Multilevel systems of governance

Multilevel systems of governance (MLSG) produce and implement decisions that impact the lives of individuals, communities and public authorities within and across states. The different actors that participate in these policy-making systems – governmental and non-governmental, individual and collective – do so on the basis of a wide spectrum of representative criteria, of which electoral representation is just one. Therefore, in MLSG, several principles of representation coexist in uneasy combinations. The chapter reviews these different types, suggesting that whether they are seen to collide or rather cohere depends on the extent to which we are ready to relinquish the standard (but increasingly unrealistic) notion of democracy premised on the existence of matching chains of delegation and accountability departing from and returning to sovereign demos, and rather embrace with which we normally identify representative democracy, and rather a notion that admits the existence of multiple demoi whose ideas and concerns must be registered for better policy-making.