Participatory Democracy
3
We seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation,
governed by two central aims; that the individual share in those social
decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society
be organized to encourage independence of man and provide the media
for their common participation. (Port Huron Statement, 1964)
Although the meetings were frequently long and tedious, many occupiers
point to these open, participatory assemblies as embodying an alternative
to the current representative democratic order disproportionately
influenced by the 1%. (Juris 2012, 263, on #Occupying Boston)
The often-quoted Port Huron Statement by the US student movement in
1964 is considered to be a manifesto for democracy as participatory,
claiming free speech and the right to participate in collective decisions.
About fifty years later, as Juris observed on the Occupying movement,
participatory democracy is still central for the movements that have
mobilized against financial crises and austerity measures. Some of the
transformations-as-opportunities identified at the end of the last chapter
tend to favor the development of some specific democratic qualities,
which are central for conceptions of democracy other than the liberal
one discussed in the last chapter. In particular, the growth of diverse and
multiple forms of unconventional political participation reflects the
development of participatory conceptions of democracy. To this conception
and related practices, and the long path of their development, this
chapter is devoted. After defining participatory democracy and reviewing
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 37
normative theories devoted to it, I’ll turn to history to show how social
movements (in particular, the labour movement) have put forward different
conceptions of democracy from the liberal one, emphasizing collective
and social rights over individual (negative) freedom as well as
participation by citizens over delegation to politicians. In their complex
evolution, the labour movement, and other left-wing movements, have
not only succeeded, often in alliances with other actors, in changing
political institutions, but also experimented with different democratic
qualities within their structures and struggles.
Participatory democracy: an introduction
The theme of participation is central to politics and to democracy. The
very concept of politics, with reference to its etymological root in the
Greek polis, recalls an image of participation: in the agora one intervenes
in the making of decisions. If so-called ‘ancient democracy’ included this
element of direct intervention, however, it is often said that ‘modern
democracy’ has little in common with the Greek polis, being prevalently
representative.
Yet another conception of democracy has survived in contemporary
democracies, alongside the liberal one – one which underlines the necessity
for citizens, naturally interested in politics, directly to assume the
task of intervening in decisions that regard public issues. Where liberal
democracy foresees the constitution of bodies of specialized representatives,
participatory democracy instead posits strong constraints on the
principle of delegation, seen as an instrument of oligarchic power. If
liberal democracy is based on formal equality – one head, one vote –
participatory democracy underlines the need to create the conditions for
real equality. While liberal democracy is often bureaucratized, with decision
making concentrated at the apex, direct democracy insists on the
necessity of bringing decisions as close to the people as possible.
If the tension between representation and participation is always
present in debates on democracy, with the first clearly prevalent in the
actual evolution of democratic institutions, a certain level of participation
is nevertheless necessary to legitimate representatives. The very idea
of popular sovereignty presupposes the participation that developed in
Europe halfway through the eighteenth century together with the public
sphere, and which allowed interaction between citizens and institutional
representatives (Mayer and Perrineau 1992, 10). This was then extended
through the different stages of the widening of electoral suffrage, removing
– albeit very slowly – census and gender barriers. As Pietro Costa
(2010, 9) has observed:
38 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
The driving force of democratization (its principal rhetorical device) is
equality, employed as an instrument capable of shedding light on differences
and denouncing the illegitimacy of the barriers that fragment
the national society creating mutually estranged classes of citizens. And
it is the participation–equality–rights nexus that continues to hold up
democratic claims throughout the nineteenth century...It is in this
perspective that attacks on the census constraints of suffrage are conducted,
in which the political and social elite who form a considerable
share of public opinion oppose tenacious resistance.
Theories of participatory democracy have also criticized liberal conceptions
of democracy, which spoke of free and equal citizens, as unrealistic,
underlining instead the power asymmetries that a purely political
equality failed to neutralize. Influenced by the most powerful interests,
the state is in fact seen as not fully able to guarantee real freedom and
equality. To fight inequalities (and their delegitimizing effects), greater
transparency in the functioning of public – both representative and otherwise
– institutions is thus called for, along with the democratization of
societal institutions. The involvement of citizens must be continuous and
direct, widening towards a capacity to intervene in all the different areas
of a person’s everyday existence. The democratization of parties and
associations is considered particularly important, as these mediate
between society and state. According to Held:
if we want democracy today to bloom it is necessary to rethink it as
a double-faced phenomenon, with one side regarding the reform of
state power and the other the restructuring of civil society. The principle
of autonomy can only be realized if we recognize that a process
of ‘double democratization’ is indispensible, that is the independent
transformation of both the state and civil society. (1997, 435)
In this conception, participation at all levels, institutional or not, is
oriented to rebalancing power inequalities that the liberal conception
does not question. In fact, in this vision, while democracy is challenged
by powerful organizations, in order for democracy to survive the challenge,
‘economic groups and associations must undergo rearticulation by
political institutions, in order to become part of the democratic process
itself. This is possible with the adoption, within the modus operandi of
such actors, of principles, rules and democratic practices’ (1997, 451).
We can add that a delegated conception of democracy does not take
into account the problem – acknowledged by Dahl (2000), among
others – of the different intensity of preferences. At elections, each vote
counts equally, but in reality the strength of citizens’ opinions and
emotional attachments, as well as competences, on different issues varies
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 39
enormously. While this unequal distribution of preference makes representative
democracy inefficient in its very claim to reflect preference
distribution (Pizzorno 2012), participatory democracy takes this into
account, by granting more decisional capacity to those who are more
committed, and therefore participate more.
To a certain extent, participation has indeed survived even in representative
regimes. Even if they are representative, participation (not only
electoral) is considered essential for contemporary democracies, which
gain legitimacy not only through votes but also through their capacity
to submit decisions to the ‘test of the discussion’ (Manin 1995). As Pierre
Rosanvallon noted, in the historical evolution of democracy, along with
the growth of institutions of electoral accountability, a circuit of oversight
anchored outside of state institutions took shape. In fact, the
understanding of democratic experiences requires the consideration, at
the same time, of the ‘functions and dysfunctions’ of electoral representative
institutions, but also of the organization of distrust. The different
elements of what Rosanvallon defined as counter-democracy do not
represent, in fact, ‘the opposite of democracy, but rather a form of
democracy that reinforces the usual electoral democracy, a democracy of
indirect powers disseminated through society – in other words, a durable
democracy of distrust which complements the episodic democracy of the
usual electoral representative system’ (2006, 8). If mistrust is the disease,
it might be part of the cure as ‘a complex assortment of practical
measures, checks and balances, and informal as well as institutional
social counter-powers has evolved in order to compensate for the erosion
of confidence, and to do so by organizing distrust’ (2006, 4).
In the same vein as Rosanvallon, other scholars have stressed at the
same time the crisis of the traditional, liberal (representative) conceptions
of democracy and the revival of democratic qualities often considered
under the label of a ‘democracy of the ancients’ that stresses the importance
of a (free and committed) public. In particular, Bernard Manin
described the evolution from a ‘democracy of the parties’, in which the
public sphere was mainly occupied by the political parties, to a ‘democracy
of the public’, in which the channels of formation of public opinion
are freed from their ideological control (1995, 295). This also means that
the cleavages within public opinion no longer reflect electoral preferences,
developing instead from individual preferences formed outside of
the political parties:
Individuals may have different opinions on a certain theme (for
example, some are in favour, others against). A fracture then forms in
public opinion on the theme in question...but this fracture does not
necessarily reproduce partisan divisions between those that habitually
40 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
vote for one party and those that vote for another. The fracture forms
on the basis of the preferences of individuals on a specific subject, not
on the basis of the partisan political preferences. The fracture of public
opinion on different themes may not coincide with the line of division
established at the vote. (1995, 295)
Normative theorists of participatory democracy have, as mentioned,
stressed the importance of involving citizens beyond elections (Arnstein
1969; Pateman 1970; Barber 2003). In sum, participatory theory – which
David Held defines as the conception of the ‘New Left’ – promotes a
‘direct participation of citizens in the regulation of the key institutions
of society, including the spheres of work and the local community’ (Held
1997, 379), or ‘the participation of citizens in the determination of the
conditions of their associational lives, which presumes the authentic and
rational nature of the judgements of each individual’ (1997, 416).
In Carole Pateman’s theorization, citizens should be provided with as
many opportunities to truly participate as there are spheres of decision.
While in partial participation, ‘the final power of decision rests with the
management, the workers if they are able to participate, being able only
to influence that decision’ (Pateman 1970, 70), full participation is a
‘process where each individual member of a decision-making body has
equal power to determine the outcome of decisions’ (1970, 70–1). In a
similar vein, ‘strong democracy’ has been defined as a government under
which citizens participate, at least some of the time, in the decisions that
affect their lives (Barber 2003).
Participatory theorists have in fact criticized ritualistic forms of participation,
calling instead for real empowerment. As Arnstein (1969,
216) noted, ‘citizen participation is a categorical term for citizen power’.
This means that ‘there is a critical difference between going through the
empty ritual of participation and having the real power needed to affect
the outcome of the process’ (1969). Any process which does not transfer
power is a manipulation of public opinion; no meaningful participation
is achieved until direct democracy comes into play. This is why, for
instance, Arnstein’s ladder counts eight rungs corresponding to eight
degrees of power. From the bottom to the top, these eight rungs are:
manipulation, therapy, informing, consultation, placation, partnership,
delegated power and citizen control. The first two bottom rungs are
equivalent to non-participation; the three successive ones are degrees of
tokenism; but the three upper rungs are degrees of citizen power.1
Participation is called for as not only just, but also useful. Among the
instrumentally positive contributions of participation, we find defence
from arbitrary power, the production of more informed decisions and
the growth of the legitimacy of those decisions (Smith 2009, 5). Yet the
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 41
advantages of participation are praised in terms not only of immediate
legitimation, but also of a growing socialization to interest and action
for the collective good. Participation is seen to have a positive effect on
citizens. Spaces of participation become ‘schools of democracy’: the more
citizens participate in the decision-making process, the more they are
informed and enlightened, and the more they will vote in national
elections (Pateman 1970). Active, knowledgeable and informed citizenship
will increase the systemic efficiency and individual and collective
wellbeing.
Participation creates, then, a virtuous circle: opportunities to participate
stimulate trust and activism, thus reproducing the stimulus to participate
and improving the effects of participation itself. Indeed,
participation in civic activity educates individuals with respect to how
to think in public, given that citizenship permeates civic activity with the
necessary sense of public-spiritedness and justice; in this sense, to paraphrase
Barber, politics becomes its own university, citizenship its gym,
participation its teacher (2003, 152).
Free spaces (horizontal and participatory) offer a school of citizenship,
socializing in those competences and values that are essential to support
effective participation (Evans and Boyte 1986, 17). Participation in social
movements and other associations often broaden the personal identities
of participants and offers satisfaction and self-realization (Gamson 1992,
56; Blee 2011). Indeed, identities and motivations are transformed,
during collective action: while participation often starts for limited,
immediate, even selfish reasons, many activists develop in time a political
and social conscience and a more public and trusting sense of the self
(Szas 1995, 154).
Similar effects were detected in the case of decentralized institutions.
As Tocqueville (1986, vol. I, 112–13) wrote long ago, ‘Town-meetings
are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within
the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it.’ It
is from encounters that solidarity is born: ‘Feelings and opinions are
recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed by
no other means than the reciprocal influence of men upon each other’
(Tocqueville 1986, vol. II, 158). Similarly, according to J.S. Mill, it is
local institutions that carry out
the practical part of the political education of a free people, taking
them out of the narrow circle of personal and family selfishness, and
accustoming them to the comprehension of joint interests, the management
of joint concerns – habituating them to act from public or semipublic
motives, and guide their conduct by aims which unite instead
of isolating them from one another (Mill 1947, 112)
42 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
In this sense, it is by participating that people learn to participate. As
Carole Pateman writes (1970, 42–3), ‘the principal function of participation
is...the educational, educational in the widest sense of the term,
that includes both psychological aspects and the acquisition of the practice
of capabilities and democratic procedures...Participation develops
and forges those same qualities that are necessary to it: the more an
individual participates, the more he is able to participate.’ Personal
involvement in the participatory process may significantly change one’s
attitude, perspective and value priorities (Bachrach 1975, 50).
The need to create multiple and varied channels of participation is
justified by the recognition of the presence of conflicts between actors
possessing different resources and powers. Bachrach and Baratz (1986),
in particular, have theorized a dichotomy between those who have power
and those who do not. The former can realize the mobilization of prejudice,
excluding some ideas and requests from the public debate through
the activation of a bundle of norms, values and rules that prevent some
matters from becoming subject to public decision. Part of the activity of
exercising power is thus oriented towards imposing and reinforcing this
selectivity, preventing controversies from emerging on questions of fundamental
importance to the group in power. Decisions are thus often
taken on issues of little relevance, while non-decisions are taken with
regard to the most important conflicts.
