There is absolutely no requirement in principle that the primary stakeholders represented in the governing bodies must also be the biggest stakeholders. Although of course it will be impractical to include every subgroup of a subgroup of a fraction of a group of primary stakeholders.

In fact, the entire point with this kind of devolution is to empower people who would otherwise be hopelessly in the minority. If you will permit me another Danish example, the city council of Copenhagen wants to implement congestion charges. Now, it just so happens that the mayor of Copenhagen is a Social Democrat and we have an irresponsible government. So the project gets sabotaged by Parliament - rather effectively, unfortunately.

I would argue, however, that Parliament is not the body that has legitimate democratic jurisdiction over this issue, because the majority in Parliament is elected in parts of Denmark that will feel next to no direct impact of a better regulation of traffic in Copenhagen. In effect, this is not government by the consent of the governed: It's government by the consent of the governed plus a lot of people who are only connected with the governed by the arbitrary administrative division called a country border.

To put it a bit more bluntly than it perhaps deserves, it is as absurd for people in Jylland to vote on Copenhagen traffic issues as it is for people in Berlin or Rome to do so. The Copenhagen city council isn't the most legitimate democratic body to decide the issue either, because it doesn't involve all the relevant stakeholders (think, e.g., commuters in the suburbs). But it's a hell of a lot closer.

And indeed, if you poll people I would be willing to bet a bottle of good beer that you would find that the traffic situation in and around Copenhagen is not among the top ten (or even top twenty or top hundred) issues that determine which way a voter in the other side of the country jumps. So not only do those people have no primary stake in the traffic situation in Copenhagen, they most likely cast their vote completely independently of it. That's hardly a democratic mandate in any ordinary sense of the term.

W.r.t. elected vs. appointed positions, I agree completely that what matters is that the interests of the primary stakeholders (in the above sense of the term) are protected. I merely wanted to point out that infatuation with technocracies is just as dangerous, if in different ways, as infatuation with elected bodies. I myself am irritated no end by the people who mindlessly repeat the mantra "well, s/he was elected democratically, so duh!" about some office-holder who does something utterly anti-democratic.

In fact, I had that very discussion with a co-worker about the just-former Danish minister of justice internal security. She (the ex-minister, not the co-worker) is the one who's given the Danish secret police the power to do "administrative deportations" - that is, deport non-EU citizens without trial if the secret police claims that they believe the deportee(s) to be a clear and present danger to Danish security or sovereignty. Oh, and she also gave the police the power to do "preventive arrests" - that is, round up anybody who looks like he is going to make trouble (basically this means football hooligans, communists, anarchists, Greenpeace activists and uppity brown people) and lock them up "preventively" for up to 24 hours. (And those two are just the two worst examples, there are plenty more where they come from...)

By my score that makes her just about the most undemocratic person in the Danish parliament. But "she's democratically elected, so obviously she's a democratic politician." In response to which I usually sneer something about the Hamas government being democratically elected as well.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.