Participatory democracy: Placebo or Alternative?

Abstract

Faced with the crisis of liberal representative democracy, the solutions have pointed to three main directions: the reduction of democracy to its minimum form, as polyarchy, the expansion of representative democracy with participatory democracy devices and electoral reengineering processes, and the constituent reforms of the State in a baroque combination of guaranteeist-neoconstitutionalist-neoinstitutionalist visions. By regulation, the participation mechanisms, the popular initiative to call consultations, the presentation of bills or the revocation of mandates, have been expanded. But, in practice, they have functioned more as placebos in a supervised democracy, to keep citizens in check, than as mechanisms for participation. The result is that the arrow of democracy, which, starting from the returns in the eighties, pointed to the expansion and strengthening of democracy, has been reversed and is oriented towards forms of authoritarian democracy, with new strategies of discipline and control. The tendency, from the dominant power, is to build a binary between representative democracy and participatory democracy, which hides the emergence of antisystemic seeds of disconnection beyond the State and the market, under forms of direct, community democracy, new forms of power from the society.