Increasing participation by the excluded therefore becomes necessary
in order to introduce new, important issues into the political debate.
Participatory democracy thus has elements in common with associational
democracy (Hirst 1994), which focuses upon the need for citizens to
self-organize. Associational experiences in civil society are here considered
not only to be capable of replacing the state in some of its
functions, but also to produce social solidarity, contributing to the
democratic socialization of the citizens as well as to the production of
social goods.
Participation should thus be an instrument for redistributing resources
to the advantage of the weakest. While interest groups favour the most
resourceful through less visible lobbying, these arenas of participation
should give more power to the powerless. For Peter Bachrach, democratic
participation is ‘a process in which persons formulate, discuss, and
decide public issues that are important to them and directly affect their
lives. It is a process that is more or less continuous, conducted on a faceto-face
basis in which participants have roughly an equal say in all stages,
from formulation of issues to the determination of policies’ (1975, 41).
The participation of those who are excluded is an instrument for reducing
inequalities as a democratic public sphere should provide the mechanisms
for recognition and representation of the voices and perspectives
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 43
of those who are oppressed (Young 1990, 184). From this point of view,
the participatory approach tends to stress also the substantive, social
dimension of democracy (Schmidt 2010, 225–35).
Conflicts are central in the conceptions of radical democracy (Laclau
and Mouffe 2001), which presents agonist democratic politics as a peaceful
way to manage conflictual interests that emerge in the (antagonist)
political. So, for Chantal Mouffe, the political is ‘the dimension of
antagonisms that I take to be constitutive of human society’, while politics
is the ‘set of practices and institutions through which an order is
created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality
provided by the political’ (Mouffe 2005, 360). In this sense, agonism
recognizes the conflicting relations with, but also the legitimacy of, the
Others:
while antagonism is a we/they relation in which the two sides are
enemies who do not share any common ground, agonism is a we/they
relation where the conflicting parties, although acknowledging that
there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognize the
legitimacy of their opponents...This means that, while in conflict, they
see themselves as belonging to the same political association, as sharing
a common symbolic space within which the conflict takes place.
(Mouffe 2005, 20)
What is shared in this vision is ‘adhesion to the ethical–political principles
of liberal democracy: liberty and equality. But we disagree concerning
the meaning and implementation of those principles, and such a
disagreement is not one that could be solved through deliberation and
rational discussion’ (Mouffe 2000, 245).
Visions of participatory democracy thus tend to consider the formation
of collective identities as exogenous to the democratic process: that
is, they emerge in the society, and then participate in politics. This is
the case also for the radical democratic approach which leaves the formation
of interests and identities outside of the (conflictual) political
sphere. The interest in ‘articulation’ – as practices that establish a relation
among elements, so that identities are modified (Laclau and Mouffe
2001, 105) – does not bring about a definition of the (democratic)
conditions under which this ‘articulation’ might happen. Additionally,
there is a separation between political institutions and society. Identities
are not constructed through democratic processes; rather, the function
of democracy is ‘to provide institutions that will allow them to take an
agonistic form, in which opponents will treat each other not as an enemy
to be destroyed, but as adversaries who will fight for the victory of their
position while recognizing the right of their opponents to fight for theirs’
(Mouffe 2009, 53).
44 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
The historical development of participatory democracy
In European history, a participatory vision of democracy developed
with the mobilization of the labour movement, also bringing about
relevant institutional changes. The initial phases of the democratic
state have been defined as characterized by widespread activism in the
public sphere (cf. Eder 2010), which remained autonomous from political
parties. During the first phase of representative democracy, which
Bernard Manin (1995, 260) defined as parliamentarism, candidates
were elected on the basis of personal trust, linked to their networks
of local relations and reputation. In society, opinion movements were
organized around varied themes, and applied pressure, often through
public demonstrations in parliaments, conceived as the place where
representatives formed their opinions through open discussions. It is
in this phase – which in the history of England and France stretches
from the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth – that the
public sphere asserted itself, and not only for the bourgeoisie. Studies
on the formation of the labour movement describe this period as
characterized by identities still oriented to trades, fragmented organizational
structures and local, sporadic protests, but also by a certain
participatory ferment.
In this phase, electoral accountability was limited, as electoral suffrage
was still very restricted. Notwithstanding the low levels of electoral
participation, participation in the public sphere was intense, with the
multiplication of autonomous and influential opinion movements. Summarizing
numerous historical studies, Alessandro Pizzorno observes that,
halfway through the eighteenth century, in England public opinion ‘manifested
itself in ever more numerous petitions, in discussions in public
places, or in semi-private places (taverns, cafés, clubs), where the new
middle class of tradesmen and professionals, readers of periodicals gathered...Numerous
societies and associations were formed...the political
press spread in a manner previously unimaginable’ (Pizzorno 1996,
972).2
In the period, which, according to E.P. Thompson (1991), saw
‘the making of the English working class’, street marches for reform
mobilized hundreds of thousands of citizens, while some of the radical
magazines achieved circulations of tens of thousands of copies. In France,
as in England, extra-parliamentary political associations gathered hundreds
of thousands of signatures for petitions on themes such as the
freedom of the press, the emancipation of slaves, freedom of religion,
electoral reform, and public education (Pizzorno 1996, 488–9). Here too,
processions and barricades mobilized hundreds of thousands of people
(Sewell 1980).
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 45
In Habermas’ analysis of the formation of public opinion, social conflicts
that emerged outside of parties were expressed in the bourgeois
public sphere, a sphere that ‘develops in the field of tension between State
and society, in such a way as to itself remain a part of the private arena’
(Habermas 1988, 171).3
The birth of the public sphere coincides with
the rise of demands by social movement organizations for an active role
in decisions that regarded their constituencies. In this sense, the notion
of public opinion, connected to that of publicity, was affirmed during
the eighteenth century. Peculiar to the public sphere is, according to
Habermas, the instrument used for political confrontation: public and
rational argumentation. Cafés, drawing rooms, linguistic societies and
Masonic lodges were the social spaces where this public sphere took form
and the taste for debate was satisfied. It is in these spaces, then, that the
institutions that led to the physical enlargement of the public space
developed – first the press, but also public meetings, reading societies
and various associations. After the French and American revolutions,
journalism, freed from the censorship of absolutist regimes, became an
instrument of wide discussion, albeit limited to an elite.
In Habermas’ historical reconstruction, the commercial bourgeoisie
progressively assumed a hegemonic position in civil society. Financial and
commercial capitalism required the international circulation of both
goods and news, thereby creating a social class interested in influencing
government action (1988, 37). According to research on social movements,
however, the public sphere was not (only) bourgeois, in the sense
of being limited to the elites of literary cafés. Even though it is debated
whether emerging conflicts should be read as motivated by the beginnings
of class consciousness, or the survival of community or trade identities
(Calhoun 1982), social movement organizations, with their scarce links
with political parties, occupied an important space in the public sphere
At the origins of democracy lies, in fact, what Bendix called ‘the
entrance of the masses into history’: indeed, ‘the 18th century represents
a rupture on a grand scale in the history of western Europe. Before that
moment, the masses were barred from exercising their public rights.
From that moment, they became citizens and in this sense members of
the political community’ (Bendix 1964, 72). In contrast to the Marxist
school, Bendix underlines the primarily political character of those social
movements:
the growing awareness of the working class expresses above all an
experience of political alienation, that is, the sense of not having a
recognized position in the political community or of not having a civic
community in which to participate....the recently politicized masses
protest against their second class citizenship, demanding the right to
46 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
participate on equal terms in the political community of the nation
state. (1964, 73)
The struggle for universal suffrage was thus also and principally a struggle
for recognition: ‘it is to oppose a conception of foreignness and social
invisibility that impacted the majority of society. Overcoming existing
discrimination in the name of equality meant being recognized as full
members of society’ (Costa 2010, 13).
Popular participation through unconventional forms went along with
its politicization. Between the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth,
the importance of demonstrations and strikes grew, with workers
forming associations focusing on the defence of wages and working
conditions, but also allied to political movements calling for democratic
reforms. In France, newspapers written by workers for workers appeared,
denouncing the partiality of the bourgeois press (and journalists) (Sewell
1980, 197). In England too, political reading societies (including working-class
ones) met in public cafés where up to ninety-six newspapers
were bought and read, including those printed illegally (Thompson 1991,
789). Not only, recalls E.P. Thompson, were there around a million literate
people among English workers, but in addition ‘Illiteracy...by no
means excluded men from political discourse’ (1991, 782). We can
speak, then, of numerous and diverse reading publics (ibid., 790), not
only bourgeois ones, that addressed political (public) issues.
A central element in the conception of democracy that developed in
this way is the collective dimension of rights as opposed to a liberal
conception of freedom (of contracts, property, etc.) as merely individual.
If the public sphere emerged in these years, the actors who participated
in it were only partly new. In both France and England the continuity
between the trade corporations and the labour movement is underlined.
In France, the societies of compagnonnages and mutual aid societies
remained active, reproducing post-revolutionary versions of the old confraternities
that later transformed into free associations. The leaders of
the compagnonnerie maintained their influence in negotiations with
masters, and in deciding eventual strikes (Sewell 1980, 180). The English
workers’ movement combined the traditions of the secret societies with
that of trade unionism (Thompson 1991, 570). Here as well, the representatives
of the old trades had a say in the emerging public sphere
(Calhoun 1982).
The social and political demands of the budding workers’ movement
intertwined with claims that may be defined as meta-democratic, addressing
the very conceptions and practices of democracy. The battle for the
freedom of the press was a founding experience of the English working
class (Thompson 1991, 805). There, the Luddites formed a transitional
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 47
movement with their mix of defending the past yet anticipating the future
through, among other things, the elaboration of specific proposals against
the exploitation of women and children, for a minimum wage, and
indeed for the right to form unions (1991, 603). The Chartists’ claims
for political reforms (such as universal suffrage and the secret ballot, the
abolition of limits on eligibility to stand for election, and paid parliamentarians)
were in fact supported by workers’ organizations (Tilly
2004, 46). In France, in 1848, trade corporations and political clubs
marched together to demand civil and political rights.
The emerging social movements in the public sphere not only discussed
specific political reforms, but also constituted arenas for the
meeting of different conceptions of democracy, with an explicit challenge
to the minimalist, individualistic and liberal vision of the developing
democratic state. From this point of view, liberal democracy unintentionally
offered the relational and cognitive resources for its own transformation.
Even if the discourse of individual rights that dominated the
collective order hindered the organization of the workers at first, it
nevertheless triggered the development of alternative conceptions of
democracy.
In England, it was precisely the resistance to repression and limits to
the freedom of association that led to an alliance between radical clubs
and trade unionism (Thompson 1991, 675), with the accompanying
emergence of popular radicalism and militant trade unions. If the Combination
Acts reflected the alliance of aristocrats and manufacturers, they
also produced, as a reaction, the alliance between radicals and workers’
organizations (1991, 217). Similarly, the repression of 1817–19 contributed
to the bridging of calls for political reform and calls for social
reform, in a reaction that E.P. Thompson sees as principally determined,
in terms of initiative and character, by worker associationism. The Peterloo
Massacre (eleven demonstrators killed) in 1819, by bringing hundreds
of thousands onto the streets to protest, caused a polarization of
public opinion (‘nobody could remain neutral’: 1991, 757) and the consequent
alliances between moderates and radicals in the struggle for civil
and political rights. Indeed, if the liberal language of rights defined these
as the natural rights of the free man, ‘it was primarily through the prism
of their rights as citizens that workers came to discover and articulate
their interests in the first place’ (Somers 2008, 13, and 152).
In France, too, although a series of laws benefiting property-owners
on a basis of competitive individualism emerged from the revolution (see
also chapter 2), some of its ideological elements were nevertheless taken
up by workers and their associations to justify demands for not only the
widening, but also the transformation of the meaning, of those rights
(Tilly 1995, 142). In the 1830s, the tension between the Enlightenment
48 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
conception of freedom (according to authorities, if workers had requests
they had to present them individually to the competent authorities) and
the workers’ demands for the recognition of trade unions was obvious.
Presenting the middle class as a new aristocracy, some of the labour
organizations claimed their right to free themselves from oppression.
