).
This article deals with the question of whether this relation can be referred to as political representation. Therefore, it starts with theoretical approaches to political representation (Tormey 2015) with specific importance on the role of communication (Manin 1997) and grasping social media (Carr and Hayes 2015) to put the research into the theoretical context.
Moreover, the article offers a conceptual approach to grasping connective actions (Benett and Segenberg 2012) on social media that overlaps with offline political actions. The article considers the micro-participation acts (Margetts et al. 2015) that elucidate social media users' behaviour and show that political participation (following, reacting, commenting, signing online petitions) on social media has a real impact on politics.
All these features manifest the social media capability for performing representative claims (Saward 2010, 2020), which is vital for creating successful political representation from Michael Saward's point of view. The article describes two modes of online representative claims regarding broader representative claims: created online and sustained online.
This distinction is fruitful for precisely describing the online behaviour of politicians and social movements. Furthermore, the article provides examples of such online behaviour from world politics (Donald Trump and #MeToo Movement) and the Middle European political area (Andrej Babis and Million Moments for Democracy Movement).