Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

managerial sciences, that is most commonly used in policy analyses
and practices. As we accept here the constitutive capacity of representative
practices, the ‘representative claim-model’ is much more apt
to gain insight and theorize contemporary governance practices, than
the principal-agent model. However much this theory seems to offer
a new and inspiring perspective on representation in the governanceera,
it should be noted that it might be overrated to assume that it is
applicable to all governance practices. While it seems appropriate to
call the claims arising in the border zone between state and society
‘political representative claims’, this might be less the case for the
claims arising in the border zone between state and market (Figure
1). I will come back to this issue in the conclusion.
Up till now I have presented the characteristics of ‘the representative
claim’ and pointed to the fact that its aesthetic understanding implies
that the representative has enough scope of manouevre at its disposal to
determine partly the identity of the represented. This does not answer
yet the ‘legitimacy of what’-question. By opening up ‘political representation’
to non-electoral representation, Saward has to attribute the
assessment of legitimacy to the judgment of the actual constituency, i.e.
the constituency that is intended by the claim plus the ones who “recognize
their interests as being implicated in the claim” (2010,148). The
ones partaking in the representational relationship is any self-claimed
representative on the one hand and his supporting constituency on
the other hand. This differs from electoral representation where the
constituency encompasses every citizen in society and legitimacy is per
definition coupled to the judgment of all citizens. By elaborating on the
way representation functions and legitimacy is brought about in the
government-model, I will argue that this difference gives us important
insight into the legitimacy ‘deficit’ of governance practices.
47
GOVERNANCE
THROUGH THE LENS OF
REPRESENTATION
Femmy Thewissen
Representative democracy: state and society coupled in spatial
and temporal sense
In the previous section I have pointed to the fact that representation is
presupposed in decision-making processes. The scrutiny of the characteristics
of representation and Saward’s model of the representative