A central claim for the worker movement was in fact the right ‘to
combine’, which began with the right to associate, but differentiated
itself from this (Bendix 1964). While the freedom to associate with others
formed a part of the freedom of conscience, of speech, of industry, of
religious belief and of the press, it had not, like these others, been promoted
by the revolution, which had rather, as mentioned, aimed to
abolish the bodies between the state and the society. It emerged instead
as an invention of the workers’ organizations that, exploiting the ambiguities
of the revolutionary discourse, defined the demands for collective
negotiations in terms of brotherhood. In the burgeoning workers’ movement,
associations were thought of as workers’ corporations, cooperatives,
but also as confraternities of proletarians, initially with a mutual
aid function, but then elaborated as instruments for opposing a vision
of freedom as isolation, promoting instead reciprocal links and common
intelligence (Sewell 1980, 216). Work was presented as the foundation
of sovereignty, and the organization of workers in associations as a
principle of social order, of a unique and indivisible republic. The language
of association in fact allowed a redefinition of the workers’ corporations
as free and voluntary societies, combining cooperative language
with a revolutionary one.
In the protest campaigns for the expansion of citizens’ rights, other
models of democracy were also conceptualized and practised: direct,
horizontal and self-managed conceptions developed. In the public sphere,
old and new intertwined: traditional forms of associationism (corporations,
etc.) combined with emerging ones. In France, the conception of
democracy emerging in working-class mobilizations included the federation
of self-governing trade unions. With a mix of continuity and
discontinuity, horizontal terminology began to spread in the trade associations
– such as ‘associate’ rather than ‘member’, ‘president’ or ‘secretary’
rather than ‘head’ or ‘captain’. The sans-culottes had already
imagined the direct exercise of popular sovereignty in the name of a
single popular will, calling for the public spiritedness of action, unanimity
and equality (Sewell 1980, 103). Notwithstanding the defeat of the
workers’ motions in June 1848, the Luxembourg Commission (which
functioned as an arena for interest mediation) remained an example of
an attempt at self-management against the disorder of the market.
In a similar manner, the associations of the radical movement in
England tended to organize in ‘divisions’, which were to divide as soon
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 49
as they reached forty-five members (Thompson 1991, 167). A delegate
from each division participated (along with a vice-delegate with no
voting rights) in weekly meetings of the general committee. The principle
of payment for services was affirmed with the aim of preventing ‘the
taking over of its affairs by men of means or leisure’ (1991, 169). In
many Corresponding Societies, which met at private houses or taverns,
the presidency of the session rotated, changing each time. Influenced by
the events in France, the English Jacobins took up the ‘zealous egalitarian
underpinning’ of the sans-culottes (1991, 171). Predominantly artisans
(but also journeymen), the participants at the meetings brought the spirit
of mutuality of that culture along with them (1991).
Returning to the model of liberal democracy presented in the previous
chapter, we may observe that this was contested and, at least in part,
disregarded in the construction of the democratic state – not only in the
continuation of the visions and institutions of the ‘old order’, but also
in the emergence of different visions and practices of democracy.
If requests that had formed in the public (not only bourgeois) sphere
were granted and identities recognized, this does not seem to have
occurred (only or principally) through mechanisms of electoral accountability.
In his research on France and England, Tilly describes a transformation
in the form of collective action between the late eighteenth
century and the early nineteenth, in which a local and parochial repertoire
became a national and autonomous one, based on public assemblies
and ad hoc free associations among its interest groups. According to
Tilly, in the eighteenth century the assumption was that citizens, grouped
into known bodies (guilds, communities, religious sects), exercised collective
rights, protected by the law, through the actions of their representatives
who had the ear of the authorities (1995, 142). The modern
repertoire that developed in the following century was made up of forms
of action independent of the authorities, carried out in public places with
the participation of associations that deployed their symbols of belonging
(1995, 362). In England, the concentration of capital and proletarianization
transformed the structure of interests, while urbanization changed
the fabric of relations and the growth of the state (linked to military
efforts) politicized the conflict, in what Tilly defines a ‘para-parliamentarization’
(1995, 49). Alongside parliamentarization, in fact, a public
sphere grew, including even those citizens who, despite not having the
right to vote, followed elections and participated in electoral campaigns
(1995, 143). The parliamentarization of politics thus made elections
important not only for the candidates, but also for their clientele (1995,
147). The French evolutionary path is similar, with growing demands by
the state corresponding with a process of centralization of decisions and
nationalization of political power (Tilly 1986).
50 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
Tilly linked the influence of social movements to the electoral moment,
insofar as elections marked the presence of mass support for a few proposals
(and thus a potential electoral pool of support). Nevertheless, the
parties of the time were initially rather indifferent to these movements.
Despite the odd exception (for example, candidates who supported the
ideas of the English radicals), the parties were parties of notables, based
on individual representation (Neumann 1956). Patron parties in the
Weberian definition, they sought to:
install their leader in a position of control in order that he would assign
state offices to his followers, that is to the apparatus of functionaries
and party propagandists. Lacking any principled content, the latter
would from time to time include in their programs, in competition
among themselves, those requests to which they attributed the greatest
propagandist strength among the electors. (Weber 1974, vol. II, 709)
According to Neumann, this party ‘is typical of a society with a
limited political field and a low level of participation. This is manifested,
in party terms, only by voting, and the party organization (if it even
exists) remains inactive in the period between one election and another.
Its principal function is to choose representatives who, once chosen,
are invested with a complete mandate’ (1956, 153).
Nevertheless, under pressure from social movements of various types,
the system of representation that had been constituted with continuity
and discontinuity with respect to the old order soon began to build
institutions and practices for recognizing collective identities. Notwithstanding
the individualizing rhetoric, the democratic state-in-formation
developed traits of organized or associative democracy, constructing
channels of access for interests organized in parties or associations. Both
pluralist and, even more, neo-corporative models (Schmitter 1981) then
recognized those bodies intermediate between the individual and the
state that had previously been stigmatized. In addition, diverse conceptions
and practices of democracy were present within these intermediate
bodies, in some cases involving claims for direct participation, in some
versions invoking self-management.
The labour movement has been a most important actor in the transformation
of the individualistic liberal conception of right through a
recognition of organized forms of participation. If, according to common
wisdom, the Left privileged equality and the Right freedom, in reality
the history of the workers’ movement is one of claims for civil and political
rights as inextricable from social rights. The relation between workers’
struggles and demands for freedoms emerges continually in the historiographical
reconstructions of the evolution of the workers’ movement
over the course of the nineteenth century.
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 51
In Great Britain, the tangling of claims for justice and for freedom
appears evident in historical reconstructions. Chartism is presented as a
development of radicalism in the eighteenth century, but also as the last
spark of working-class revolutionary politics (Biagini and Reid 1991, 3).
Halfway through the nineteenth century, the Reform League (65,000
members and 600 sections, 100 of which were in London) had an ‘overwhelmingly
working class’ membership (Hinton 1974, 11). In tacit alliance
with the more moderate Reform Union, the League organized huge
demonstrations against the limits on the right to political assembly (in
1866, 150,000 protestors converged on Hyde Park, challenging a government
ban), pushing the Disraeli government to concede an enlargement
of suffrage. The 1850s also witnessed hard-fought battles for the
recognition of trade union rights, among which the right to register was
recognized only in 1855 with the Friendly Societies Act. In addition, it
was only in the 1870s that the question of trade unions’ legal status was
finally settled, despite the earlier explosion in the numbers of those
signing up. And even then, disputes over work on the law on conspiracy,
the abolition of incarceration for breaking a contract (used until then
against strikers) and the introduction of the right to peaceful picketing
were excluded (Hinton 1974, 22). In the 1880s, the Democratic Federation
continued its mobilization against repression in Ireland, for the
nationalization of land, for democratic reform (along Chartist lines) and
for a further extension of suffrage. Demands for social, civil and political
rights thus became more and more intertwined, in complex ways:
Unfortunately, it is all too often assumed that the world of the working-class
politics can be understood simply by deploying categories
such as ‘socialist’, ‘Lib.-Lab.’ or ‘Labourist’ to divide the labour movement
into its ideological parts. In reality, working-class politics was far
more complex. Individuals frequently shifted between these supposedly
discrete ideological positions, or, more revealingly, behaved as though
they were completely ignorant of their existence. (Lawrence 1991, 83)
Historians have in fact noted reciprocal influence between the organizations
active on political rights and those active on social rights. Distinct
from socialism, Chartism nevertheless had an impact on the workers’
movement: while the Liberal party is normally seen as the heir to the
traditions of radicalism, its effects are also strong in the Labour party
(and in the organized working classes) (1991, 18). In fact, the Liberal
party was viewed sympathetically by many trade unionists in the late
Victorian period (for example, on the labour-law reform of 1875, Spain
1991, 110). The Tichborn movement of the 1870s has been described as
the link in the chain between the end of Chartism and the development
52 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
of socialism (and thus of the Labour party in the 1890s) (McWilliam
1991, 44). Over the course of the century, popular constitutionalism was
indeed invoked in support of working-class mobilizations:
It was the repertoire of constitutionalist action – the mass petition, the
remonstrance to the Crown, the mass demonstration and platform
agitation, the convening of conventions – that could be relied on to
rally the force of popular radicalism. It was not merely what could be
said but what could be done that gave the constitutional force, allowing
certain things to happen, certain political dramas to unfold. (Epstein
1994, 11)
In the beginning of the eighteenth century, this mostly came about in
a defensive manner, in particular against the restrictions placed on trade
union rights by the government Whigs, repression in Ireland and the new
Poor Law, as well the Rural Police Act. Protests developed against restrictions
of the right to meet in public and the suspension of habeas corpus
in 1817.
In France, too, social movements intervened in the public sphere,
raising demands for justice and liberty, but also presenting diverse conceptions
of democracy. Sewell (1986, 63) writes that ‘the fall of 1833
saw not only the creation of a new and powerful sense of class-consciousness
among artisans working in different trades, but also the first steps
towards a political alliance between radical republicanism and socialism’.
In particular, the role played in the 1833 strikes by the Société des
Droits de l’Homme has been underlined: initially a republican and bourgeois
society, it soon became dominated by the working class. Together
with the diffusion of socialist ideology, the demand for freedom was
considered to be the central characteristic of the French working-class
conscience. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the working-class
identity, linked to a widespread popular culture, was characterized by:
the sense of being manual workers; of being exploited by employers
who, in the popular imagination, had replaced feudalism; a lively
attachment to freedom, which formed the basis of the sans-culotte
spirit as well as direct-action trade unionism; extreme suspicion
towards all forms of authority, towards those referred to as ‘them’,
ranging from the state to the workshop and even including other
unions, whenever the ‘little leaders’ took advantage of their functions
to act as big shots. (Perrot 1986, 105)
Although they were a minority, critics of the vote (and of ‘votards’) as
an individual instrument in contrast with the collective will expressed in
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 53
assemblies, testified to the survival of conceptions of direct democracy
(1986, 109).
Similarly in Germany, where end-of-century repression had favoured
the centralization of struggles and working-class representation in the
party (Nolan 1986), the workers’ movement was born and grew from
the bottom up: ‘even apart from the strikes, to many workers selforganization
and collective self-help appeared to be a quasi-natural way
to protect against the insecurities of the market economy and the superiority
of employers’ (Kocka 1986, 338). The Verband Deutscher Arbeitervereine
grew as the umbrella organization of workers’ associations
that had developed close links with left-wing and democratic liberals
(Kocka 1986, 345). It was the defeat of the mobilizations of 1848–9 that
rendered these alliances more difficult, contributing towards the creation
of a strong yet isolated social democratic party.
From an organizational point of view, the interweaving and tensions
between working-class struggles and conceptions of democracy were
reflected in frequent waves of criticism of parties and trade unions ‘from
below’. As early as the end of the nineteenth century, in Germany, the
political police had registered in the workers’ Kneipen (bars) complaints
about the coldness of the party and the loss of working-class spirit (Evans
1989, 246). In France, in 1936, the occupation of factories demonstrated
how these had substituted trades as the focus of identity. As Perrot
recalled:
The occupations of factories in 1936 implied an entirely different
relationship not merely to the instrument of work, but also to space.
