Representation and Participation at the Crossroads
With the march of globalization, democracy has become generally established as the one legitimate form of government that guarantees citizen rights.1 As part of the same process, however, new challenges are imperilling the capacity of citizens to collectively determine our own destiny. While in the twentieth century tyranny in the form of despotic regimes rendered the advance of democracy precarious, in the twenty-first century it is mainly the unbridled economic powers and actors who stand accused of threatening hard-won rights and corroding citizenship values. In such a context, it has become commonplace to speak of a crisis of political representation within systems based on universal suffrage.2
Crises of representation are inherent to parliamentary democracy: they originate in disjunctions between the ideological, social, or cultural identities of citizens and the organizational and institutional framework for the channelling of interests.3 When such fracture becomes very marked, the established order is subjected to criticism, and possible alternatives are proposed that may affect the constitutional order itself. Over the last decades, various initiatives have come under discussion in this regard, such as changes in voting legislation aimed at introducing proportional representation, limitations and revocation of mandates, open candidate lists, reforms in party financing, and so on.4
Interestingly, however, the current sense of crisis has not translated into disaffection among citizens. Although not entirely absent, nowadays public disaffection is usually spasmodic rather than sustained. In part this may be due to the fact that globalization has also deepened the public sphere, making the manipulation of public opinion by the media easier and more likely while at the same time also empowering citizens. In any case, it is not possible to speak of political participation—an essential feature of citizenship—as diminishing. Quite the contrary, it is precisely this domain that has witnessed major experimentation in recent decades. From the end of the Cold War, and especially in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and the ensuing economic downturn, participation has expanded its semantic field to include a whole new set of practices and procedures: primary elections in organizations and parties, consultative and binding referendums, participatory budgeting, and so on, along with the entire range of political communication and activism channelled through the social networks.5
Although many of these initiatives are being implemented in cities or small urban quartiers rather than in the national or international political arena, they amount to a new conceptualization of democracy: the emerging sense is that of deliberative democracy, which places emphasis on the role of citizens in decision-making.6 This stress on participation leaves the act of voting in a contradictory situation: on one side, it now appears as a rather simple, primitive, and even obsolete mechanism; on the other, there are demands for its introduction in organizations and institutions where it has not featured hitherto. The same may be said about the election of representatives: while called for in new settings and in formerly resistant organizations, the figure of the representative is being questioned from the perspective of a reinvigorated discourse on direct democracy.7 Something similar is occurring with the concept of populism, deployed in public debates with increasingly contradictory meanings that reveal the tensions shaping the current entanglement of participation and representation.8
Representation is an inherent feature of the parliamentary system as much as participation is inextricably tied to political citizenship. Yet their relations are not normative or structural but rather historical and contextual. For a start, many of the current practices and procedures of civic participation are hardly new, and have in fact marched in step with the history of citizenship. In the case of Spain, for example, during the transition to democracy in the late 1970s newly empowered citizens engaged in a whole range of activities, from street protests to neighbourhood assemblies, individual and collective petitions, and so on.9 Officially, however, participation was reduced to the casting of votes in ballots, so that all other types of political engagement were indistinctively designated as “informal” and classified as part of the repertoire of social movements, even as forms of protest, and mostly placed outside the system.10
The example reveals that political-institutional changes affect the meaning of participation and its relationship to representation. Much the same can be said of collective social and political mobilization, which in turn touches upon the distinction between order and disorder. The re-fashioning of the conceptual universe linking representation, participation, and mobilization leads to the re-evaluation of hitherto informal and marginal practices, which now are perceived as significant and consequently formalized. In fact, many such practices had existed previously but were dismissed as dysfunctional or radical, and so deemed incompatible with the parliamentary system. At present they are being discursively re-categorized as part of the established order.
This book’s basic epistemological assumption is that historical phenomena acquire a new dimension when they are rooted in language. Many political, social, or cultural phenomena, though empirically observable, do not always attract the attention of ideologues, opinion makers, or scholars, who only take them into consideration once they have been duly incorporated into a conceptual framework that renders them meaningful. Other phenomena do not even feature in the discursive vocabulary of a culture, or lack a commonly recognized name. In the absence of formal conceptualization, phenomena cannot be included in discourse and subject to competing interpretations in the public sphere, without which they can scarcely become an object of public debate or scholarly study. Above all, conceptualization may serve as an indicator of their social diffusion as well as a factor in the empowerment of established or emerging actors whenever capable of appropriating their meanings for effecting political, social, or cultural change.11
As much as scholars devote efforts to defining and refining analytical categories, historical perspectives are usually acknowledged as crucial for understanding and explaining social phenomena—despite historical narratives too often end up naturalizing them in the past. In this respect, addressing phenomena by studying their history should be clearly distinguished from another, more ambitious and radical activity of “historical thinking” or historizing. The former assumes that the phenomena under study already existed in the past, though maybe in an embryonic or limited form, under another name or in the guise of a different but equivalent phenomenon, and reduces the task of the historian to tracing its trajectory from its origins until the present, usually through a linear narration shaped by present-day commonplaces. Historizing a phenomenon is however a very different quest: it implies taking a critical distance towards the currently dominant interpretations by contrasting these with the discursive status of a phenomenon in other historical contexts, when it may not even have had a name, or conversely may have been even more pervasive than t...