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Piero Meaglia
Governance and Representative Democracy: A Comparison The author presents governance as a form of decision-making that is alternative to representative democracy. In the case of governance, a plurality of agents, public and/or private, take decisions through negotiations that arrive at contracts or agreements, based on unanimous decision-making. In representative democracy, on the other hand, there is a public institution, such as a parliament or a local assembly that takes the decisions by applying majority rule. In this essay, these two methods are compared on the basis of four questions: 1) who takes the decision?; 2) how is the decision taken (through which rules)?; 3) where?; 4) when?. The analysis shows that, in the case of governance, the identity of the decision-makers is uncertain since it is unclear who the stakeholders are; the method of decision-making (agreements) risks favouring the mighty that can act without being accountable towards citizens. The time and place of the decision-making are also uncertain since they cannot be established beforehand. This makes this decision-making process not as transparent as it should be. The author takes into consideration the "realist" objection according to which representative democracy often involves negotiation between groups before and outside the official seats of power, therefore hiding from the public eye. However, the obligation to follow formal procedures to which any citizen can make an appeal so as to contest the decisions taken in insufficiently transparent ways. In the case of governance, there is no such possibility. Finally, the author asks which of these two models is the most democratic. No definitive answer is given. Nonetheless the method of governance does not avoid some of the problems affecting "real" democracies: vulnerability to pressure groups, lack of transparency of the decision-making procedures, the dominance of private interests over public interests.