Dispersed with respect to residence, the workers were reunited daily
in the factory, which became the locus of their collective existence;
dislocated with respect to their crafts, they were reunited in the firm,
which became the locus of their convergence, and thereby all at once
the epicentre of the labour movement. (1986, 91)
In Great Britain, if the explosion in the numbers of those joining trade
unions in the 1890s, and the mobilizations linked to this, led to the
Labour party’s running in the general elections of 1892, dissatisfaction
over the lack of direct representation for the poor nevertheless accompanied
the development of ideas of direct revolutionary action. 4
Conceptions and practices of different models of democracy (and different
democratic qualities) with respect to those foreseen in the definition
of the liberal state were indeed developed and prefigured during
waves of protest. In Great Britain, from 1910 to 1914, a new surge in
membership of trade unions accompanied ‘bottom-up’ actions organized
during the depression of 1908–9. Spontaneous transport strikes led to
54 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
alliances negotiated from below among up to eighteen trade unions at a
time, all pledging not to leave the negotiating table until the requests of
each had been satisfied. Community mobilizations included the strikers’
wives, who marched under the banner ‘Our poverty is your danger. Stand
by us’. Currents of trade unionism in defence of working-class autonomy
developed, criticizing existing trade unions as too sectarian in structure,
oriented to compromise in their politics and internally oligarchic in
their conception of representation (Hinton 1974, 91). These examples
of working-class autonomy are described as ‘loosely-coordinated, fragmented
and lacking a coherent body of theory’; in this sense, ‘trade
unionism failed to organize the grassroots leaders of industrial militancy
into a disciplined force capable of leading a fight for revolutionary politics
within labour politics’ (1974, 94). Nevertheless, ‘in a period when
the Labour Party achieved little and was wracked by internal dissension,
the trade union explosion provided a base for a renewal of socialist politics’
(1974, 89). Even during the Great War of 1914–18, spontaneous
protests saw alliances between skilled and unskilled workers, who pushed
the Labour party to adopt some socialist goals. After the war, resistance
to the moderate turn of the Labour government was expressed in the
1920–1 protests by the unemployed people’s movement (organized in the
National Unemployed Workers Movement), taking the form of hunger
marches, which saw the participation of, among others, the party’s local
councillors, often at odds with the national government (1974, 134–5).
The trade unions also expressed their disappointment about the second
(minority) Labour government in 1929. In the 1930s, Labour re-emerged
under the control of the trade unionists, with calls for promises to enact
socialist legislation when in government, and a bottom-up opposition to
the alliance with Churchill emerged in 1944.
Moments of tension and innovation also developed in the course of
waves of strikes, accompanied by processions, assemblies and occupations.
According to E.P. Thompson’s formula, ‘class formation occurs at
the intersection of determination and self-activity: the working class made
itself as much as it was made’ (1978, 299). It was especially during strikes
that a working-class consciousness was formed. In Michelle Perrot’s
reconstruction (1974), the strikes that spread through France at the end
of the nineteenth century 5
were in fact organized not just by trade unions,
but also by various local committees, with strong involvement from
grassroots activists, who were often very young. In this sense, action
produced and reproduced the workers’ community – as Perrot noted:
Revolt is not instinctive. It is born of action, and community in action.
The strike, in this view, offers a remarkable occasion for basic training,
an antidote to isolation, to the mortal cold that the division of labour
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 55
reduces workers to. With its leaders, its assemblies, its demonstrations,
its language, sometimes even its financial organization, it forms a community
with Rousseauian aspirations, anxious for direct democracy,
avid for transparency and communion. (1974, 725)
In its everyday dimension, the long strike of this period (ten times longer
than the average contemporary strike), ‘even if rational in its reasoning
and objectives, is not purely functional, but experience, history, event.
Experienced as a liberating force, able to break the monotony of the days
and force the retreat of the bosses’ power, it crystallized an ephemeral
and often-regretted counter-society. Strike nostalgia carries the seed of
its recommencing’ (1974, 725).
Pushed by the workers’ movement, the debate on democracy also
spread to include not only an emphasis on participation, but also themes
of social equality. In the first period of the development of capitalism,
equality in civil and political rights sanctioned by the concept of citizenship
was not normally considered to be in conflict with the social inequalities
produced by the market, notwithstanding the fact that these
weakened the enjoyment of civil and political rights (Marshall 1992, 27).
In the twentieth century, the growth of economic wellbeing, the diffusion
of education, and the use of those same civil and political rights affected
this balance:
Social integration spread from the sphere of sentiments and patriotism
to that of material satisfaction. The components of a civilized and
cultivated life, at first the monopoly of the few, were progressively
placed within reach of the many, who were encouraged to reach out
their hand to those who still eluded their claims. The diminution of
inequality reinforced the pressures for its abolition, at least with regard
to the essential elements of social wellbeing. These aspirations were in
part heeded for incorporating social rights in the status of citizenship
and thus creating a universal right to a real income that is not proportional
to the market value of the claimer. (1992, 28)
Social rights began then to be discussed as essential conditions for a true
enjoyment of political rights.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was therefore Bendix’s
‘masses’ that conquered the rights of citizenship, organizing in political
parties which then contributed to their integration. In particular, the
socialist parties included the working class in the system, allowing the
nationalization of society: ‘above all integrating the working class into
the procedures of the representative regime, “giving it a voice” and thus
leading it to enter into dialogue with the other components of the political
system, then contributing with success to enlarge the attributes of the
56 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
State’ (Pizzorno 1996, 1023). With respect to the democratic state, the
‘masses’ exercised constant pressure for the enlargement of rights to
dissent, as well as ‘civility control’.6
Further, they kept alive a focus on
participatory democracy – open, direct and horizontal.
A participatory revolution?
Going back to the definition of liberal democracy, we can observe that
it does not reflect some of the main elements which are present in the
conceptions and practices of democracy which have developed in the last
two centuries. While the electoral moment certainly played an important
role, it was, however, neither the only nor the most important one in a
democratic participation which instead flourished in associational forms,
often independent of the representative circuit. Like the labour movement
in the past, more recent movements also became arenas for debating
and experimenting with different conceptions of democracy.
The protest movements of the late 1960s were already interpreted as
an indication of the widening gap between parties and citizens – and
indeed of the parties’ inability to represent new lines of conflict (Offe
1985). This could be seen in the growing separation between movements
and parties, that had together contributed to the development of some
main conflict lines. Despite the obvious tensions between movements and
parties, especially on the European continent, relations with parties long
continued to play a central role for movements (Tarrow 1998; della Porta
1995). In fact, social movements have tended to form alliances more or
less tightly with parties – and parties have sought to co-opt social movements,
to absorb their identities, and to represent them in institutions.
Social movements have indeed been extremely sensitive to the characteristics
of their political parties of reference: they have privileged action in
society, leaving parties the job of bringing their claims to institutions.
They have placed themselves on the political Left–Right axis, and have
constructed discourses compatible with the ideologies of their allies. For
their part, parties have not been impermeable to the pressures of movements:
from the Labour party in Great Britain to the Social Democrats in
Germany, from the French socialists to the Italian communists, the programmes
and members of the institutional left have changed following
interactions with social movements and increasing awareness on themes
such as gender discrimination or environmental protection. Comparative
research has indicated that, in general, the old Left has been more disposed
to supporting movements in locations where exclusive regimes had
for a long time hindered the moderation of conflicts on the Left–Right
axis (Kriesi et al. 1995, 68; della Porta and Rucht 1995).7
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 57
Between parties and movements, tensions continued to develop,
however, over the appropriate organizational format. Faced with more
and more bureaucratized parties (see chapter 2), the democratic quality
of participation has remained central in the visions and practices of leftwing
social movements. The 1968 movements (or the ‘sixty-eight years’,
as they have recently been defined) called for an extension of civil rights
and forms of political participation. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement
influenced European student movements, which also organized debates
on freedom of opinion as well as the ‘state of emergence of democracy’
(in Germany, for example) (for recent analyses, see Tolomelli 2008;
Klimke and Scharlot 2008). The anti-authoritarian frame, central to
these movements, was in fact articulated in claims for ‘democracy from
below’. Democracies in the form of councils and self-management were
also discussed in the workers’ movements of those years. Beyond the
expansion of forms of political participation, the student movement and
those that followed it (the first being the women’s movement) experimented
internally with new democratic practices, considered to be early
signs of the realization of non-authoritarian relations (a libertarian
dimension).
The so-called new social movements of the 1970s and the 1980s also
insisted on the legitimacy – if not the prevalence – of alternative forms
of democracy, criticizing liberal visions. In fact, ‘the struggle of the left
libertarian movements thus recalls an ancient element of democratic
theory, which promotes the organization of the collective decisionmaking
process variously defined as classical, populist, communitarian,
strong, grassroots or direct democracy, against a democratic practice
defined in contemporary democracies as realist, liberal, elitist, republican
or representative democracy’ (Kitschelt 1993, 15). According to this
interpretation, against a liberal democracy based on delegation to representatives
who may be controlled only at elections, movements affirm
that citizens, naturally interested in politics, must directly assume the
task of intervening in political decisions. As carriers of a participatory
conception of democracy, the new social movements of the 1970s also
criticized the monopoly of mediation through mass parties and by a
‘strong’ structuration of interests, aiming to shift policy making towards
more visible and controllable places. Democracy as self-management was
much discussed among social movements in this period.
In part, these conceptions did penetrate the democratic state through
reforms that widened participation in schools, in factories and in local
areas but also through the political recognition of movement organizations
and the ‘right to dissent’. Beginning from the 1960s, there has also
been an increase in institutional and other forms of participation. In
an important piece of comparative research carried out in the 1970s in
58 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
different western democracies, Samuel Barnes and Max Kaase noted
that, with respect to laws and decisions considered unjust or illegitimate,
ever larger groups of citizens were ready to resort to forms of action
characterized by their unconventionality, as in advanced industrial societies
techniques of direct political action were no longer carrying the
stigma of deviance, nor were seen as anti-systemic in their orientation
(Barnes and Kaase 1979, 157). For example, between 1960 and 1974,
the percentage of those who responded ‘Non-conventional political
actions, such as demonstrations’ to the question ‘What can a citizen do
with respect to a local regulation judged unjust or damaging?’ increased
in Great Britain, the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany
from less than 1 per cent to over 7 per cent.
The conclusion here is that increasing participation, including unconventional
forms, is not an indicator of political alienation but, on the
contrary, of the growth in political competences, in particular among the
young. It was an expression of an enduring increase in potential citizen
interventions, a broadening of the repertoire of political action that they
rightly predicted was going to be reproduced over and over again (1979,
534).
In line with those predictions, a large-scale comparative research
project – which used data from different surveys carried out at various
points in numerous western democracies – underlined that, at least until
1990, political participation in western Europe grew considerably, with
a reduction in the percentage of entirely inactive people (from 85 per
cent in 1959 to 44 per cent in 1990) and a parallel growth in people
partaking in some political activity (from 15 per cent in 1959 to 66 per
cent in 1990) (Topf 1995, 68). While traditional political participation
has remained stable, non-institutional participation has increased enormously
in the years that followed. This growth has affected not only all
the countries analysed, but, within the individual countries, it has reduced
the differences in participation levels linked to gender, age and educational
attainment – so as to lead scholars to speak of a ‘participatory
revolution’ (1995, 78).
The most recent research also confirms that unconventional forms of
participation are complementary, not alternatives, to conventional forms.
In the 2000s, survey-based research has repeatedly underlined the decline
of conventional forms of political participation (Putnam 2000; see also
chapter 2), but the corresponding rise in unconventional forms (Torcal
and Montero 2006). In Italy, for instance, unconventional forms of participation,
such as signing petitions or participating in boycotts and
marches, have spread – in 2005 the percentage of citizens that participated
in unconventional forms stood at 37 per cent, equal to that of citizens
participating in conventional ways (Lello 2007, 433; also Diamanti,
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 59
2007). In addition, while parties are losing members and trust, voluntary
associations have gained. The number of people declaring that they never
discuss politics has also tended to decrease: in Italy from 47 per cent in
1981 to 32 per cent in 2000 (Lello 2007, 416).
Conclusion
In conclusion, at the normative level, the concept of participatory democracy
has suggested, with growing success, the need to increase the number
and power of arenas open to citizens’ participation. Concretely, real
existing democracies developed by multiplying channels of participation,
and extending the civil, political and social rights that made that participation
possible. In fact, at least partially, participatory conceptions have
penetrated the democratic state, through reforms that increased participation
in public institutions, but also through the political recognition
of the ‘right to dissent’. This evolution has been neither linear nor
peaceful: rights to participation were affirmed through various waves
of protest, with strong resistance and frequent U-turns. Different democratic
qualities – based on participatory principles – were nurtured in
social movement organizations, re-emerging with more strength in times
of struggle. The broadening of participation rights was reflected in a
growth in unconventional forms of participation. Most importantly, the
criticism of liberal democracy was expressed in the theorization of and
experimentation with other models of democracy in a growing number
of social movements.
Deliberative Democracy:
Between Representation
and Participation
4
After a march on 15 May 2011, about forty protestors decided to camp
in Madrid’s main square, Puerta del Sol, calling for supporters on the
Internet. By 20 May, 30,000 people were in that square, and many
more followed the protest online, while the movement spread to many
other localities, both large and small. As sociologist John Postill (2012),
present during the events, recalled, ‘The encampments rapidly evolved
into “cities within cities” governed through popular assemblies and
committees. The committees were created around practical needs such
as cooking, cleaning, communicating and carrying out actions. Decisions
were made through both majority rules vote and consensus. The
structure was horizontal, with rotating spokespersons in lieu of leaders.
