Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

Actors in the other societal spheres (market and society) start lending
their help to the state. It is perceived as an opportunity to empower
themselves in relation to the other spheres. The cooperation, quite
contradictory, is thus a means to achieve one’s own goals.
Governance in search of legitimacy
As the decision-making center no longer resides solely with the state,
the electoral process linking state and society looses importance as
well, as an instrument of legitimacy. It brings us to the question of how
to theorize legitimacy of the new public-private decision-making units
that arise. Initially, the main concern of global governance theorists
was the creation of order at the global level. The effectiveness of the
outcome that governance could bring about was hence the primary
focus of theorists such as Rosenau. At the end of the 90’s Scharpf
included outcome-effectiveness in the legitimacy-discourse. In order
to give insight into the process of European integration he made the
interesting distinction between input and output legitimacy. Input
legitimacy must be understood as ‘government by the people’. It means
that the voice of the people gets articulated in decision-making. It is the
fairness of the process, such as legal equality guaranteed by elections,
that functions as the criterion of judging input legitimacy. ‘Government
for the people’ than is translated by Scharpf as output legitimacy. The
success of the outcome is the legitimating variable. Scharpf stated that
the EU only has output legitimacy and no input legitimacy because
there is no pre-existing collective identity. Other authors have argued
that governance is perfectly capable of realizing input legitimacy, not
in terms of legally equal input of the citizens a people, but in terms of
participation of excluded groups. The definition of input-legitimacy
by Thomas Risse for example refers to “the participatory quality of the
decision-making process leading to laws and rules” (2006,185) [italics
mine]. That is why authors often state that governance “may indeed
contain germs of ideas that may permit greater openness, inclusion
and empowerment of hitherto excluded or marginalized social groups”
(Swyngedouw 2005, 1993). The question is what the implications are of
substituting legally equal input for participatory input. Will it result in
an empowerment of excluded groups or will it increase inequalities?
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GOVERNANCE
THROUGH THE LENS OF
REPRESENTATION
Femmy Thewissen