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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
The birth of democracies owes much to the interventions and mobilizations of ordinary people. Yet many feel as though they have inherited democratic institutions which do not deliver for the people - that a rigid democratic process has been imposed from above, with increasing numbers of people feeling left out or left behind. In this well-researched volume, leading political sociologist Donatella della Porta rehabilitates the role social movements have long played in fostering and deepening democracy, particularly focusing on progressive movements of the Left which have sought to broaden the plurality of voices and knowledge in democratic debate. Bridging social movement studies and democratic theory, della Porta investigates contemporary innovations in times of crisis, particularly those in the direction of participatory and deliberative practices - 'crowd-sourced constitutions', referendums from below and movement parties - and reflects on the potential and limits of such alternative politics. In a moment in which concerns increase for the potential disruption of a Great Regression led by xenophobic movements and parties, the cases and analyses of resistance in this volume offer important material for students and scholars of political sociology, political science and social movement studies.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Front Matter
1. Democratic Innovations and Social Movements
Democratic challenges in the Great Recession
Progressive social movements as sites for innovation
This volume
2. Crowd-Sourced Constitutionalism: Social Movements in the Constitutional Process
Iceland in the crisis
Expanding the analysis: the Irish deliberative constitutional process
Concluding remarks
3. Referendums from Below: Direct Democracy and Social Movements
‘Water is not for sale’: direct democracy against the privatization of water supply
Expanding the analysis from a comparative perspective: referendums in Scotland and Catalonia
Concluding remarks
4. Movement Parties in the Great Recession
Podemos as a movement party
Developing a comparison: MAS in Bolivia
Conclusion
5. Progressive Movements and Democratic Innovations: Some Conclusions
Innovating from below
Conditions and limits for democratic innovations
Democracy and the populist Right
Democratic innovations as social movement outcomes
Institutional change in empirical theories of democracy
Innovations in intense times: the way forward
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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How Social Movements Can Save Democracy
Democratic Innovations from Below
Donatella della Porta
polity
Copyright © Donatella della Porta 2020
The right of Donatella della Porta to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4128-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Della Porta, Donatella, 1956- author.Title: How social movements can save democracy : democratic innovations from below / Donatella della Porta.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Leading political sociologist della Porta rehabilitates the role social movements have long played in fostering democracy. Bridging social movement studies and democratic theory, she investigates contemporary innovations of the progressive Left in times of crisis and reflects on the potential and limits of such alternative politics”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2019029694 (print) | LCCN 2019029695 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509541263 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509541270 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509541287 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Social movements--Political aspects. | Direct democracy. | Right and left (Political science)Classification: LCC HM881 .D46 2020 (print) | LCC HM881 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/4--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029694LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029695
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Dedication
To Alessandro Pizzorno, amico e maestro, in memoria
Acknowledgements
This volume is based on the assumption that democratic conceptions and practices need constant innovation. In a moment in which various crises converge in challenging existing institutions, it is all the more important to reflect on what can be done in order to save democracy. Progressive social movements have historically been carriers of democratic deepening, elaborating and prefiguring alternative visions that have often then been constitutionalized in democratic institutions. In a period in which attacks on democracy come from the populist Right, research on attempts to improve democratic institutions through increased participatory and deliberative qualities is most important.
Looking at some of these attempts, with a critical view aimed also at singling out existing limits and conditions for improvement, is my purpose. In this sense, this volume can be seen as building upon and developing some of my previous contributions on related issues: first and foremost in Can Democracy Be Saved? (Polity 2013) and Social Movements in Times of Austerity: Bringing Capitalism Back into Protest Analysis (Polity 2015), but also in Movement Parties against Austerity (Polity 2017), Late Neoliberalism and its Discontents in the Economic Crisis: Comparing Social Movements in the European Periphery (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and Social Movements and Referendums from Below: Direct Democracy in the Neoliberal Crisis (Policy 2017).
