Representative democracy and legitimacy crisis: the need for an evaluation of the act of government

Abstract

Firstly, to get to the topic, an analysis of the concept of people as the holder of political power in its different conceptions was made, treated from the theory of Fredrich Müller. At the end of the analysis, it was possible to verify that many governments call themselves democratic and use the word “people” to legitimize their mandate. In the second chapter, there was an exposition of the thoughts of some authors about the apparent crisis of representativeness established in society, such as: Paulo Bonavides; Lenio Luiz Streck and Hans Kelsen. In this context, it was possible to glimpse that the absence of sufficient mechanisms ends up corroborating so that the will of the people is not effectively represented by the elected. In the third chapter, the factors that contribute to the mismatch of the representative system with the will of the people were pointed out, such as: corruption in politics, party infidelity and social exclusion. In the end, it was found that society lives in a moment of political apathy, so what presents itself as a crisis of representativeness can actually be translated into the need for a revaluation of the act of governing. For the development of the research, the deductive method was used, that is, part of general principles and prepositions to reach more specific conclusions.