Tens of thousands of citizens were thus experimenting with participatory,
direct and inclusive forms of democracy at odds with the dominant
logic of political representation. Displaying a thorough mixture
of utopianism and pragmatism, the new movement drew up a list of
concrete demands, including the removal of corrupt politicians from
electoral lists, while pursuing revolutionary goals such as giving “All
power to the People”.’ By mid-June 2011, consensus-oriented assemblies
decided it was time to move from the central squares to the
neighborhoods (barrios).
From Spain, the emphasis on the creation of open spaces moved
to Greece and the US, following mobile activists. Describing Occupy
Boston, and citing an activist who talked about the ‘small slice of
utopia we are creating’, Juris (2012, 268) singled out some of the
tactical, incubating and infrastructural roles of the occupied free
spaces: among the first are attracting media attention and inspiring
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 61
participation; among the second, ‘providing a space for grassroots
participatory democracy; ritual and community building, strategizing
and action planning, public education and prefiguring alternative
worlds that embody the movement’s visions’; among the third, networking
and coordination. Beyond the prefiguration of a different
society, the activists already imagine that these spaces, as Ratza and
Kurnik (2012) noted, are also important in the invention of alternative,
but not yet imagined, futures, through what has been called a
politics of becoming. In the Occupy movement they studied in Slovenia,
the encounters between diverse minorities transform them and
their visions.
Protestors in the Puerta del Sol, or those in Zuccotti Park in New York,
certainly went back to conceptions of participation from below, cherished
by the progressive social movements I mentioned in the previous
chapter. As this short account indicates, however, they combined this
with special attention to the creation of egalitarian and inclusive public
spheres. In this sense, their actions resonate with the conceptions and
practices of deliberative democracy, which we are going to discuss in this
chapter. Here as well, I shall first introduce the debate on normative
theory and then refer to empirical research on democratic conceptions
and practices in social movements, looking in particular at two waves
of protest at the turn of the millennium.
Deliberative democracy: an introduction
A different type of criticism of the liberal democratic model from the
one discussed under the ‘participatory’ label came from the theorists
of a deliberative democracy, initially defined as ‘liberal-deliberative
democracy’.
What emerges as most innovative in the definition of deliberative
democracy is the importance given to preference (trans)formation during
the discursive process oriented to the definition of the public good. In
fact, deliberative democracy requires a transformation of preferences
during the interaction (Dryzek 2000a, 79). It is ‘a process through which
initial preferences are transformed in order to take into account the
points of view of the others’ (Miller 1993, 75). In this sense, it differs
from conceptions of democracy as aggregation of (exogenously generated)
preferences (or opinions) as it aims instead at their (democratic)
formation.
With varying emphases, theorists of deliberative democracy stressed
the importance of communication, as in deliberative democracy people
62 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
are convinced by the force of the better argument. In particular, (good)
deliberation is conceived as being based on horizontal flows of communication,
multiple producers of content, ample opportunities for interaction,
confrontation on the basis of rational argumentation, and a positive
attitude to reciprocal listening (Habermas 1981, 1996). To use Barber’s
(2003, 173) words, ‘at the heart of strong democracy is talk’, and democratic
talk requires listening as well as uttering.
Some deliberative conceptions stress consensus, as decisions are
reached by convincing the others of one’s own good argument. Decisions
must therefore be approvable by all participants, in contrast with majoritarian
democracy, in which decisions are legitimated by votes. According
to Joshua Cohen (1989), an ideal deliberation aims to reach a rationally
motivated consensus thanks to reasons that are persuasive to all.
Changes of preferences regarding the public good should occur
through the process of argumentation wherein reasons are exchanged
in support of respective and different positions. The central tenet of
deliberative democratic theory is, in fact, that it is through argumentation
that participants in deliberation convince one another and come
to decisions. In deliberative democracy, the debate is oriented to finding
endorsable reasons (Ferejohn 2000).
Finally, deliberation enables individuals to abstract themselves from
the mere appeal of self-interest, in such a way that the solution should
reveal the general interest (Cohen 1989, 23–4; Elster 1998). In this
model, ‘the political debate is organized around alternative conceptions
of the public good’, and, above all, it ‘draws identities and citizens’
interests in ways that contribute to public building of public good’
(Cohen 1989, 18–19). A deliberative setting thus facilitates the search
for a common good (Elster 1998). Indeed, while I can consider my preferences
as sufficient reason to make a proposal, deliberation in conditions
of pluralism requires that I find reasons that make my proposal
acceptable to others whom I can expect not to consider the fact that this
is my preference to be a sufficient reason for supporting it (Cohen 1989,
33). A public explanation of oneself and one’s own reasons ‘forces you
to report only those reasons that others might plausibly be expected to
share’ (Goodin 2003, 63).
Deliberative democracy is therefore a way to address controversies
through dialogue: when citizens or their representatives disagree morally,
they should continue to reason together until they reach mutually acceptable
decisions (Gutmann and Thompson 1996). Decisions are legitimate
‘to the extent they receive reflective assent through participation in
authentic deliberation by all those subject to the decision in question’
(Dryzek 2010, 23). Deliberation (or even communication) is based upon
the belief that, while not giving up my perspective, I might learn if I listen
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 63
to the other (Young 1996). While reaching consensus is not always possible,
different forms of meta-consensus (on values, beliefs, preferences
or discourses) can ensure the functioning of a deliberative arena (Dryzek
2010, 94, 114).
Deliberative forms of democracy have also been advocated as a way
to channel the support of critical citizens into democratic institutions by
building upon the assumption that contemporary democracies (at the
local, national and supranational levels) need to combine representative
institutions with other arenas. As Dryzek (2010, 40) noted, ‘Democracy
does not have to be a matter of counting heads – even deliberative heads.
Nor does it have to be confined to the formal institutions of the state or
the constitutional surface of the political life. Accepting such confinement
means accepting a needlessly thin conception of democracy.’ In the past,
participation developed especially within political parties, where the
reference to common values permitted the formation of collective identities.
As mentioned earlier (see chapter 2), the very processes of economic
globalization and political transnationalization challenge representative
forms of democracy as they have developed within the nation state.
Recently developed partial solutions to the weaknesses of representative
democracy appear far from satisfactory. Technocratic models of
democracy, based on the assumption of consensual goals (such as economic
development) to be reached with the input of experts or public
bureaucrats, are accused of disempowering (and alienating) citizens
(Sanderson 1999). Media democracy, with legitimation mediated by
mass media, has facilitated populist appeals – as commercialization and
centralization in the media system have encouraged the trend away from
information and critical debate. In this context, interest has risen, among
scholars as well as practitioners, in forms of democracy variously defined
as deliberative.
Faced with these perceived challenges to representative democracy, the
virtues of deliberative democracy are said to include legitimation on the
input side and efficacy on the output side: ‘Beyond its essential contribution
to democracy per se, citizen participation in the policy process can
contribute to the legitimization of policy development and implementation’
(Fischer 2003, 205). For Bernard Manin, the legitimacy of the decision
is the outstanding product of the deliberative theory of democracy:
‘A legitimate decision is one that results from the deliberation of all. It is
the process by which everyone’s will is formed that confers its legitimacy
on the outcome’ (1987, 351–2). Also for Seyla Benhabib (1996, 69),
deliberation ‘is a necessary condition for attaining legitimacy...with
regard to collective decision-making processes in a polity...what is considered
in the common interest of all results from processes of collective
deliberation’. And for Amy Gutmann (1996, 344), ‘the legitimate exercise
64 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
of political authority requires...decision-making by deliberation among
free and equal citizens’. In this sense, deliberative democracy is ‘a normative
account of the bases of democratic legitimacy’ (Young 2003, 103).
Deliberation, as a ‘dispassionate, reasoned, logical’ type of communication,
promises to increase citizens’ trust in political institutions (Dryzek
2000b, 64). Indeed, scholars highlighted a ‘moralising effect of the public
discussion’ (Miller 1993, 83) that ‘encourages people not to merely
express political opinions (through surveys or referendum) but to form
those opinions through a public debate’ (1983, 89).
In its turn, legitimacy should facilitate the implementation of decisions,
and efficiency should increase thanks to the increased information
that citizens bring into the process. Among others, Fung and Wright
(2001) stated the need to transform democracy in order to improve its
capacity to achieve public goods. Deliberation should make people
capable of overcoming their own individual interests and participating
in the pursuit of a general interest (Cohen 1989, 23–4). In a virtuous
circle, deliberative spaces improve citizens’ information and decisionmaking
capacity. Research on attempts at extending policy making
through deliberative experiments – in the forms of auditing, people’s
juries and so on – usually focuses attention on the capacity of these
instruments to solve problems created, for example, by local opposition
to unpopular local land use (Bobbio and Zeppetella 1999, Sintomer
2001).
Deliberative and participatory democracy
A fourth model of democracy developed from some criticism of the
original deliberative conception, bridging it with emphasis on deliberation
from below. Critics have first of all stigmatized the exclusionary
nature of the public sphere, especially as conceived in the Habermasian
proposal. As Nancy Fraser noted:
not only was there always a plurality of competing publics, but the
relations between bourgeois publics and other publics were always
conflictual. Virtually from the beginning, counterpublics contested the
exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alternative
styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech.
Bourgeois publics, in turn, excoriated these alternatives and deliberately
sought to block broader participation. (1997, 75)
As mentioned in the previous chapter, subaltern counterpublics (including
workers, women, ethnic minorities, etc.) actually formed parallel
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 65
discursive arenas, where counter-discourses developed, allowing for the
formation and re-definition of identities, interests and needs (1997, 81).
Also, in contemporary societies, a multitude of public spheres offers to
those subaltern groups the possibility of forming a collective identity. We
can agree with Sheila Benhabib that ‘heterogeneity, otherness, and difference
can find expression in multiple associations, networks, and citizens’
forums, all of which constitute public life under late capitalism’
(1996, 84).
Second, and linked to this, liberal deliberative theories are said to tend
towards an institutional bias denying that democracy develops (also or
mainly) outside of public institutions. Scholars of deliberative democracy
disagree in fact about the spheres in which it may take place, some focusing
on the institutional public spheres, others on alternative spheres, free
from state intervention (della Porta 2005b). Habermas (1996) postulates
a double-track process, with ‘informal’ deliberation taking place outside
institutions and then, as public opinion, influencing institutional deliberation.
In empirical research, particular attention has been devoted to institutional
arenas, from parliaments (Steiner et al. 2005) to administrative
committees (Joerges and Neyer 1997), or in the mass media. According
to other authors, however, deliberation happens (also or mainly) outside
of public institutions. Joshua Cohen (1989) holds that deliberative democracy
develops in voluntary groups, in particular in political parties, while
John Dryzek (2000) singles out social movements as better positioned to
build deliberative spaces, since they keep a critical eye upon institutions.
In a similar vein, Jane Mansbridge (1996) stated that deliberation should
take place in a number of enclaves, free from institutional power – social
movements being among them. As Claus Offe (1997, 102–3) has emphasized,
deliberative democracy needs citizens embedded in associative
networks, able to build democratic skills among their adherents.
Third, not only does the historical account of the ‘bourgeois’ public
sphere leave aside the ‘proletarian’ ones, but the very communicative
styles which are normatively stressed varies. The Habermasian emphasis
on the role of reason has been contested by those who pointed instead
at the positive role of emotions and narration in public deliberation (Polletta
2006). Research on institutions as well as social movements revealed
that different public spheres have different grammars (Talpin 2011; Haug
2010). Habermas has thus been criticized for reflecting elitarian norms:
communicative rationality at the expense of story-telling, or politeness
instead of passions. The importance of protest action as a complement
to discourse was also noted: ‘processes of engaged and responsible democratic
participation include street demonstrations and sit-ins, musical
works and cartoons, as much as parliamentary speeches and letters to
the editor’ (Young 2003: 119).
66 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
Emotions are here considered as important in creating solidarity
through closeness and knowledge. As Hannah Arendt observed, a broad
way of thinking cannot develop in isolation or solitude, but needs the
presence of those others who have to be taken into account in that thinking
(Arendt 1972, 282). Rhetoric can perform important functions in
bonding and bridging individuals (Dryzek 2010, 69–81). To move
beyond individual selfishness, in Iris Young’s view too, people must meet,
as a ‘moral point of view’ grows not from solitary reasoning, but from
concrete meetings with others, who ask for their own needs, desires and
perspectives to be recognized (Young 1990, 106). The need for a deliberation
inside counterpublics, or enclaves of resistance, is recognized by
the theoreticians of participatory forms of deliberation. Among them
Jane Mansbridge stresses that ‘democracies also need to foster and value
informal deliberative enclaves of resistance in which those who lose in
each coercive move can rework their ideas and their strategies, gathering
their forces and deciding in a more protected space in what way or
whether to continue the struggle’ (1996, 46–7).