In addressing this task, I rely on a long-lasting research programme on institutional involvement by progressive social movements, carried out at the Center on Social Movement Studies (Cosmos) that I direct at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. In particular, on crowd-sourced constitutionalism, referendums from below and movement parties, I have collaborated especially with my colleagues at Cosmos Lorenzo Cini, Andrea Felicetti, Francis O’Connor, Martin Portos, Anna Subirats, Hara Kouki, Lorenzo Mosca, Joseba Fernandez, Daniela Chironi and Jonas Draege, as well as with Colin Crouch, Michael Keating, Ken Roberts and Sidney Tarrow, who have been our most welcome visitors. I am also grateful for the support I received from the Hertie School of Governance and for the conversations I had during some visits to Berlin with colleagues there, among them Helmut Anheier, Christian Joerges and Claus Offe. At Hertie, I also wish to thank Stefanie Jost, who helped me in developing the project for this book. Some important stimuli also came from presentation of parts of my work at seminars and conferences, in particular at the Stein Rokkan Lecture at the Joint Sessions of the European Consortium for Political Research in Mons in 2019. Herbert Reiter has helped me greatly, improving the text through his critical but constructive reading (as well as through his patience and support while I was writing this book).
1Democratic Innovations and Social Movements
The Great Recession that hit the world in 2008 worked as a critical juncture, nurturing socioeconomic but also political transformations. Some of the political developments during the crisis have challenged civil, political and social rights, triggering a Great Regression (Geiselberger 2017). Increasing social inequalities have spiralled, with growing mistrust in established institutions fuelling a sense of insecurity and xenophobic reaction (Streeck 2017; Bauman 2017a). While scholars are debating how much inequality democracy can withstand without breaking down (della Porta, Keating et al. 2018), resistance to the backlash is also developing, with citizens mobilizing for social justice and ‘real democracy’ (Meyer and Tarrow 2018).
This volume will focus on some innovative proposals, emerging from progressive social movements, that aim at increasing participation and deliberation in order to save democracy. Exploiting windows of opportunity offered by institutions of direct democracy, social movements have promoted referendums or infiltrated ‘from below’ referendums promoted by other actors in a more top-down fashion (della Porta, O’Connor et al. 2017a). Party systems have been dramatically shaken, with the breakdown of mainstream parties and, in some cases, an unexpected rise of movement parties on the left (della Porta, Fernández et al. 2017a), as well as right-wing populist ones. Similarly unexpected success has come to candidates that appeal to social justice and citizens’ participation within old-Left parties, among them Labour in the United Kingdom and the Democratic Party in the United States. In addressing these developments, I suggest that times of crisis are times of rapid change, presenting challenges to existing institutions but also, potentially, opening opportunities for a deepening of democracy.
This chapter will introduce the theoretical discussion on the potential innovative contributions by civic society that have indeed been addressed in democratic theory, as well as in various approaches within social movement studies. While movements have been studied mainly as contentious actors, fighting in the streets to resist or promote political change, social movement studies have also pointed at their capacity to nurture innovative ideas, as movements are constantly engaged in generating and spreading counter-expertise and new forms of knowledge. In doing so, social movements are endowed with specific ontological, epistemological and methodological preferences. This chapter therefore addresses the channels through which social movements’ ideas enter institutions, singling out conditions that favour (or thwart) the development of innovative ideas and plural knowledge. It suggests that, by providing for alternative knowledge, progressive movements might contribute to the deepening of democracy through increasing the plurality of ideas.
Democratic challenges in the Great Recession
In the countries that have been most hit by the financial crisis, particularly in the European periphery, waves of protest have challenged the austerity policies adopted by national governments under heavy pressure from international institutions including the European Union (EU), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These protest waves – known as Indignados or Occupy movements – reflected but also strengthened a legitimacy crisis, caused by what protesters saw as a lack of concern by political institutions for the suffering of their citizens (della Porta 2015b). Protests took different forms in different countries, influenced by the different timing and characteristics of the financial crisis, as well as by the domestic opportunities and threats facing social movements (della Porta, Andretta et al. 2016).
The Great Recession had immediate and often dramatic political effects on what Robert Dahl (2000) dubbed ‘really existing’ democracies, especially on representative institutions. The crisis of institutional trust fuelled calls for constitutional reforms that could help refound the political community. Really existing democracies have certainly been under stress, but there is also potential for innovation. The multiple (financial, social, political) crises have in particular increased the tensions between those scholars and politicians who have considered citizens as too emotional and ignorant to make sensible choices, stressing the need for technical expertise, and those who have instead blamed an ‘econocracy’ that has taken over political decisions while pretending they are not political (Earle et al. 2017), as well as the idea of an ‘epistocracy’ in which only the most knowledgeable people can vote (Brennan 2016). Siding with a participatory and deliberative vision, I will suggest that what we need is more, rather than less, citizen participation in democracy, and look at some democratic innovations that could contribute to it.
