Review of “Democratic Practice: Origins of the Iberian Divide in Political Inclusion”

Abstract

It has been a decade since the so-called Indignados movement in Spain rallied under an anti-austerity platform of ¡Democracia Real YA! (Real Democracy NOW!). Similar calls for “real” democracy, including those from the Occupy movement in North America, imagined political systems that were more responsive to the needs of people and less captured by the demands of global capital. These movements raised many questions about how we understand democracy and, in the intervening years, many scholars have attempted to explain the social and political dynamics that make democratic systems more or less responsive to grassroots movements. However, few have produced studies as rich and analytically convincing as Robert M. Fishman’s Democratic Practice: Origins of the Iberian Divide in Political Inclusion. The book is the product of a scholar who has spent decades working to understand democracy, and has written extensively on Spain and Portugal. Although the Indignados movement was...