Social Movements and the Public Sphere

Abstract

The democratic state is not based solely on a conception of representative democracy. As Pierre Rosanvallon (2006: 11) recently observed, ‘the history of real democracies cannot be disassociated from permanent tension and contestation’. The democratic state in fact requires more than legal legitimacy acquired through respect for procedures. It also needs trust, which includes an ethical dimension. In the evolution of ‘real’ democracies this has meant that alongside those institutions that guarantee electoral accountability, a circuit of surveillance (or vigilance), anchored outside state institutions, has developed. The public sphere therefore arose when the state’s search for efficiency met with interventions by civil society, namely civil society’s demands on the state and their efforts at rectifying state decision-making (Eder 2010).KeywordsSocial MovementPublic SphereDirect DemocracyDemocratic StateRepresentative DemocracyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.