The challenges to representative democracies during the Great Recession bring about a need to reflect on democratic qualities. Democracy has in fact a contested meaning, with different qualities stressed in different understandings of the concept of democracy itself and the evaluation of democratic practices. A concept with a long history, democracy ‘has meant different things to different people at different times and places’ (Dahl 2000, 3). In time, a minimalist definition of democracy as electoral accountability has emerged, and democracy has been identified with the current characteristics of Western polities (Held 2006, 166).
The widespread democratic malaise has, however, challenged the identification of the meaning of democracy with its minimalistic vision or currently existing institutions. While electoral accountability has been considered as the main democratic mechanism in the historical evolution of the discourse on really existing democracy, today’s challenges to representative democracy focus attention on other democratic qualities (Rosanvallon 2006). The mainstream conceptions and practices of democracy are in particular contested in the name of other conceptions and practices, which political theorists have addressed under labels such as participatory democracy, strong democracy, discursive democracy, communicative democracy, welfare democracy or associative democracy (see della Porta 2013, ch. 1).
In particular, debates have emerged around two main characteristics often considered as at the basis of really existing democracies: delegation of power, and majoritarian decision-making (even if with different degrees of protection of minorities through constitutionalization of rights and institutional checks and balances). These two elements have in fact been in tension with other democratic qualities that constitute the building blocks of other conceptions of democracy.
First of all, participatory democratic theorists have long pointed towards the importance of creating multiple opportunities for participation by involving citizens beyond elections (Arnstein 1969; Pateman 1970; Barber 1984). While elections are seen as too rare, offer only limited choices, and can be manipulated in various ways, participation is praised as capable of constructing good citizens through empowering interactions. Participation in different forms and in different moments of the democratic process is considered as essential in socializing citizens to visions of the public good, also potentially increasing trust in and support for political institutions. Expanding the semantic meaning of politics, participatory approaches call for democracy not only within parliaments and governments, but also in societal institutions, from workplaces to neighbourhoods, from schools to hospitals, from the local to transnational institutions.
Majoritarian decision-making has also been criticized on several grounds. The power of the majority might jeopardize the rights of minorities, bringing about the need for the constitutionalization of some rights. In addition, there is no logical assumption that grants that the preferences that are more supported in terms of numbers are also the best for the collectivity. Considering these limits of majoritarian decision-making, deliberative normative theories have stressed the importance of creating high-quality discursive spaces, in which participants can exchange reasons and construct shared definitions of the public good (Cohen 1989; Habermas 1996; Elster 1998; Dryzek 2000). In this vision, the more the definition of interests and collective identities emerges, at least in part, through a high-quality discursive process, the more legitimate and efficient the outcome is expected to be. Legitimacy does not arise in fact from the number of pre-existing preferences, but rather from a decision-making process in which citizens can relate to each other, recognizing others and being recognized by them. Decisions are democratic not (so much) when they have the support of the majority, but rather when opinions are formed through a deliberative process in which reasons are freely exchanged. In high-quality discursive spaces, citizens, treated as equal, can understand the reasons of others, assessing them against emerging standards of fairness. In addition, public arenas with high discursive quality should help participants to find better solutions, not only by allowing for carriers of different knowledge and expertise (rather than just self-appointed ‘experts’) to interact, but also by changing the perception of one’s own preferences, making participants less concerned with individual, material interests and more with collective goods. While the extent to which deliberation implies the actual building of consensus or the transformation of preferences is debated (Dryzek 2010), discursive quality requires a recognition of others as equal, with an open-minded assessment of their reasons.
Bridging participatory and deliberative conceptions of democracy, some scholars have pointed towards the importance of building enclaves free from institutional power (Mansbridge 1996) and developing ‘processes of engaged and responsible democratic participation [which] include street demonstrations and sit-ins, musical works and cartoons, as much as parliamentary speeches and letters to the editor’ (Young 2003, 119). In particular, subaltern counter-publics (including workers, women, ethnic minorities and so on) form parallel discursive arenas, where counter-discourses develop, allowing for the formation and redefinition of identities, interests and needs (Fraser 1990).
