Governance and Democracy: Tensions and Intersections
Governance and democracy are two areas that do not necessarily converge. In fact, reflections on them reveal paths that only occasionally align, highlighting the tensions surrounding their relationship.
However, considering governance outside of democracy can stimulate authoritarianism, aiming for efficient government without public legitimacy. Similarly, applying governance without regard for democracy can lead to political instability. For these reasons, it is appropriate to reflect simultaneously on democratic governance and governable democracy. This refers to two fundamental levels of politics: democratic processes for the formation of legitimate governments and the exercise of efficient, citizen-minded government service.
a) Governance and Efficacy: The Tradition of “Reason of State”
This first perspective emphasizes the dimension of effectiveness and efficiency in the exercise of political power, and therefore of governmental administration, as the key to the governance of a social system. For this view, governance is a property of political systems, defined by their ability to achieve goals at the lowest possible cost. Leaving aside the question of defining and measuring these “costs,” it is clear that any system tends to ensure its own survival and to strengthen its operational capacity. In this sense, the concept of governance and effectiveness/efficiency is similar to the notion of “reason of state,” which begins with modern scientific thinking about politics from Machiavelli’s work.
As is known, the tradition of the Florentine thinker separates political action from the moral requirement of consistency between means and ends, replacing it with an instrumental efficacy criterion dictated by the need to maintain power. In a similar vein, which continues in the reflections of “political realism,” the central problem of politics is the exercise of effective/efficient power, namely the proper maintenance of the “degree of government” over a society. In this sense, we could draw a parallel between governance, understood as the degree of effective government, and the familiar Weberian notion of ‘domination.’ Thus, if the degree of government refers to “the probability of finding obedience to a mandate with a certain content among individuals,” we can say that the higher the probability of finding fulfillment (or at least social acceptance) of a political decision, the greater the level of government, and therefore, the better the governance. 11
Of course, this conception must be shielded from two great simplifications. First, the efficient exercise of power does not exclude, but includes the dimension of consensus as input to the process of decision-making and policy implementation. Second, the concept of power involved in these reflections is not defined in terms of linear causality and mechanics. By contrast, in complex societies, where the number and variety of social subsystems increases, no actor is able to dispose of “all” their power. Rather, the various social, political, and economic actors have a “lot” of power by establishing cross-vetoes on the decisions of other actors. Therefore, each actor must take into account all the expectations and strategies of others when making decisions.