Repensando representação política e legitimidade democrática: entre a unidade e a pluralidade

Abstract

In recent years, the attention to the limits of representative government and the emergence of actors and spaces, performing a representative role at different levels and fields of politics, has activated the debate regarding the concept of political representation. Some analysts have highlighted the blurring of lines between State and civil society and the need to rethink the criteria of the democratic legitimacy of representation, which since the seventeenth century have been associated with notions of authorization and delegation. This thesis is the result of this debate. The overall objective is to evaluate the concept of political representation and propose a revision of this concept. Such study is conducted from the attention to three issues, namely, who represents, what is represented, and how it represents. In the first two chapters, this thesis the contrast between the responses of liberal theory and contemporary democratic theory. Instead of focusing on the elected representative, national interests and the independent and accountable mandate, the study intends to look at the plurality of actors included, of representative demands and ways of exercising public control over the representative. Based on these reformulations, the thesis proposes to assess political representation as an activity which allows the social either to tranform into the political or to connect with the world of politics. In this context, democratic legitimacy is not an exclusive attribute of the act of authorization, but is rather an attribute of quality, which must be sought out in the representative process and in the interaction between distinct deliberative spheres. In the last two chapters, this study examines the concept and practice of political representation in the Brazilian experience, in order to identify points of convergences and divergences with the liberal notion of representation. In addition, it also seeks to provide an understanding of the limits and potentials representatives of civil society can have on the quality of democracy. The thesis concludes that with the redemocratization period in the 1980s, there is a change in political representation. Democracy is no longer the underlying idea of representation, but rather its moving and pivotal force. Based on studies in Participatory Institutions (PIs), specifically the Municipal Health Councils and Watershed Committees, the thesis suggests variables and indicators to assess the democratic legitimacy of civil society. The research reveals the contingency of democratization and pluralization of representation, in view of the interaction of PIs with the socio-political context, the institutional design features, and the characteristics of public policy. Finally, the thesis emphasizes that the IPs capacity of changing the response to the questions who, what and how it represents, should be evaluated in a disaggregated form. Although these dimensions are mutually related, sometimes, the greater inclusion of social actors is not accompanied by the corresponding impact on deliberation and control, and vice versa. These results show that the difficulty of connecting unity and diversity remains a challenge to the representative activity.