Participatory and deliberative conceptions of democracy challenge some of the main assumptions not only of really existing democracies, but also of technocratic alternatives to them. Supporters of what Colin Crouch (2003) has defined as the ‘post-democratic’ view the democratic malaise as related to too much participation. As neoliberal approaches stigmatize what they see as unreasonably high expectations about state responsibilities, in a rehearsal of the analysis already developed in the 1970s by the so-called trilateral report (Crozier et al. 1975), technocratic solutions are suggested to reduce the ‘overload’ of demands on the state. Building upon arguments that citizens are unable to understand political complexities and formulate sound opinions (e.g. Schumpeter 1943), the assumption is that electoral accountability puts elected representatives under the pressure of selfish individuals. The suggested solutions are therefore to reduce the competences of the state (freeing the market from state control), and to give power to electorally unaccountable institutions. Considering citizens as selfish, but also ignorant and therefore unable to pursue even their own private good, technocratic solutions are based on a fear of the brutal instincts of the masses. Lack of pressure from below is seen as favouring bipartisan agreements and reducing inequalities, movement pressures are considered as fuelling polarization and increasing inequalities (McAdam and Kloos 2016).
Contrasting the assumption that deciding on public issues is too complex a task to be left to the mass of citizens, participatory and deliberative conceptions on which the democratic innovations I am going to analyse are based trust citizens, their knowledge and their reasons. Public debates are considered as formative and, therefore, participation produces better citizens as ‘people may become more competent and responsible if they are allowed to participate in public deliberation and actual decision-making’ (Setälä 2009, 3). Direct forms of democracy might stimulate citizens by empowering them, increasing their sense of civic duty as well as their political efficacy (Smith and Tolbert 2004): they provide for ‘education in democratic citizenship’ (Dyck 2009, 540). While, in minimalist conceptions of democracy, ideas, interests, preferences and/or identities are assumed to develop outside of the democratic process, participatory and deliberative conceptions emphasize instead the capacity of democratic arenas to stimulate the development of inclusive collective identities. As the competence of experts is challenged by processes of politicization of science (della Porta, Keating et al. 2018), econocracy is not a solution to democratic stress; instead, it risks reducing not only the legitimacy of decision-makers but also the efficacy of their decisions. It does not help individuals to learn to be good citizens, but instead pushes them to the margins and makes them more responsive to populist leaders.
Even within really existing democracies, the suggestion that participation and deliberation must (at least) supplement representative and majoritarian institutions has been implemented through various democratic innovations (Barber 1984; Fishkin 1997). In their concrete evolution, existing democratic states and societies have mitigated the ideal-typical principles of representative democracy, mixing them with others that are linked to different conceptions of democracy (della Porta 2013). In implicit recognition of the limits of delegation and majoritarian decision-making, the really existing democracies have combined institutions privileging different democratic qualities. Participatory conceptions have penetrated the democratic state through reforms that have introduced channels of citizen participation in schools, in factories and in neighbourhoods, but also through the political recognition of movement organizations and of the ‘right to dissent’. Referendums, once considered as a residual vestige of direct democratic procedures, are increasingly used, as are institutions in which the principle of delegation is limited, including in institutions based on representatives chosen by lot, as well as consensual decision-making. Democratic innovations – from participatory budgeting to deliberative mini-publics (Font et al. 2014) – have spread attempts to restore citizens’ trust in democracy, as well as bringing in their expertise and knowledge.
As I have suggested elsewhere (della Porta 2013), the legitimation of really existing democracies required certain specific conditions that are less and less present nowadays. First of all, mass political parties allowed for linking delegation with some form of participation by citizens, contributing towards making representatives accountable in a long-term perspective (Pizzorno 1993). In addition, the majoritarian assumption needed a nation state, defining the border of the demos in whose name (and interest) decisions were made. Finally, even though representative democracy did not call for social equality, it still relied upon the assumption that political equality would reduce social inequality, which otherwise risks challenging the very principle of free access to political rights. The representative form of democracy developed, that is, in contexts characterized by party democracies, national sovereignty and well-established welfare states.
The weakening of political parties, nation states and welfare provisions has altered the functioning of representative democracies, but it may also have produced some opportunities for experimenting with other conceptions of democracies. In particular, it stresses the importance of involving citizens in the democratic process. As Pierre Rosanvallon (2006, 12–18) has suggested, in the evolution of democracy a circuit of oversight anchored outside of state institutions has developed, along with the institutions of electoral accountability. Growing societal powers of sanction and prevention have been reflected in an increasing organization of distrust.