What is more, social inequality is said to reduce the capacity of
oppressed groups to learn the dominant rules of the game, as oppression
‘consists in systematic institutional processes which prevent some people
from learning and using satisfying or expansive skills in socially recognized
settings, or which inhibit people’s ability to play and communicate
with others or to express their feelings and perspective on social life
in contexts where others can listen’ (Young 2000, 156). Deliberative
democracy, in its original version, is thus accused of favouring (at least
reproducing) inequalities:
Although deliberators will always choose to disregard some arguments,
when this disregard is systematically associated with the
arguments made by those we know already to be systematically
disadvantaged, we should at least reevaluate our assumptions about
deliberation’s democratic potential. This is all the more problematic
as deliberation requires not only equality in resources and the guarantee
of equal opportunity to articulate persuasive arguments but
also equality in ‘epistemological authority’, in the capacity to evoke
acknowledgment of one’s arguments. (Sanders 1997, 349)
Fourth, and most fundamentally, the classical version of deliberative
democracy assumes the possibility of reaching consensus through dialogue,
thus excluding fundamental conflicts, which are instead parts and
parcel of democratic development. It does not therefore help to address
a fundamental question: if, as is usually the case, deliberation does not
achieve consensus, how should conflicts be addressed (Smith 2009, 11)?
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 67
The very plurality of opinions makes conflicts, even bitter ones, all the
more likely. As Flybjerg (1998, 229) observed, ‘With the plurality that a
contemporary concept for civil society must contain, conflict becomes an
inevitable part of this concept. Thus civil society does not mean “civilized”
in the sense of well-mannered behavior. In strong civil societies,
distrusts and criticism of authoritative action are omnipresent as is resulting
political conflict.’ But, also, exclusion from some spaces of deliberation
might produce conflicts. From this point of view, public spheres are
conflictual as they are selective: ‘If some of the interests, opinions, and
perspectives are suppressed..., or if some groups have difficulties getting
heard for reasons of structural inequality, cultural misunderstanding, or
social prejudice, then the agenda or the results of public policy are likely
to be biased or unfair. For these reasons, the public sphere will properly
be a site of struggle – often contentious struggles’ (Young 2000, 178).
The presence of conflicts (that cannot be solved discursively) is particularly
important, as mentioned before (see chapter 3), in conceptualizations
of radical democracy as based upon agonistic interactions. As
Chantal Mouffe wrote, ‘taking pluralism seriously requires that we give
up the dream of rational consensus which entails the fantasy that we
could escape from our human form of life’ (2000, 98).
From these criticisms a conception of democracy which is at the same
time deliberative and participatory developed. It calls for the formation
of public spheres where, under conditions of equality, inclusiveness and
transparency, a communicative process based on reason (the strength of
the good argument) is able to transform individual preferences and reach
decisions oriented to the public good (della Porta 2005a). A deliberative
and participatory democracy is first of all inclusive. All citizens have to
be included in the process and able to express their voice. Against hierarchy,
it ‘requires some forms of apparent equality among citizens’
(Cohen 1989, 18); in fact, deliberation takes place among free and equal
citizens (as ‘free deliberation among equals’: 1989, 20). This means the
deliberative process takes place under conditions of plurality of values
where people have different perspectives but face common problems. At
least, ‘all citizens must be able to develop those capacities that give them
effective access to the public sphere’, and ‘once in public, they must be
given sufficient respect and recognition so as to be able to influence decisions
that affect them in a favourable direction’ (Bohman 1997, 523–4).
Deliberation must exclude power – deriving from coercion, but also from
an uneven balance of the participants as repesentatives of organizations
of different size or influence. In Joshua Cohen’s definition, a deliberative
democracy is ‘an association whose affairs are governed by the public
deliberation of its members’ (1989, 17). Consensus is, however, possible
only if there are shared common values.
68 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
Global social movements, public spheres and
deliberative democracy
A deliberative model based on participation has been promoted by the
social movements that developed at the turn of the millennium claiming
global justice. While a participatory emphasis has been pursued by the
left-libertarian movements of the 1960s and the following decades, social
movement activists have also been aware of the difficulties in implementing
direct democracy. The risks of a ‘tyranny of the structureless’ (Freeman
1970; see also Breines 1989) have in fact brought about an increasing
focus on discursive qualities and consensual decision making (Polletta
2002).
Some internal characteristics of this mobilization called for a participatory
and deliberative conception. In the global justice movement
(GJM), which became visible with the mobilizations against the WTO
in Seattle in 1999, characteristics like network organizational structures,
plural identities and the presence of a varied repertoire were intertwined
with a transnational dimension (della Porta 2007). A plurality of networks
active on a variety of issues participated in the protests, including
in their ranks organizations and activists with experience in previous
movements. New communication technologies – first and foremost the
Internet – had not only reduced the costs of mobilization, allowing
streamlined and flexible structures, but also facilitated reciprocal interaction
between different areas and movements. The social forums represented
attempts to create open spaces for meetings of different individuals
and groups (della Porta 2009b).
Even though previous social movements also typically had a network
structure, the global justice movement emphasized, even more than past
movements, its reticular character, presenting itself as ‘networks of networks’.
Its activists were in fact rooted in an extremely dense network
of associations, from Catholic to ecologist associations, from social volunteering
to trade unions, from the defence of human rights to women’s
liberation, often with multiple belongings to associations of different
types (Andretta et al. 2002, 184; della Porta et al. 2006; della Porta
2009b; see also della Porta and Caiani 2009). So, for instance, 97.6 per
cent of participants interviewed at the anti-G8 countersummit in Genoa
in 2001 were (or had been) members of at least one type of organization,
80.9 per cent were (or had been) members of at least two, 61 per cent
of at least three, 38.1 per cent of at least four, 22.8 per cent of at least
five, 12.6 per cent of six or more (Andretta et al. 2002, 184). Similar
results emerged from survey-based research at the first European Social
Forum (ESF), in Florence in 2002 (della Porta et al. 2006), and on
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 69
the fourth ESF in Athens in 2006 (della Porta 2009b; della Porta and
Caiani 2009).
The formation of trans-thematic and transnational networks came
about ‘in action’, along with a widening of protest repertoires (della
Porta 2008b). From the end of the 1990s, demonstrations against the
Millennium Round of the WTO in Seattle sparked a new wave of ‘street
politics’ on global themes. Mass demonstrations had often been called
for during countersummits defined as arenas of ‘international level initiatives
organized during official summits and on the same themes albeit
from a critical point of view, raising awareness through protest and
information with or without contacts with the official version’ (Pianta
2001, 35). Millions of people joined the international day of protest
against the war in Iraq on 15 February 2003 (della Porta and Diani 2004;
Waalgrave and Rucht 2010).
The campaigns against land mines or the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) and the Multilateral Agreement on Investments
(MAI), the UN-sponsored world conferences and Jubilee 2000 were
important occasions for organizational networking, aggregating the
more institutionalized organizations – such as development and human
rights NGOs, religious and non-religious charities, labour unions and
large environmental associations – that had already collaborated in,
among other movements, the previous waves of pacifist mobilization.
Similarly, the European Marches against Unemployment and Exclusion,
the actions in solidarity with the Zapatistas and the Intergalactic meetings
(in 1996 in Chiapas and 1997 in Spain), as well the later demonstrations
in Prague against the IMF and WB and in Nice and Gothenburg
against the EU, constituted moments of interaction among the more
radical groups and the critical unions.
Group interviews with activists show a pride in this ‘plurality of the
movement’, whose strength was in fact located in its capacity to network
associations and individuals, bringing together
many situations...that in previous years, especially the last ten, did
not come together enough, met around big issues for very short periods,
always with a highly emotional impetus, while instead this is, I feel,
the first experience I have had in such an alive way of contact and
networking where the fact of being in contact and in a network is one
of the most important factors...this is the positive thing...the value
of the Social Forums. (cited in Del Giorgio 2002, 89)
The network was thus defined as more than the sum of its groups: for
it is in the network that the activist ‘gets to know people, forms relationships,
becomes a community’ (2002, 92). As another activist observed,
70 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
‘A word I feel is key to a different way of doing politics is the concept
of relations...the ability to create and amplify relationships counts more
than the ability to send them down from above’ (in 2002, 252).
The network logic facilitated the bridging of various issues as well. In
different countries the different concerns of different movements were
connected in a lengthy, although not always very visible, process of
mobilization (della Porta 2007). The global justice movement developed
from protest campaigns around ‘broker issues’ that tied together concerns
of different movements and organizations. In Switzerland, the
campaign against the WTO brought together squatters, human rights
activists and labour unionists. In France, the struggle against Genetically
Modified food linked peasants and ecologists, while the mouvements de
sans saw the convergence of the critical unions with organizations of the
unemployed, sans-papiers and homeless. Jubilee 2000 bridged development
NGOs with rank-and-file religious groups. In the anti-Maastricht
movement in Spain (and later in the ‘50 years are enough’ campaign),
ecologists and pacifists met with critical unionists. In Great Britain,
opposition to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was a catalyst
for the interaction of travellers, squatters, ravers and environmentalists
(and in the campaign against dismissals, dockers encountered – even if
occasionally –the Reclaim the Street direct action network).
All this diversity needed spaces of confrontation where not only issues
but also frames could be bridged. Countersummits and social forums
have been important for the construction and exchange of knowledge.
The relevance of communication is further confirmed by the importance
assumed in the organization of protest, not only by the Internet but also
by connected themes, from copyright to censorship (Milan 2009). Competences
in counter-expertise are important characteristics of many more
formalized associations, but also of think-tanks and alternative media
close to protestors. The movement for global justice has in fact developed
actions oriented to sensitizing the public on alternative values and cultures.
Networking is facilitated by the so-called campaign approach,
which foresees the utilization of various forms of protest and information,
by wide networks of organizations and individuals, to attain
relatively specific, but symbolically significant, demands.
The trans-thematic and transnational nature of the movement constitutes
a novelty in an environment which appeared to be characterized
by movements’ specializations on single themes (from women to the
environment, from peace to AIDS). In transnational protests, worries
about the environment, women’s rights, peace and social inequalities
continue as characteristics of the sub-groups or networks involved in the
globalization mobilization. The definition of a ‘movement of movements’
underlines the survival of specific claims, and the non-subordination of
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 71
one conflict in relation to others. The multiplicity of bases of reference
in terms of class, gender, generation, race and religion appears to have
led to identities that are, if not weak, certainly composite. In different
campaigns, countersummits and social forums, fragments of diverse cultures
– secular and religious, radical and reformist, of young and old
generations – have tangled together in a wider discourse that has taken
the theme of social (and global) injustice as its glue, yet at the same time
leaving plenty of space for deepening discussions of different themes. At
the transnational level, local and global concerns have been connected
to values such as equality, justice, human rights and environmental
protection.
Platforms, forums, coalitions and networks have allowed reciprocal
knowledge and, often, understanding. Even while pluralism and diversity
have been much emphasized, in the movement’s discourse a master frame
has developed around the claim for global justice and another democracy.
In parallel, the enemy has been identified in neoliberal globalization,
which characterized not only the policies of international financial institutions
(the WB, the IMF and the WTO) but also the political choices
of national right-wing parties and also left-wing governments. These
actors are considered responsible for the growing social injustice, and its
negative effects on women, the environment, the global South, etc. Next
to social injustice, a common base is the meta-discourse on the search
for new forms of democracy. The traditional legitimation of democracy
through electoral accountability has been challenged by the development
of global governance, but also by the perceived decline in state intervention
as a consequence of a global economy. Perceived as hostile to the
movement’s claims, parties have also been criticized as the carriers of a
conception of politics (and democracy) that is limited and exclusive.
Distrust of parties reflects the perception shared by some activists that
‘politics from below’ is a viable alternative to the conception of politics
as an activity for professionals defended by the parties (della Porta et al.
2006). The critique of parties – especially those potentially closest to
movements – regards their conception of politics even more than their
concrete political choices. Stigmatized as the carriers of an idea of professional
politics, parties are seen as, at best, interested in electorally exploiting
the movement, all the while denying its political credentials. In focus
groups, most criticized is the reference made by party leaders to
a pre-political movement asking to be listened to and then translated
into a political project and programme by those doing politics in the
institutional sense of the word, from local institutions to parliaments,
and this is extremely dangerous...the very fact that many insist on
saying that this is a youth movement...I remember an interview with
72 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
the mayor of Florence after the Social Forum in which he said ‘one
cannot ask these young people to express political projects, it is up to
us to interpret them’. (cited in della Porta 2007)
This movement’s characteristics fuelled in fact a search for alternative
conceptions of democracy. Focusing attention on the global justice
movement, the research project Demos (Democracy in Europe and the
Mobilization of the Society) – covering six European countries (Italy,
France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland and Great Britain) as well as the
transnational level – showed the increasing relevance of the debate on
democracy, inside and outside the movement, confirming, however, that
various conceptions of democracy coexist, stressing different democratic
qualities (see chapter 1).
