This paper has for theme the subject of the democratic legitimacy underlining, for such, the limits of representative democracy and the potentialities dammed inside of current political Brazilian spectrum of individual and collective action, supplanting the quantitative bias that prevails in the analyses on the democratic process in Brazil. Beyond the variables traditionally seated in the triad vote, political parties and elections, this paper tries to demonstrate that the Brazilian electoral democracy still didn't consolidate a democratic political culture, in the measure in that it is solidifying a differentiation plane between representatives and represented, due to mandates more and more imperatives and less bound to the control and participation of those represented. Quantitative researches, primary sources, secondary sources and the analysis of recent social movements in the national scene allowed the building of the hypothesis worked here that the electoral process, for itself, doesn't answer for the construction and consolidation of a plural and participative democracy.
democracy; representation; social movements; public sphere; accountability
