SOCIAL ACTORS AND POLITICAL REPRESENTATION: KNOWING ACTORS, TRAJECTORIES AND INFLUENCES
Political Representation. Civil society. Public Policy Management Councils.
From the promulgation of the Federal Constitution of 1988, a vast institutionalization of spaces for the exercise of social participation was initiated in Brazil, among which are included, for example, public policy management councils; participatory budgets; conferences and forums and predicting the democratic management of cities in the municipal master plans. Recently, the question of the representativeness of actors acting on behalf of civil society in public policy boards has been widely discussed in the literature. Such questions rest on the legitimacy of these actors to act and, consequently, to influence the deliberations and the decision-making processes in the participatory instances. In this way, the study and the understanding of this representation becomes fundamental, since these spaces of participation extend the political representation beyond the electoral model. In the sense of the foregoing, the present research aims to investigate the exercise of political representation of civil society in the Municipal Health Council of Natal and the State Health Council of Rio Grande do Norte, in 2017. In order to carry out the proposed study, were adopted as methodological strategies the analysis of the institutional design; the conduct of semi-structured interviews with the directors who exercised their representation in the year 2017; and, finally, the documentary analysis of administrative acts as a way of verifying the performance of representatives of civil society in the decisions of both councils.