ABSTRACT
Political presentation and re-presentation are figure-based perceptual concepts. Political representation is a social construction. Originating from a predominantly government-focused and parliament-oriented conception of political representation, new forms of a non-parliamentary, direct, deliberative and participative democracy evolved which have proved to be more efficacious in the current political and cultural context. New forms of democracy were accompanied by new understandings of citizenship in which the role of citizens is now required to be more active. The political representation of citizenship is not an established institutional framework, but arises from societal construction. Its characteristic, form and transformation are directly subject to an 'iconology of cultures'—every political culture evolves its own roles, figures and iconic performances. Citizens change their attitude intuitively towards political processes, the organization of the 'political' or towards the symbolic location of the political representation. Understanding representation as an iconological concept can shed new light to the complexities of representation in current conditions which are in flux in several ways.
