Abstract
The declining trust in the representative institutions of liberal democracy after the 2008 economic crisis has generated a rise in appeals to substitute the representative model in favor of a participatory democracy. Although political representation has been in crisis since its very inception, for the first time the new technologies of communication based in the Web 2.0, smartphones and social media make replacing the elites’ intermediation in decision-making a real possibility. Aiming to critically address this issue, the article uses a political theory framework to analyze the role of political participation within the main models of democracy as a first step from where to question the viability and convenience of participatory democracy nowadays. Then, the article focuses on the case of Podemos in Spain, a left-wing populist party that advocates for instruments like referendums and citizen initiatives as a solution for the Spanish political crisis. Here, the article highlights the shortcomings of Podemos’s participatory proposal, mainly focused on aggregating predetermined positions instead of addressing the dynamics that undermine the quality of political debate. Finally, we conclude that dealing with the citizens’ political disaffection requires institutional innovations designed to increase the deliberative quality of our representative democracies.
Highlights
The claim that representation is in crisis is certainly not a new statement
The section analyses the case of Podemos, the party that has hoisted the flag of citizen participation in Spain
The emergence of Podemos (We Can) in Spanish politics is closely connected to the protests of the Indignados Movement on May 15, 2011, the moment in which the effects of the economic crisis that started in 2008 were strongly felt in the country
Summary
Opinion studies since at least the 1970s have been detecting a progressive decline in citizens’ trust in the institutions that uphold the liberal democratic model (Crozier, Huntington, & Watanuki, 1975; Montero & Torcal, 2006; Pharr & Putnam, 2000) In this regard, the economic crisis that started in 2008 has magnified a pre-existing disaffection with the parties, governments and parliaments in most Western democracies The current disaffection with representative democracy is accompanied by voices crying out to replace this model with a participatory democracy that grants greater influence to citizens in decision making In this regard, the prevailing zeitgeist is a furious anti-elitism that denigrates any type of political intermediation as opposed to the popular sovereignty on which true democracy is based. The article concludes that citizen participation in liberal democracies should transcend the mere expression of predetermined positions to focus instead on the deliberative quality of the public sphere
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