Can Democracy Be Saved?: Participation,Deliberation and Social Movements

Even as the ideal of democracy is nearly universally endorsed, democracy’s appropriate institutional forms and social practices seem ever more contested. Whereas representative government with multi-party elections has been largely taken for granted as democracy’s canonical institutional form, this is now no longer true. Chinese leaders and scholars speak of democracy “with Chinese characteristics,” which means only one party for the foreseeable future. ¹ In Latin American countries, especially Brazil, there has been a rebirth and reinvention of democracy in participatory configurations. ² In the mature North Atlantic industrialized democracies of the United States and Europe, the canonical form of democracy faces challenges of losses of trust, confidence, and affiliation from below and transnational governance institutions from above.

In her new book, Can Democracy Be Saved? Donatella della Porta brings her expansive command of contemporary social movements and democratic institutions to bear on the question of the future of democracy. Hers is a potent combination—more of us should be attentive to the intersection between these two arenas, and work at that cross roads. The world resists division into these facile intellectual categories, and these categories inhibit our ability to understand the crucial moment that lies before us. This moment presents opportunities, motives, and means for fundamentally reconstructing democracy in less liberal-representative and more directly participatory ways.

Della Porta begins by explaining that liberal democracy has never been the only institutional game in town. Instead, she conceives of democratic institutions along two dimensions: whether public decision-making is delegated to representatives or participatory; and whether decisions are made through (aggregative) majority rule or deliberation (Table 1.1, p. 8). ³ These conceptual alternatives to liberal democracy have always existed and even been practiced and advocated from time to time, especially by worker’s movements.

There is a second, macro-empirical dimension of the opportunity for institutional transformation. Della Porta argues that the three conditions which made liberal democracy possible and desirable in the twentieth century no longer hold in the twenty-first century. Specifically, liberal democracy depended upon (1) functioning and empowered political parties; (2) the territorial nation-state as the area in which majoritarian decisions govern; and (3) the efficacy of political means, and political equality, to constrain economic and social inequality. Each of these conditions has given way to different realities: the power of national executives, regional and global dynamics, and market forces against state regulation.

Della Porta’s relatively brief treatment of these large macro-empirical claims will not settle questions of whether her three conditions have eroded to the point of threatening the stability of liberal democracy itself. But there are many other empirical trends that indicate deep challenges to liberal democracy, while offering a window of opportunity for reconstruction. Chief among these are changes in the hearts and minds of citizens in the industrialized West. In particular, there is little doubt about the broad popular disaffection with political parties and decline of trust in the public institutions of liberal democracy across many societies in the mature North Atlantic democracies, especially among young people. ⁴

In the most distinctive and richest part of the book, della Porta uses interview and survey data of almost 250 social movement organizations in Europe (p. 77) to show that those who participate in contemporary social movements organize themselves using an array of participatory and deliberative methods, and they favor less liberal, more participatory and deliberative ideals of democratic governance more generally. Movements from Occupy Wall Street, to the Indignados, to anti-globalization groups have responded to the problems of political inequality and exclusion in their own ranks by developing a range of practices for decision-making that revolve around consensus, more equal communication and participation. ⁵

Two open questions remain. Will these social movement organizations muster the capacity for a transformation of not just their internal governance, but for a wider transformation of public institutions? Toward that end, will they be able to spread the enthusiasm for participatory and deliberative democratic forms beyond their own ranks?

If social movements are a principal motive and engine for democratic transformation, it is still the state—with its control of laws, policies, and public institutional designs—that controls the means to reinvent democracy. Della Porta (pp. 168–83) surveys a range of “deliberative experiments” inside public institutions, endorsed by governments. Participatory budgeting in Brazilian cities such as Porto Alegre is the most advanced and prominent of these such experiments. ⁶ Beyond participatory budgeting, there has been a wide range of novel experiments and institutions that allows citizens to express themselves, and sometimes exercise influence, over issues as diverse as electoral rules, ⁷ fiscal policy, national constitutions, ⁸ European priorities, environmental issues, and public services. ⁹

These institutional experiments show that sometimes, under some conditions, governments have the desire and wherewithal to implement institutions that embody forms of democratic governance that reach beyond liberal democracy. So, in this sense at least, the answer to the question that forms the title of della Porta’s book, “can democracy be saved?”, is yes. A different question, however, concerns what the future holds: will democracy be saved?

No one can claim the answer to that question. However, della Porta’s exploration identifies three important barriers to such a wider transformation that merit further examination. The first is state resistance. In an important chapter on conflicts between these new social movements and governments, della Porta explores the emerging new strategies of police and state repression and control. They are, in some ways, as inventive as the democratic innovations she celebrates elsewhere in the book, though with different implications for democracy. More broadly, we can expect those who now enjoy the privileges of executive or representative power to resist the press for different kinds of democracy. Second, far from embracing state-originated democratic innovations, social movement organizations are often indifferent or skeptical (p. 173). Even though this skepticism is sometimes justified, it is difficult to see how democratic reform will achieve depth or scale absent working alliances between social movement organizations and political officials both committed to that goal. Finally, there is in most societies at present a dearth of political leaders who understand and are open to the project of deepening deliberation and participation in their governance institutions. Sometimes, as with the Workers’ Party in Brazil at the end of the twentieth century, there is a systematic confluence of interest among officials in the political success and expansion of participatory democracy. Much more often, however, officials’ commitments regarding democratic reform are idiosyncratic and episodic. How, then, can public officials be made to take a deeper interest in deepening their democratic institutions? Della Porta argues that social movements are the key, and she is likely correct.