Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

356Chapter 8of communication, this public sphere forms the real periphery.Naturally, as the debate over corporatist bargaining shows, thedistinction between output-oriented "customers" and input-oriented"suppliers" is not a sharp one. But the actually observablefusion between influencing the implementation of policies thathave already been adopted, on the one hand, and influencing theformulation and adoption of policies, on the other hand, is not inagreement with constitutional principles.47Mter a descriptive overview, Peters introduces two explanatoryelements: the "sluice model" and the two modes of problem solvingthat determine the direction in which communication flows. Ifbinding decisions are to be carried out with authority, they mustpass through the narrow channels of the core area:However, the legitimacy of decisions depends on processes of opinionandwill-formation at the periphery. The center is a system of sluicesthrough which many processes in the sphere of the political-legal systemmust pass, but the center controls the direction and the dynamics of theseprocesses only to a limited degree. Changes can start just as much at theperiphery as at the center. ... The idea of democracy is ultimately basedon the fact that political processes of will-formation, which in the schemahere sketched have a peripheral or intermediary status, are supposed tobe decisive for political development. This is not predecided by the· present schema.48This sociological translation of the discourse theory of democracyimplies that binding decisions, to be legitimate, must be steered bycommunication flows that start at the periphery and pass throughthe sluices of democratic and constitutional procedures situated atthe entrance to the parliamentary complex or the courts (and, ifnecessary, at the exit of the implementing administration as well).That is the only way to exclude the possibility that the power of theadministrative complex, on the one side, or the social power ofintermediate structures affecting the core area, on the other side,become independent vis-a-vis a communicative power that developsin the parliamentary complex.To be sure, the normal business of politics, at least as it is routinelyconducted in Western democracies, cannot satisfy such strongconditions. The countercirculation cutting across the "official"circulation of power certainly involves more than just a contradic-