Representative Democracy and Governance: With Different Intentions?

The paper examines semantic transformation through three instances each related to the practices of representative democracy. The first instance concerns concepts that were associated with representative democracy since its historical beginning – state, civil society, citizenship, parliament, constitution, etc. – which all were closely associated also with traditional "politics" disciplines such as political philosophy, constitutional law, or the history of ideas. 2) In the period following the WWII, these core political concepts were supplemented, but not substituted, with "system" concepts such as social welfare, economic efficiency and resource mobility, which often originated from sociology, economics and social policy. Still "the national system" – i.e. the state or polity – was usually maintained as the chief empirical reference point of even the new concepts. 3) In some contrast to these two phases, the cutting edge of contemporary globalised governance appears to use a theoretical vocabulary – consider, e.g., "network", "stakeholdership", "efficiency", “consumer orientation” or "governance" – that distances itself from both the traditional "politics" disciplines and the idea of using clearly limited polities as their main empirical reference. This has given business management, administrative science and organizational sociology increased opportunities to influence the discourses of governance. If this general interpretation is valid, it will have a number of consequences concerning both political theory and practice. We may, for example, ask whether scholars in the traditional "politics" disciplines, who still largely operate with the conventional concepts, are able to grasp the nature of changes that take place if the logic of "politics" disciplines is replaced with some other logic. But we may also ask whether, for example, business or administrative logic can interpret institutions and problems from a perspective that does not preclude political debate, opposition, and conflict. These questions can also help reconsider the tasks of political theory and conceptual history.