Problem legitimacijskog deficita u savremenoj demokratiji
The Problem of Legitimacy Deficit in Contemporary Democracy

Author(s): Milorad Đurić
Subject(s): Government/Political systems, International relations/trade, Politics and society, Globalization
Published by: Fakultet političkih nauka Univerziteta u Beogradu
Keywords: Democracy; nation-state; globalization; sovereignty; legitimacy; legitimacy deficit
Summary/Abstract: The idea that voluntary/autonomous consent of the majority of citizens gives validity and legitimacy of government in the management of political life, is central to our understanding of democracy. Voluntary/autonomous consent is expressed through elections with a known procedure, which are held periodically in the defined territory, and where can participate known in advance the number of citizens. Defined territory and known in advance the number of citizens are relevant community (in fact, the nation-state) within which to implement democratic procedures. The impressive stroke of democracy throughout the second half of the twentieth century crossed, however, with the increasing level of globalization, that is, the growing interdependence and connections on a planetary scale. Since the global association creates and global problems, solving them is necessarily imposed as globally. In this way, the problems are transferred to places that does not have their own political system, who are deprived of a consistent normative and institutional merits. The suspension normative and institutional dimensions of events necessary to produce the structural tensions that cannot be hidden by any ad hoc established equilibrium. Therefore, it should not underestimate the frustration of citizens caught up in systems that have become dysfunctional because their intrinsic political dimension largely relocated to the area above-state sovereignty. In this sense, our basic assumption is that the problem of legitimacy deficit is the result of the structural inability of national states/of democracy that the usual procedure respond to the challenges that transcend national borders and which require coordination of transnational organization. In other words, we believe: that modern democracy – a democracy of the nation state, with whom and which constituted and functioning; that global processes products and global problems, whose resolution exceeds the capacity of individual nation states; they are, therefore, changing the terms of the functioning of democratic systems, and that the legitimacy deficit occurs because the circles of those decisions are not consistent with the circles of those affected by these decisions.

• Details
• Contents