Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

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