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