Abstract
This article focuses on the technological affordances and use of Rousseau, the decision-making platform of the second largest Italian political party, the Five Star Movement. Crossing an empirical observation of the platform’s functionalities with data regarding its use and qualitative data collected during the 2016 and 2017 national meetings of the Five Star Movement, the essay argues that Rousseau supports an emerging “direct parliamentarianism,” which allows party members to entertain an ostensibly direct relationship with the party in public office, at the expense, however, of deliberative processes that may allow them to influence the party agenda. Thus Rousseau leaves the deliberative, and strictly parliamentary moment in the hands of elected representatives and party leaders, leaving to the party base the task of choosing between options that have been defined elsewhere.
Highlights
With over 140,000 registered users as of August 2017 (Casaleggio 2017), Rousseau is one of the world’s largest online platforms for political participation and collaborative law-making.1 OwnedCC: Creative Commons License, 2017.JeDEM 9(2): 47-67, 2017Deseriis Marco and developed by the Five Star Movement (5SM), the second largest Italian political party, Rousseau allows its users to select candidates via online primaries, vote the party program, provide feedback to elected representatives on draft legislation, publicize local events, and submit their own legislative proposals to Members of Parliament
My wager is that this combination produces an emerging form of direct parliamentarianism, that is, a hybrid institutional arrangement wherein the direct participation of citizens to policy making does not reduce the autonomy of elected representatives, but on the contrary reinforces it and legitimizes it
As Members of Parliament Manlio Di Stefano, Nunzia Catalfo, and Danilo Toninelli noted in their presentations in Palermo, Rousseau has been designed to function as an “operational tool” rather than an outlet for extended discussions among party members
Summary
With over 140,000 registered users as of August 2017 (Casaleggio 2017), Rousseau is one of the world’s largest online platforms for political participation and collaborative law-making. Owned. My wager is that this combination produces an emerging form of direct parliamentarianism, that is, a hybrid institutional arrangement wherein the direct participation of citizens to policy making does not reduce the autonomy of elected representatives, but on the contrary reinforces it and legitimizes it To support this argument, I will contrast the founders’ programmatic statements to three kinds of data: an empirical analysis of Rousseau’s affordances; quantitative data regarding the use of Rousseau; and qualitative data I have personally collected through fieldwork at two national meetings of the 5SM in Palermo in 2016 and in Rimini in 2017. The affordance analysis begins from the notion that, far from being technologically neutral, the design of any participation platform is inflected with certain political values, that is, a specific conception of democracy and of political representation In this case, the frequent recourse to voting and the lack of in-platform discussion tools suggests that Rousseau privileges preference aggregation over processes of opinion formation, decision-making over deliberation. Before analyzing these data more in detail, I will briefly recapitulate the history of the 5SM and link its networked organizational structure to the co-founders’ vision of a politics without traditional parties and intermediaries
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