Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
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54<br />
DEMOCRACY TODAY<br />
of what’-question is here opposed to that of the ‘government’-model.<br />
It boils <strong>do</strong>wn to a system with a multiplicity of representative claims<br />
creating little decision-making units which gain their legitimacy by<br />
way of the approval of the ones partaking in the unit. There seem to<br />
arise two potential problems here. Firstly, the strength and visibility<br />
of political claims of citizens (the negative power of citizens) might get<br />
lost when they are not formulated against a public decision-making<br />
centre, but only against the decision-making unit of which they form<br />
the constituency. In Urbinati’s description of representative democracy<br />
negative power only arose in the ‘second phase’ with the birth<br />
of the temporal narrative. In this second phase the spatial division,<br />
that creates a visible centre, is presupposed. Hence, when the state<br />
no longer functions as the central representative institution how than<br />
should we conceive of the negative power of citizens? Related to this<br />
is the second problem. When losing sight of the centre (the state) the<br />
attempt to represent the general is lost and so the contest among different<br />
ideologies or partisan viewpoints is lost. And exactly this is what<br />
turns representation into politics, as was said above.<br />
Saward’s theory also confronts us with another problem that relates<br />
to the room of manoeuvre for the representative. Saward clearly focuses<br />
on the role of (civil) society and in this regard his theory attempts to<br />
create opportunities for the empowerment of the sphere of societal<br />
actors and the therein excluded groups in the new governance-context.<br />
Yet, we should realize that in practice governance not only takes place<br />
at the border between state and society, but also (and maybe more) at<br />
the border between state and market. In this latter border zone effectiveness<br />
and output of decisions are the main preoccupations. That<br />
is why it should not surprise us that the principal/agent relationship<br />
is used to measure the legitimacy of these kind of governance-acts. If<br />
the principal asks the agent to realize some particular output, than<br />
the principal wants to prevent as much as possible that during the<br />
realization (the representation) any transformation of the original<br />
request arises. In other words, by constantly controlling the agent,<br />
the principal tries to prevent that an (aesthetic) gap comes in to being.<br />
Again this should not surprise us, as the governance-decisions we are<br />
here referring to comprise market-actors. Traditionally they are not<br />
part of political representation, and thus the contemporary attempt