Bridging research on democracy, social movements and communication

Donatella della Porta

The democratic challenge: an introduction

It has become common for reflections on the 'state of democracy' to point to the ineffectiveness of elected politicians' interventions and citizens' growing dissatisfaction with the performance of elected members (Crouch, 2005). Empirical research shows repeatedly that trust in current democracies as regimes based on electoral accountability is being limited by the decline in electoral participation and deep transformations to the most important actors in representative democracy: the political parties. The falls in party membership and, especially, activist numbers (and the related spread of memberless and personalized parties) and the weakening of party loyalties (and increased electoral volatility and opinion voting) are tangible signs of these transformations (della Porta, 2009c).

Although less common than assessments of the challenges to democracy, there are growing calls for a balancing of the perceived crisis in the representative (electoral) conception of democracy. This happens by considering other concepts, which although far from being hegemonic, belong to deep-rooted traditions in democratic thinking and democratic institutions, that go beyond electoral accountability. As Rosanvallon (2008: 12) observes:

[T]he idea of popular sovereignty found historical expression in two different ways. The first was the right to vote, the right of citizens to choose their own leaders. This was the most direct expression of the democratic principle. But the power to vote periodically and thus bestow legitimacy to an elected government is almost always accompanied by a wish to exercise a more permanent form of control over the government thus elected.

Rosanvallon notes that, in the historical evolution of democracy, alongside the growth of institutions of electoral accountability, a circuit of oversight anchored outside state institutions was consolidated. In fact, an understanding of democratic experiences requires simultaneous consideration of the 'functions and dysfunctions' of electoral representative institutions and the organization of distrust. The different elements in what Rosanvallon defines as counter-democracy do not represent 'the opposite of democracy, but rather a form of democracy that reinforces the usual electoral democracy, a democracy of indirect powers disseminated through society – in other words, a durable democracy of distrust that complements the episodic democracy of the usual electoral representative system' (Rosanvallon, 2008: 8).

Thinking in terms of other conceptions of democracy paves the way to addressing contemporary transformations as not only challenges to, but also opportunities for democracy. If mistrust is the disease, it might also be part of the cure as 'a complex assortment of practical measures, checks and balances, and informal as well as institutional social counter-powers has evolved in order to compensate for the erosion of confidence, and to do so by organizing distrust' (Rosanvallon, 2008: 4, emphasis in the original). In the same vein, other scholars have stressed both the crisis in the traditional, liberal (representative) conceptions of democracy and the revival of democratic qualities usually considered under the formula of a 'democracy of the ancients'. These scholars emphasize the importance of a (free and committed) public. Prominent among them is Bernard Manin, who describes the contemporary evolution from a 'democracy of the parties' in which the public sphere is occupied mainly by the political parties, to a 'democracy of the public' in which the formation of public opinion is freed from ideological control of the parties (Manin, 1995: 295). This means also that the cleavages within public opinion no longer reflect electoral preferences, and instead develop from individual preferences formed outside the political parties.

At a more normative level, the concepts of participatory and deliberative democracy have been used, with mounting success, to stress the need to develop public spheres characterized by free and equal participation. Within participatory conceptions of democracy, the development of communicative space is given a fundamental value since citizen involvement requires a multiplicity of public spaces (Downing, 2001: 47–8). Also, in the radical version of participatory democracy:

[W]hile antagonism is a we/they relation in which the two sides are enemies who do not share any common ground, agonism is a we/them relation where the conflicting parties, although acknowledging that there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognize the legitimacy of their opponents [...] This means that, while in conflict, they see themselves as belonging to the same political association, as sharing a common symbolic space within which the conflict takes place.

(Mouffe, 2005: 20)

With various degrees of emphasis, theorists of deliberative democracy also stress the importance of communication. This is because in deliberative democracy people are convinced by the force of the better argument (Habermas, 1996) or, at least, are willing to share this view while not abandoning their perspective, and to learn by listening to the other (Young, 1996).

In the debate on the transformations in democracy, social movements appear to play a potentially crucial role. Recognizing the democratic potential of mistrust in fact means pushing forward reflections on the democratic role played by non-institutional actors in the political system. Recent research on political participation shows that while some more conventional forms of participation (such as voting or party-linked activities) are declining, protest forms are increasing. Although fewer citizens may be voting, they are not less interested or less knowledgeable about politics. Also, although some...