Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
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38<br />
DEMOCRACY TODAY<br />
and key characteristics of this new mode of decision-making. As the<br />
main interest of this article is to explore the potential legitimacy of<br />
governance-decision-making, a subsection will be devoted to ways<br />
in which the legitimacy question has been addressed in the past. The<br />
second section will be devoted to philosophical research on representation,<br />
in order to introduce a new perspective into the legitimacy<br />
debate. I contrast here a formalistic and a more substantive view on<br />
representation and argue that the last one reveals a crucial aspect of<br />
representation that is often obscured. Michael Saward’s theory of<br />
‘the representative claim’ will be presented here as it <strong>do</strong>es comprise<br />
this substantive view on representation and can be read as a theory<br />
applicable to the empirical situation of governance-decision-making.<br />
In the third section the characteristics of representative government<br />
will be explored. By drawing on the reading of Nadia Urbinati, I will<br />
state that the institutional framework of a representative government<br />
reveals two aspects that are crucial in turning representation into representative<br />
democracy: the spatial division (between state and society)<br />
and the temporal narrative (generated by the sequence of elections<br />
and intra-election time). This leads me in a concluding section to the<br />
implications of the sketched confrontation between governance and<br />
government.<br />
Governance<br />
Definition and characteristics<br />
The particular meaning we currently attribute to governance only<br />
arose after the cold war. Before, the term governance was used as a<br />
synonym for governing, in the sense of the deliberate “attempt to shape<br />
socio-economic structures and processes” (Mayntz 2003, 27). We have<br />
to situate this understanding in the historical situation in which the<br />
welfare-state was pre<strong>do</strong>minant. It implied that the state occupied the<br />
most powerful position in the classical threefold between state, society<br />
and market. After the Cold War, the interdependence, that started pervading<br />
the whole world, was perceived as a completely new challenge.<br />
Globalization processes started to occur and gradually challenged the<br />
pre<strong>do</strong>minant position of the (welfare-)state. In reaction to these changes,