Mercosur reflects, as many other Regional Integration Processes do, the consequences of a process of Nation-State mutation, as this Nation-State seems incapable of keeping acting as the vital regulator of social life. Nevertheless, the perception of this mutation persists anchored on Nation-State interpretations' patterns. The institutional cartography that emerges from this situation encloses some inconsistencies and incompatibilities between: on the one hand, the real demands of social actors and economic agents; and, on the other hand, the de facto political institutions shaped. This article proposes to investigate how governance has been transformed within Mercosur. It focus on the intricate and complex relations between regional, national and, particularly, sub-national levels. It is composed by two parts: the first seeks to situate the problem of the relationship between legitimacy, democracy, and accountability in the sphere of regional governance and the action of sub-national actors; the second, under this prism, inquires, empirically, about the Brazilian-Argentinean connections and about the institutional design and relationship networks in Mercosur.
Legitimacy; Democracy; Accountability; Governance; Mercosur
