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Participatory democracy

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Participatory democracy is a process emphasizing the broad participation of constituents in the direction and operation of political systems. Etymological roots of democracy (Greek demos and kratos) imply that the people are in power and thus that all democracies are participatory. However, participatory democracy tends to advocate more involved forms of citizen participation than traditional representative democracy.

Participatory democracy strives to create opportunities for all members of a population to make meaningful contributions to decision-making, and seeks to broaden the range of people who have access to such opportunities. Since so much information must be gathered for the overall decision-making process to succeed, technology may provide important forces leading to the type of empowerment needed for participatory models, especially those technological tools that enable community narratives and correspond to the accretion of knowledge. Effectively increasing the scale of participation, and translating small but effective participation groups into small world networks, are areas currently being studied.[1] Other advocates have emphasised the importance of face to face meetings, warning that an overreliance on technology can be harmful.[2]

Some scholars argue for refocusing the term on community-based activity within the domain of civil society, based on the belief that a strong non-governmental public sphere is a precondition for the emergence of a strong liberal democracy.[3] These scholars tend to stress the value of separation between the realm of civil society and the formal political realm.[4] In 2011, considerable grassroots interest in participatory democracy was generated by the Occupy movement.

History

Members of the occupy movement practicing participatory democracy in a General Assembly held in Washington Square Park, New York City on October 8, 2011

Participatory democracy has been a feature of human society since time immemorial.[peacock prose] The most famous example of participatory democracy is the Haudenosaunee confederacy (also known as the Iroquois confederacy) which operates under the oldest living unchanged constitution in the world, It is a common practice of non-civilized peoples and tribal nations. In 8th and 7th century Ancient Greece, the informal distributed power structure of the villages and minor towns began to be displaced with collectives of Oligarchs seizing power as the villages and towns coalesced into city states. This caused much hardship and discontent among the common people, with many having to sell their land due to debts, and even suffer from debt slavery. At around 600BC the Athenian leader Solon initiated some reforms to limit the power of Oligarchs and re-establish a partial form of participatory democracy with some decisions taken by a poplar assembly composed of all free male citizens. About a century later, Solon's reforms were further enhanced for even more direct involvement of regular citizens by Cleisthenes.[5] Athenian democracy came to an end in 322BC. When democracy was revived as a political system about 2000 years later, decisions were made by representatives rather than by the people themselves. A minor exception to this was the limited form of direct democracy which flourished in the Swiss Cantons from the later Middle Ages. In the late 19th century a small number of thinkers including Oscar Wilde[6] and Emma Goldman[7] began advocating for increased participatory democracy. It was in the 20th century that practical implementations of participatory democracy once again began to take place, albeit mostly on a small scale, attracting considerable academic attention from the 1980s.[8][2]

A brief period where a region was governed almost totally by participatory democracy occurred during the Spanish civil war, from 1936–1938, in the parts of Spain controlled by anarchist republicans. In 1938 the anarchists were displaced after being turned on by their former republican allies in the Communist party as well as suffering attacks by the loyalist forces of General Franco. The writer George Orwell, who experienced participatory democracy as he was in Spain with the anarchists before their defeat, discusses it in his book Homage to Catalonia, and says participatory democracy was a "strange and valuable" experience where one could "breath the air of equality" and where normal human motives like snobbishness, greed and fear of authority had ceased to exist.[2]

The mystic and philosopher Simone Weil, who had helped the Spanish anarchists as a combat soldier, would later promote participatory democracy in her political manifesto The Need for Roots.[9]

In the 1960s the promotion and use of participatory democracy was a major theme for elements of the American Left.[10]

In the 1980s, the profile of participatory democracy within academia was raised by James S. Fishkin, the professor who introduced the deliberative poll. Experiments in forms of participatory democracy that took place within a wider framework of representative democracy began in cities around the world, with an early adopter being Brazil's Porto Alegre. A World Bank study found that participatory democracy in these cities seemed to result in considerable improvement in the quality of life for residents.[2]

In the early 21st century, low profile experiments in participatory democracy began to spread throughout South and North Americas, to China, across the European Union and also to Great Britain.[11][12] A partial example in the USA occurred with drawing up the plans to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, with thousands of ordinary citizens involved with drafting and approving the plan.[2] In 2011, participatory democracy became a notable feature of the Occupy movement, with Occupy camps around the world taking decisions based on the outcome of working groups where every protestor gets to have their say, and by general assemblies where the decisions taken by working groups are effectively aggregated together. Those involved with the Occupy movement have been described as very much attached to their forms of participatory democracy, even to the extent of "fetishizing it." .[13]

The decision-making process used by the Occupy movement is an example of an attempt to combine equality, mass participation and deliberation, though at a cost of slow decision making. By November 2011 the movement had been frequently criticized for not yet coalescing around clearly identifiable aims,[10][13][14] though many have argued that the experiment with participatory democracy was the only plausible aim. Shortly thereafter, the movement disbanded to a large extent.

