Legislature

Governance versus Parliamentary Representation

As an attempt to modify the classic way of producing public policies, the concept of governance can first be perceived as a challenge for legislatures. Political assemblies and parliaments symbolize the vertical and partisan dimension of politics, whereas governance refers to the promotion of horizontal forms of coordination and an opening-up to representatives from civil society. The concept of governance supposes that the community of actors involved in the making of a given public policy is seriously interested in the outputs: The community of actors aims to improve the quality of public policy. More or less explicitly, doubts have been expressed that members of legislatures could efficiently play such a role because some of them are mainly motivated by electoral considerations and because others act under the control of party leaders. For instance, the distributive approach of parliamentary committees considers that such committees are composed of high-demand representatives who bargain to distribute potential benefits from public policies (“pork-barrel politics”).

The institutionalization of conflict, the pressure of electoral competition, and the significance of formalism and procedural rules constitute three features of legislatures that can be regarded as antagonistic to the principles of governance. Moreover, the promotion of governance partly results from a failure of legislatures to achieve some of those principles. The insistence on deliberation by the “good governance” agenda can be understood as a severe judgment on parliamentary debates routinely organized on the floor of the assemblies. The priority to make public decision making more open and accountable implies that the traditional legislative assemblies do not fill that role efficiently. The approval of the law by elected representatives does not guarantee that a transparent decision-making process actually includes a large variety of stakeholders. Thus, governance as an agenda eventually challenges the legislature's historical pretension to exercise a monopoly over legitimate popular representation. Instead, opening government to civil society partly results from the crisis of legitimacy of traditional parliamentary elites.

Concrete consequences for legislatures of effective prerogatives derive from this conceptual shift, particularly in Europe. For instance, the development of contracting procedures between central and local governments also contributes to limiting the ability of legislatures to influence the decision-making process. These contracts involve so many partners that once an agreement is achieved, local assemblies and the national legislatures can only rubber-stamp the document because reopening the bargaining process would be too costly.

Legislators as Actors of Governance among Others

As political organizations, legislatures are logically in conflict with the conception of power behind the dynamics of governance. However, it is still necessary [Page 517]to investigate the actual contribution of legislators to the transformation of both public administration and state-society relations that governance encompasses. Indeed, there are four reasons why legislators can and must be regarded as actors of governance.

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