Prinzipien der Demokratischen Vertretung

Prof. Dr. Dawid Friedrich 

Projekttitel

The Principle of Democratic Representation in a Globalising World: A Gap in the Governance Literature?

Zusammenfassung

The number of academic publications on European and Global Governance (EGG) gives witness to the growing importance of supra-, trans- and international arenas in which an increasing amount of political decisions are made beyond the boundaries of the modern nation-state.

In this context, democratic representation is said to be weakened through processes of de-nationalisation and de-parliamentarisation. Traditionally, relations between representatives and represented were embedded in the framework of the nation-state. However, the increasing mobility of capital, people, services and goods and the emergence of influential trans- and international actors made state borders more permeable, challenging the role of the traditional political actors and spaces of government.

In possible remedies of a perceived deficit of democratic legitimacy in governance processes, the literature has given particular attention to the concepts of deliberation and participation, while largely neglecting the concept of democratic representation and with it the familiar agents of representative democracies, above all parliaments and political parties. Instead, in the face of a perceived legitimacy crisis of Western democracies, of welfare retrenchment in Western democracies as well as of peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe, civil society has gained widespread attention. The particular role, however, which civil society should play in politics – that of having a voice or of having a vote? – remains contested, and no demands for representation were articulated against civil society organisations (CSOs).

Overall, there are only few accounts in EGG-research about how the people, which are the ultimate addressees of political decisions, are or could be the ultimate authors of decisions made in governance processes and which role the principle of democratic representation should and could play.

This situation has most recently begun to change. Research has started to acknowledge the importance of democratic representation as a necessity for legitimacy at all levels of political action.

The proposed workshop wants to contribute to this introduction of representation into governance research. We argue that even in a changing political environment, we need to separate analytically (a) what political representation is, and (b) how the institutional instances of it look like. Representation has traditionally been seen as a trustee or delegate relationship between voters and elected representatives. If representation is now increasingly separated from (national) electoral representation, this raises the question of appropriately defining constituencies and the accurate means to represent those constituencies. Also, these changes seem to imply the need to address the dynamic character of the claim-making processes and the role the different actors involved in that claim-making play. Since political representation is by definition context-dependent, there is no unique answer as to how this dynamic relationship can be defined in EGG.

The beginning attention governance research attributes to representation also mirrors the fact that different actors have made some moves towards including the issue of representation in their practices. Examples are international organisations such as the EU which request the (territorial) representativeness of CSOs; CSOs that have started to react to these demands by considering standards of representativeness and accountability; parliaments that adopt formal rules and informal practices to come to terms with the challenges of globalising politics; parliamentarians which increasingly interact in transnational networks, both issue specific and more encompassing ones, which sometimes explicitly aim at closing the gap between parliamentarians and civil society.

In short, representation has commenced to be re-discovered as a necessity for democratic legitimacy by both scholars and practitioners, and this project seeks to contribute to the discussion about democratic representation and European and global governance.

Projektverantwortliche

Prof. Dr. Dawid Friedrich (Leuphana Universität Lüneburg)
Dr. Sandra Kröger (Jean Monnet Zentrum für Europäische Studien (CEuS), Universität Bremen)

Beteiligt sind darüber hinaus KollegInnen aus zehn weiteren europäischen Staaten. Im September 2010 findet ein Workshop am ZDEMO, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg statt. Hier das ausführliche Programm