Political variants

Political variants of participatory democracy include:

Representative democracy is not generally considered participatory. Bioregional democracy is often but not necessarily participatory. Grassroots democracy is an alternative term that has been used to imply almost any combination of the above.[citation needed]

New concepts such as open source governance, collaborative governance, open source politics, and open politics seek to radically increase participation through electronic collaboration tools such as wikis and 'wikigovernment'.

Participatory politics (or parpolity) is a long-range political theory that also incorporates many of the above and strives to create a political system that will allow people to participate in politics, as much as possible in a face-to-face manner.[citation needed]

Deliberative democracy differs from traditional democratic theory in that authentic deliberation, not mere voting, is the primary source of a law's legitimacy. It adopts elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule. When practiced by small groups, it is possible for decision making to be both fully participatory and deliberative. But for large political entities, the democratic reform trilemma makes it difficult for any system of decision making based on political equality to involve both deliberation and inclusive participation. With mass participation, deliberation becomes so unwieldy that it becomes difficult for each participant to contribute substantially to the discussion. Professor James Fishkin argues that random sampling to get a small but representative sample of the general population can mitigate the trilemma, but notes that the resulting decision making group is not open to mass participation.[15] But in a variant proposed in A Better Democracy, the author presents a direct, participative democracy in which deliberation and political equality are combined with a much wider participation.

Demarchy is a hypothetical system where government is heavily decentralized into smaller independent groups. Each group is responsible for one or several functions in society. Officials are volunteers elected to committees controlling these groups by sortition. The system seeks to avoid problems with centralized and electoral governance, while still providing a stable democratic system.[citation needed]

Panocracy or 'pantocracy' also has similarities with participatory democracy. However, it avoids the concept of demos or the people having a single view with the inevitable limitations that come from trying to agree what that view is. It also avoids the expectations that attach to anything called democracy.[citation needed]

See also

References

  • Jon Elster (editor) (1998). Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge Studies in the Theory of Democracy). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-59696-3. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  • Roger Osborne (2006). Civilization: A New History of the Western World. Jonathan Cape Ltd. ISBN 0-224-06241-7.
  • Carne Ross (2011). The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Can Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 1-84737-534-0.

Notes

  1. ^ Shirky, Clay "Here Comes Everybody"
  2. ^ a b c d e Ross 2011, Chapter 3
  3. ^ Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society, edited by Simone Chambers and Will Kymlicka (Princeton University Press, 2002)
  4. ^ The Idea of Civil Society, by Adam B. Seligman (Princeton University Press, 1992)
  5. ^ Osborne 2006, pages 50 -56
  6. ^ Principally in The Soul of Man under Socialism.
  7. ^ MS (2011-11-21). "Elegy for Woo!". The Economist. Retrieved 2011-12-13.
  8. ^ Elster 1998, pages 1-3
  9. ^ Simone Weil (2002). The Need for Roots. Routledge. pp. 44–55. ISBN 0-415-27102-9.
  10. ^ a b James Miller (2011-10-25). "Will Extremists Hijack Occupy Wall Street?". The New York Times. Retrieved 2011-11-21.
  11. ^ Fishkin 2011, passim, see especially the preface.
  12. ^ UK participatory budgeting homepage: a church sponsored charity that supports participatory budgeting in numerous local communities.
  13. ^ a b Laurie Penny (2011-10-16). "Protest by consensus". New Statesman. Retrieved 2011-11-21.
  14. ^ Michael Skapinker (2011-11-09). "The Occupy crowd is no match for banks" ((registration required)). Financial Times. Retrieved 2011-11-14.
  15. ^ Fishkin 2011, Chapters 2 & 3.

Further reading

  • Baiocchi, Gianpaolo (2005). Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre. Stanford University Press.
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