From the capillarity of the representative system: reinvigorating legitimacy in contemporary democracies

Abstract

The objective of this article is to reopen the debate over the crisis of legitimacy in representative democracies, occasioned as much by the incapacity of representatives to provide adequate responses to the demands of the population, as by the reproduction of vicious cycles in the institutional sphere. In this sense, the creation of mechanisms for the direct intervention of the population in the distribution of public policy has been considered a solution to the said crisis of legitimacy, in the sense that it broadens the perception of the representatives in relation to the objective reality of the governed, while it allows the consolidation of virtuous cycles in the public sphere through the workings of multiple instances of social control. The article also presents a discussion of the experience of the Participatory Budget in Porto Alegre (RS), used here as a testing ground for the proposals outlined above. Key words: Democracy; Political representation; Democratic legitimacy; state-society relations; Accountability; Participatory Budget.