Debates tended to develop within the movements on the two main
dimensions I used to construct the general typology of models of democracy
(see chapter 1). First, participatory conceptions that stress inclusiveness
of equals were contrasted with those based upon the delegation of
power to representatives. A second dimension referred instead to majoritarian
versus deliberative visions, diverging in the decision-making
methods. Deliberative aspects have been particularly embedded and valorized
by the method of consensus that poses an even stronger emphasis
on the decision-making process per se than on the outcome of such a
process. In the various parts of the Demos research (see della Porta and
Reiter 2006; della Porta and Mosca 2006), we have in fact used a typology
that crosses these two dimensions of participation (referring to the
degree of delegation of power, inclusiveness and equality) and deliberation
(referring to the decision-making model and to the quality of
communication).
The analysis of the fundamental documents of 244 social movement
organizations that have participated in the Social Forum process in
Europe has shown that most of them made reference there to democratic
values (della Porta 2009b). Participation is one of the most widespread
references, mentioned by one-third of the organizations as an internal
value and by more than half as a general value. This applies not only to
the pure forms of social movement organizations; trade unions and leftwing
political parties also referred to participation as a founding principle.
However, additional values emerged that specify (and differentiate
among) the conceptions of participatory democracy. References to limits
to delegation, the rotation principle, mandated delegation, and criticism
of delegation as internal organizational values were present although not
dominant (each mentioned by between 6 and 11 per cent of our groups).
Non-hierarchical decision making was often mentioned (16 per cent),
and inclusiveness was even more (21 per cent and 29 per cent). If we
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 73
group the positive responses on critique of delegation, limitation of delegation,
non-hierarchical decision making, and mandated delegation into
an index of non-hierarchical decision making, 23.4 per cent had positive
scores. Significantly, representative values were mentioned instead by
only 6 per cent of our organizations.
With the aim of identifying the visions of democracy, inside and outside
the movement, in this document analysis we narrowed them down to
four basic conceptions (or models) of internal democracy (della Porta
and Reiter 2006). In the associational model, the assembly is composed
of delegates and – even in those cases in which the assembly consists of
all members and is defined as the main decision-making organ – everyday
politics is managed by an executive committee; decisions are taken by
majority vote. When, according to the selected documents, delegates
make decisions on a consensual basis, we speak of deliberative representation.
When decisions are made by an assembly that includes all
members, and no executive committee exists, we have an assembleary
model, when decisions are taken by a majority; and deliberative participation,
if consensus and communicative processes based on reason are
mentioned together with participation as important values (see table 4.1).
As we can see in table 4.1, half of the 212 organizations we sampled
support an associational conception of internal decision making.1
This
means that, at least formally, a model based upon delegation and the
majority principle is quite widespread, and indeed expected, given the
presence in the global justice movement of parties, unions and NGOs.
Table 4.1 Typology of democratic conception
Participation
High Low
Consensus Low Associational model (%)
Visions: 59.0
Practices: 35.6
Norms: 19.1
Assembleary model (%)
Visions: 14.6
Practices: 2.5
Norms: 35.9
High Deliberative representation
(%)
Visions: 15.6
Practices: 32.7
Norms: 8.2
Deliberative participation
(%)
Visions: 10.8
Practices: 29.2
Norms: 36.7
Visions (no. of cases 212), practices (no. of cases 184), norms (no. of cases 1055).
Source: della Porta 2009a, 72.
74 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
This is, however, only part of the picture: we classified 14.6 per cent of
the organizations as assembleary since, in the documents we analysed,
they stressed the role of the assembly in a decision-making process that
remained tied to aggregative methods such as voting or bargaining. In
an additional quarter (26.4 per cent) of the organizations, the deliberative
element came to the fore, with 15.6 per cent of organizations applying
consensus within an associational type (deliberative representation)
and 10.8 per cent applying it within an assembleary model (deliberative
participation).
Consensus is even more prominent if we move, as we did in another
part of our research, from the written documents to the accounts of
movement practices by representatives of the organizations (della Porta
and Mosca 2006). Acknowledging that constitutions and written documents
are not always followed in everyday activities, and that praxes are
often different from norms, we complemented the information obtained
on organizational ideology with interviews on organizational functioning,
as perceived and reported by their speakers.2
In this part we operationalized
the dimension of participation/delegation by distinguishing
groups characterized by a central role of the assembly in their decisionmaking
processes from all other types of organizations (executivecentred,
leader-centred, mixed models and so on). On the dimension
deliberation / majority voting, we separated the groups employing consensus
from those employing different decisional methods (simple majority,
qualified majority, mixed methods and so on). Here as well, our
research testifies to the presence of various types of organizational decision
making, confirming that social movements are characterized by
‘considerable variation in organizational strength within and between
movements’ (Klandermans 1989: 4).
Of the 202 out of the overall 212 cases that we could classify, almost
one third fall into the deliberative representative category, where the
principle of consensus is mixed with the principle of delegation. Another
36 per cent adopt an associational model that is based on majoritarian
voting and delegation, while about 30 per cent of the groups bridge a
consensual decision-making method with the principle of participation
(refusal of delegation to an executive committee); only 2.5 per cent of
the selected organizations mix the principle of participation with majoritarian
decision making (assembleary model). The fact that interviewees
tended to stress consensus more than the organizational documents can
be explained in various ways: respondents might be more up-to-date
and accurate in describing the actual decision making in their groups,
or they may want to give a more positive image of decision making
in their organizations. Whatever the explanation, norms of consensus
appeared as very much supported by the movement organizations.
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 75
Different models of democracy followed from organizational traditions,
age, size and self-conception. Reference to consensus was particularly
frequent in organizations with smaller memberships and budgets,
as well as no paid staff and more reliance on the assembly. There was
also some coherence between the search for consensus and horizontal
organizational forms, as indicated by the rejection of an executive, the
high value given to the assembly, the explicit critique of delegation.
Consensual methods were, finally, more widespread in the younger organizations,
as well as in the transnational ones (della Porta 2009b).
Similar results also emerged from an analysis of the normative models
of democracy proposed by the activists we interviewed at the ESF in
Athens (see again table 4.1), although with a greater emphasis on participation.
In that sample, the rate of support for associational models of
democracy further declined to one-fifth of our population (N = 1,055),
and the percentage for deliberative representation reached only 8.2
per cent. From a normative point of view, indeed, the ESF participants
appeared equally attracted by either assembleary or deliberativeparticipative
models (about one-third each). Participation and deliberation
were considered, therefore, as main values for ‘another democracy’.
At the individual level, together with experiences of participation in
protest events, at home and abroad, subjective degrees of identification
with the global justice movement influenced attitudes towards democracy.
In particular, those who identify more with the movement expressed
more support for those values that emerged as particularly relevant for
the movement organizations – inclusiveness, participation and consensus.
Crossing degrees of identification with normative conceptions of
democracy, our analysis indicates a statistically significant correlation:
with the growth of identification, support for consensual and participatory
decision making increased (see table 4.2). Here too, however, the
correlation is not particularly strong, indicating quite widespread support
for the more participatory and consensual values.
In many of the groups linked to the global justice movement, the
positive reference to consensual decision making (often embodied in
organizational principles) was therefore quite innovative. Several organizations
declared they wanted ‘to take decisions that reach the maximum
consensus’ (RCADE 2001); were ‘committed to the principle of consensus
decision making’ (Indymedia 2002) and experimented with ‘an organizational
path that favors participation, reaching consensus and
achieving largely shared decisions’ (Torino Social Forum 2008). In its
self-presentation, Attac Germany (2001) stated that the organization is
‘a place, where political processes of learning and experiences are made
possible; in which the various streams of progressive politics discuss with
each other, in order to find a common capacity of action together’.
76CANDEMOCRACYBESAVED?
Table 4.2 Identification with GJM by activists’ normative models of democracy
Normative models of democracy Identification with GJM, % Total
number
% enough or
much identified
Mean
(value 0–3)
None or little Enough Much
Associational 21.0 43.0 36.0 200 79.0 2.13
Deliberative representative 12.8 57.0 30.2 86 87.2 2.16
Assembleary 13.7 48.8 37.5 371 86.3 2.23
Deliberative-participative 9.1 49.1 41.8 383 90.9 2.32
Overall % 13.4 48.5 38.2 1,040 86.6 2.24
Measures of association Cramer’s V = .10** Cr.’s V = .12 *** ETA = .11**
Source: della Porta 2008a: 76.
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 77
Supporting this type of conception, in its ‘Criteri di fondo condivisi’
(2001), Rete Lilliput defined the ‘method of consensus’ as a process in
which, if a proposal does not receive total consensus from all participants,
further discussion ensues in order to find a compromise with those
who disagree. If disagreements persist and involve a numerically large
minority, the project is not approved (Tecchio, quoted in Veltri 2003,
14). According to the network Dissent!:
Consensus normally works around a proposal, which, hopefully, is
submitted beforehand so that people have time to consider it. The
proposal is presented and any concerns are discussed. The proposal is
then amended until a consensus is reached. At the heart of this process
are principles that include trust, respect, recognition that everyone has
the right to be heard and to contribute (i.e. equal access to power), a
unity of purpose and commitment to that purpose and a commitment
to the principle of co-operation. At these gatherings we seek to reach
consensus on most issues, although this is not always possible and
often there is no need to reach ‘one decision’ at the end of a useful
discussion. (Dissent! – A Network of Resistance against the G8 2008)
Among the groups most committed to experimentation with consensual
methods, specific rules were developed to facilitate horizontal communication
and conflict management. Consensus tools included ‘good
facilitation, various hand signals, go-rounds and the breaking up into
small and larger sized groups. These should be “explained by the facilitator
at the start of each discussion”’ (Dissent! – A Network of Resistance
against the G8 2008). Facilitators or moderators were used (for instance,
for the Italian Rete Lilliput or the British Rising Tide), with the aim of
including all points of view in the discussion as well as implementing
rules for good communication, going from the (limited) time allocated
to each speaker to the maintenance of a constructive climate (della
Porta et al. 2006, 53–4).
Attention to consensual methods as a way to improve communication
resonated with the widespread idea of the movement as building public
spaces for dialogue. This is illustrated, for instance, by the Spanish
Derechos para Tod@s (n.d.), which stressed:
our goal is to contribute to the spreading of debates, not by narrowing
spaces, but by opening them to all those who are critical of this globalization
that causes exploitation, repression and/or exclusion...No
alternative to the current system can be regarded as the ‘true’ one. That
is, we want to set up a space to reflect and to fight for a social and
civil transformation. (Jiménez and Calle 2006, 278)
78 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
From the normative point of view, the assumption was that ‘The
practices of consensus-seeking strengthen bonds, trust, communication
and understanding. On the other hand, decision-making based on voting
creates power blocks, power games, and hegemonic strategies, excluded
and included, hierarchies, thus reproducing the same kind of social
relations we are opposing’ (London Social Forum 2003).
Consensus was, however, framed differently by different organizations.
In a plural conception of consensus through high-quality dialogue,
which often characterized network organizations, consensus was considered
as mainly ‘functional for safeguarding the unitary–plural nature
of the movement as well as members’ demands for individual protagonism’
(Fruci 2003, 169). In networks and campaigns, the consensual
method was advocated as enabling work on what united the groups,
notwithstanding their differences. In this sense, in organizational networks,
consensual principles were presented as resonating with a respect
for the autonomy of the individual organizations that were part of the
federation.
The meaning of consensus was bridged here with a positive emphasis
on internal diversity. This was the case, for instance, for Attac Italia,
which in its Charter of Intent stipulated that it ‘wants to be a democratic
and open association, transversal and as much as possible pluralistic,
composed of diverse individuals and social forces...it wants to contribute
to the renovation of democratic political participation and favours
the development of new organizational forms of civil society’. As its
national assembly stated, ‘We want to continue to build shared associational
forms, based on participation and the consensual method, fit for
letting diversities meet and work together and develop democratic decisional
practices. Because we consider democracy as the most important
element of the common good and we want, all together, to re-appropriate
it’ (ATTAC Italia 2007).
Participation and the method of consensus are, in this sense, considered
as the main expressions of democracy ‘as a common good’. In
particular – but not only – for networks, consensus resonated with an
emphasis on the respect for differences, bridged with calls for inclusiveness,
within the conception of the organization as an open space –
a metaphor often used by our groups. For instance, the Turin Social
Forum (2008) presented itself as ‘an open place in which even individuals,
as well as the organized actors, can meet and work together;
a space in which internal differences are accepted and given a positive
value’.
