Rappresentanza e legislazione nell’età della globalizzazione

di Tommaso Edoardo Frosini

SOMMARIO: 1. La crisi della rappresentanza come crisi del rappresentato. – 2. Rappresentanza vs. globalizzazione. – 3. Legislazione e globalizzazione. – 4. Comparazione vs. globalizzazione? – 5. Sul mito del dialogo fra le istituzioni. – 6. Conclusioni.

 
This article examines and addresses a feature common to many contemporary democracies: the crisis of political representation. It goes without saying that the crisis refers to traditional political representation i.e. the mandate to represent the entire nation, the responsibility of those who represent, political parties as associations representing the people, the exercise of legislative power as a primary duty of representative assemblies together with their function of control and scrutiny. Furthermore, the representation crisis is also determined by the difficulty of finding an equilibrium, or rather, a synthesis between governability and representation.
The crisis of representation is also the crisis of the represented (or constituents), who have lost their political and institutional standpoints. This is due to several factors: the liquefaction of political parties, which are ever less the bridge be-tween political society and civil society; Parliament’s loss of centrality i.e. a body that no longer decides; the disappear-ance of the relationship between representative and territory, and hence the concept of the elected representative as an expression of an electoral district or constituency.
Political representation has thus become fragmented also because there has been an increase in social pluralism that can-not be fully represented in Parliament alone.
The republican institutions have had to rule fast changing social dynamics, which have grown more complex because of the processes of globalization and the technological revolution. National constitutional systems have become aware of the difficulties parliaments have in providing answers in a suitable and rapid way. They have questioned the role of parliamentary assemblies, and the role of law within social contexts.
A strong and convinced relaunch of the concept of representation, and its variations in the shapes and usages of a liberal democracy, is a way of putting a halt to populism and most of all a way of giving back dignity to constitutionalism.