Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

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