A different viewpoint is a communitarian conception of consensus as
collective agreement, expressed by groups with a deep-rooted ‘assembleary’
tradition. For instance, the British Wombles declared:
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 79
We have no formal membership; all meetings are weekly & open to
anyone who wishes to attend. These meetings are where any & all
decisions concerning the group are made. The politics we espouse are
those we wish to live by – self-organization, autonomy, direct democracy
& direct action against the forces of coercion and control...As
such, no individual can speak on behalf of the Wombles as all group
decisions are made collectively based on consensus. (Wombles 2008)
In this area, consensus resonated with anti-authoritarian, horizontal
relations. Accordingly, the French Réseau Intergalactique, which developed
around the construction of a self-managed space at the anti-G8
summit in Evian, stated in its Charter: ‘there is no dominant voice. It is
what we call a horizontal way of functioning: there is no small group
that decides. Thus, there is not on the one side thinking heads and on
the other side small hands and feet. The aim is to facilitate the integration
of each in the discussion and decision-making.’
Consensual methods are here adopted within a prefigurative vision
of organizational life. They are linked to the aim of realizing social
changes not only though political decisions, but through deep transformations
in everyday life and individual attitudes. ‘For it is impossible
to realize a social transformation through merely political decisions. The
activities have to relate to the needs and desires of the people, so that
anti-militarism can bring about alternative lifestyles and struggle in a
positive way. This would develop by consensus, understood as a process
that aims at reaching the agreement which is most satisfactory for all’
(Alternativa antimilitarist – MOC.). So, for the London Social Forum,
the use of the method of consensus was also linked to the group’s selfdefinition,
reflecting in particular the preference for prefigurative politics
over effectiveness.
Indignados, Occupy and deliberative democracy
A focus on deliberation became all the more central in the most recent
movements against austerity. The Arab Spring could be read as yet
another testimony that democracy is becoming ‘the only game in town’.
The effects of the wave of protest that brought about democratization
processes in an area of the world traditionally defined as dominated
by resilient authoritarian regimes certainly contributed to challenging
the idea of a clash of civilization based on the incompatibility of Islam
with democracy. Moreover, these protests have shown that, even in
brutal dictatorships, citizens do mobilize, and not only on material
issues. Interpreting the Arab Spring as merely a call for representative
80 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
institutions will, however, be misleading. The protestors in the Tahrir
Square were calling for freedom, but also practising other conceptions
of democracy that are, if not opposed to, certainly different from liberal
representative democracy, resonating instead with ideas of participatory
and deliberative democracy.
Not by chance, when the ideas of the Arab Spring spread from the
MENA (Mediterranean and North-African) region to Europe, they were
adopted and adapted by social movements that indeed challenged (neo)
liberal democracy. Austerity measures in Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Portugal
and Spain were in fact met with long-lasting, mass protests. Directly
inspired by the Arab Spring, the Spanish and then Greek indignados
occupied hundreds of squares in order not only to protest against austerity
measures in their respective countries, but also to ask for more, and
a different democracy. ‘Democracia real ya!’ was a main slogan of the
Spanish indignados protestors who occupied the Puerta del Sol in Madrid,
the Placa de Catalunya in Barcelona and hundreds of places in the rest
of the country from 15 May 2011, calling for different social and economic
policies and, indeed, greater citizen participation in their formulation
and implementation. Before this example in Spain, between late
2008 and early 2009, self-convened citizens in Iceland had demanded
the resignation of the government and its delegates in the Central Bank
and financial authorities, accusing them of collusion with big business.
In Portugal, a demonstration arranged via Facebook in March 2011
brought more than 200,000 young Portuguese people to the streets in
opposition to their country’s political class. The indignados protests in
turn inspired similar mobilizations in Greece, where opposition to austerity
measures had already been expressed in occasionally violent forms.
In both countries, the corruption of the government was a central issue
of protest, and it remained so when protest moved, as we saw in the
beginning of this chapter, to the US and beyond.
The very meaning of democracy was, in all these protests, contested.
There is no doubt that the current crisis is a crisis of democracy as
well as, or even more than, a financial crisis. As mentioned, neoliberalism
was – and, in fact, is – a political doctrine that brings with it a
minimalist vision of the public and democracy. It foresees not only the
reduction of political interventions oriented to balancing the market
(with consequent liberalization, privatization and deregulation) but also
an elitist conception of citizen participation (electoral only, and therefore
occasional and potentially distorted) and an increased level of influence
for lobbies and strong interests. The evident challenges in a liberal
conception and practice of democracy have, in this case as well, been
accompanied by the (re)emergence of different ones, elaborated and
practised by – among others – movements that in Europe today are
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 81
opposing a neoliberal solution to the financial crisis, accused of further
depressing consumption and thereby jeopardizing any prospects for
development (whether sustainable or not).
Accused by the centre-left parties of being apolitical and populist (not
to mention without ideas) and by the right of being extreme leftists, these
movements have in reality placed what Claus Offe (1985) long ago
defined as the ‘meta-question’ of democracy at the centre of their action.
The activists’ discourse on democracy is articulate and complex, taking
up some of the principal criticisms of the ever-decreasing quality of
liberal democracies, but also some proposals inspired by democratic
qualities other than representation. These proposals resonate with (more
traditional) participatory visions, but also with new deliberative conceptions
that underline the importance of creating multiple public spaces,
egalitarian but plural.
Above all, protestors criticize the ever more evident shortcomings of
representative democracies, mirroring a declining trust in the ability of
parties to channel emerging demands in the political system. Beginning
from Iceland, and forcefully in Spain and Portugal, indignation is
addressed towards the corruption of the political class, seen both in
bribes (the dismissal of corrupt people from public institutions is called
for) in a concrete sense, and in the privileges granted to lobbies and
common interests shared by public institutions and economic (often
financial) powers. It is to this corruption – that is, the corruption of
democracy – that much of the responsibility for the economic crisis, and
the inability to manage it, are attributed.
Beyond the condemnation of corruption, the slogan ‘they don’t represent
us’ also expresses a deeper criticism of the degeneration of liberal
democracy, linked in turn to elected politicians’ failure to ‘do politics’.
The latter are in fact often united in spreading a narrative suggesting that
no alternatives are available to cuts in budget and deregulation – a narrative
that protestors do not accept. In Spain in particular, the movement
asked for proportional reforms to the electoral law, denouncing the
reduced weight given to citizen participation inherent to the majority
system, where the main political parties tend to form cartels and electors
see their choices limited (for this reason, equal weight for each vote was
called for). Also in other countries, among other proposals for restoring
the importance of citizens are those that call for direct democracy, and
which give electors the possibility to express their opinions on the biggest
economic and social choices. In this vein, greater possibilities for referendums
are called for, with reduced quorums (for signatures and electors)
and increased thematic areas subject to decisions through referendums.
Actually existing democracies are also criticized for having allowed
the abduction of democracy, not only by financial powers, but also by
82 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
international organizations, above all the IMF and the EU. Pacts for the
Euro and stability, imposed in exchange for loans, are considered as
anti-constitutional forms of blackmail, depriving citizens of their sovereignty.
Starting in 2011 with the petition Another Road for Europe
(www.anotherroadforeurope.org) numerous reforms have been suggested
at EU level in order to gain control of financial markets, for
example through the introduction of a Financial Transaction Tax, political
supervision of banks, the removal of the public role for (private)
rating agencies and the creation of public ones, as well as higher taxes
on capital, and strategies for economic growth (see also Pianta 2012,
chapter 4). More transnational democracy is additionally called for (see
chapter 6, this volume).
But in recent mobilizations there is also another vision of democracy,
which normative theory has recently defined as ‘deliberative democracy’,
and which the global justice movement has elaborated and diffused
through the Social Forums as consensus democracy. This conception of
democracy is prefigured by the very same indignados who occupy squares,
transforming them into public spheres made up of ‘normal citizens’. It is
an attempt to create high-quality discursive democracy, recognizing the
equal rights of all (not only delegates and experts) to speak (and to be
respected) in a public and plural space, open to discussion and deliberation
on themes that range from situations suffered to concrete solutions
to specific problems, from the elaboration of proposals on common
goods to the formation of solidarity and emerging identities.
Participatory and deliberative forms of democracy were in fact called
for and experienced during these protests. In Spain, as elsewhere, open
public spaces facilitated the creation of intense ties. Postill (2012) vividly
recalls:
the strong sense of connection to the strangers I spoke to during that
fleeting moment...Under normal circumstances – say, on an underground
train – we would have found no reason to talk to one another,
but the present situation was anything but normal. The 15-M
movement had brought us together, and the sense of ‘contextual
fellowship’...cutting across divides of age, class and race was very
powerful....Many participants later reported a range of psychosomatic
reactions such as goose bumps (carne de gallina) or tears of joy.
I felt as if a switch had been turned on, a gestalt switch, and I had
now awakened to a new political reality. I was no longer merely
a participant observer of the movement, I was the movement.
The assemblies in the encampments were described by activists as ‘primarily
a massive, transparent exercise in direct democracy’. So, they
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 83
declared, ‘We feel part of the movement because we contribute to creating
it, spreading it, growing it; Internet user and indignado are one and
the same person’ (@galapita and @hibai 2011, cited in Postill 2012).
Similarly, when the Occupy Wall Street movement started in the United
States, quickly spreading to thousands of American cities, the concerns
voiced by the protestors addressed the financial crisis, but even more
the failure of democratic governments to live up to the expectations of
their citizens. The occupations represented not only occasions to protest
but also experimentations with participatory and deliberative forms of
democracy. Called for by the magazine Adbuster, the protest started
with a few hundred activists converging on Manhattan on 17 September
2011. A previous protest event had been staged on 2 August by the city
group New York Against the Budget Cuts. As a journalist recalled:
it began as an old-school rally with speeches by lifelong local activists....the
dedication was admirable, the rhetoric was antique. We
must ‘fight back by any means necessary,’ said dreadlocked Larry Hales
of NYABC....Then hot-tempered Greek student Georgia Sagri shook
things up. She took the mic, saying, ‘This is not the way that a general
assembly is happening! This is a rally!’ She continued to blurt out
criticisms and piss people off. But a chunk of them, mostly students
but also middle-aged folk, joined her in a circle for a radical-consensus
general assembly – a mainstay process in countries like Greece and
Spain. Then it became something new (Captain 2011)
The style that started to dominate the Occupy Wall Street movement
included an emphasis on respect and inclusivity. Moderators tried to
assure a racial and gender balance. A consensual, horizontal decisionmaking
process developed – sponsored by the young generations (twothirds
of whom had voted for Obama) and global justice movement
activists – based on the continuous formation of small groups that then
reconvened in the larger assembly.
The occupation became much entrenched with the very identity of the
movement, not just, as for other social movements, an action form
among others. Occupied spaces were in fact ‘vibrant sites of human
interaction that modeled alternative communities and generated intense
feelings of solidarity’ (Juris 2012, 268). Evictions took away these vital
spaces, running the risk of transforming the camps into a sort of fetish,
difficult to keep, but also difficult to replace. The clearing of the occupied
places by the police in fact created important fractures among activists
– for example, between the community of those who were physically
occupying and the various circles of those participating virtually and/or
intermittently.
84 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
Conclusion
Deliberative conceptions of democracy go beyond the traditional criticism
of liberal democracy as excluding – or not including sufficiently –
the citizens, stressing instead the importance for the very interests and/
or identities that confront each other to be democratically constructed.
Democracy is not only a way of counting votes, but especially a way to
form preferences through inclusive and high-quality dialogues. If, in their
initial versions, deliberative theorists maintained an institutional focus,
other scholars have linked participatory and deliberative aspirations.
Recent movements, to varying degrees, have done the same, stressing the
need to form multiple and open public spheres, to allow the participation
of various and plural actors.
Calls for and prefiguration of deliberative democracy follow a vision
of democracy profoundly different to that which legitimates representative
democracy based on the principle of majority decisions. Democratic
quality here is in fact measured by the possibility of elaborating ideas
within discursive, open and public arenas, where citizens play an active
role in identifying problems, but also in elaborating possible solutions.
It is the opposite of an unquestioning acceptance of democracy of the
prince, where the professional elected to govern must not be disturbed
– at least until fresh elections are held. But it is also the opposite of a
democracy of experts, legitimized by the output, for which European
institutions have long called. If, especially after the Maastricht Treaty
and the introduction of the Euro, calls for this kind of legitimization –
which appeals to the capacity to produce, apolitically and on the basis
of specialist skills and economic successes – have gradually reduced, it
now seems to crumble entirely before the disastrous results of European
policies in the recent financial crisis. In protests against the crisis (and
the ineffective and unjust responses to it), protestors have started to prefigure,
in occupied public spaces, different conceptions of democracy,
based on participation and deliberative values.