In sum, the democratic innovations analysed here are justified by the belief that, in times of economic, social and political crises, more rather than less citizens’ participation is needed. As a democratic malaise is fuelled by an increasingly elitist development within really existing democracies – particularly in their post-democratic version – what we need to restore democratic legitimacy and efficacy (on the input and the output side) is more involvement of citizens. Participation is not only essential to restoring trust in institutions, but is also a way to develop good citizenship. Crises require, and at the same time open opportunities for, change. Prefiguration of democratic participation is therefore even more important in and outside public institutions.
The backlash against democracy that is fuelled by right-wing populism cannot be addressed by declaring the people unfit for civic life and calling for technocratic solutions. Rather, an ‘age of mistrust’ requires an institutional adaptation that can transform challenges into resources. Social movements (along with judges and independent authorities), as instruments of external control and permanent contestation, act in what Pierre Rosanvallon (2006, 20) calls counter-democracy – that is, a set of formal and informal checks and balances, as well as counterpowers, that make sure that ‘society has a voice, that collective sentiments can be articulated, that judgments of the government can be formulated, and that demands can be issued’.
Against this background, as I am going to argue in the next section of this introduction, progressive social movements are to be considered as promoters of democratic innovations that can improve participation and deliberative qualities. In this direction, the volume focuses on the involvement of progressive social movements in the ideation and implementation of innovations in institutional politics, addressing their potential but also the limitations on their capacity to improve democracy. As with political parties or interest groups, so too social movements may have different attitudes towards democracy, in some cases supporting and in others challenging democratic institutions. In a moment in which concerns are increasing regarding the potential disruption of a Great Regression led by xenophobic movements and parties, I address instead the potential for alternative politics and policy that progressive social movements might contribute in the direction of a deepening of democracy.
Bridging social movement studies and democratic theory, I analyse some democratic innovations promoted by progressive social movements, especially in the direction of participatory and deliberative practices. Focusing on recent cases, the analysis will thus highlight the role that progressive social movements can play in times that are characterized by crises, but also by transformation.
Progressive social movements as sites for innovation
While social movements have been studied especially as contentious actors, mainly taking to the streets to resist or promote political changes, some research has pointed towards their innovative capacity in terms of nurturing and spreading new ideas – about, among other things, democratic institutions. Traditionally considered as actors ‘at the gate’ of the institutional system, social movements instead enter institutional arenas in various forms and through various channels.
Social movements have been considered as important actors in terms of their capacity to ‘take the floor’, building public spheres and participating in them. Clearly, not all social movements promoted democracy: some movements (particularly right-wing movements) have openly declared themselves anti-democratic; others (including left-wing movements) have produced authoritarian turns. There is, however, as Charles Tilly (2004, 125) has pointed out:
a wide correspondence between democratisation and social movements. The roots of social movements are found in the partial democratisation that moved British subjects and the North-American colonies against those that governed them in the 18th century. Throughout the nineteenth century, social movements generally blossomed and developed wherever further democratisation took place, decreasing when authoritarian regimes impeded democracy. This path continued during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; the maps of the development of institutions and social movements widely overlap.
If democratization favoured social movements, the majority of these supported the democratic reforms that promoted their development.
In this volume, I am primarily concerned with what we might call progressive social movements. Even though progress is a contested term (Allen 2016), I would retain it to define actors that struggle for an inclusive vision of a just society and for deepening democracy. In doing so, I do consider that progress has a dialectical nature. It has been used to stress human emancipation as opposed to social domination, but also criticized as justifying domination by implying ‘a universalist teleological form of thinking according to which some societies or groups have reached that telos earlier than others and thus have the authority, and maybe even the mission, to pull the less progressed people out of their “self-incurred immaturity” into the light of reason and freedom, possibly even overcoming their ignorant or indolent reluctance by force’ (Forst 2019, 1).
While acknowledging the tension between a normative meaning and its historical use, I follow Forst’s call for the development of a de-reified, non-teleological, non-dominating and emancipatory conception of progress. As he notes, differentiating between a technological vision of progress and moral–political progress:
the decisive question raised by the concept of moral–political progress remains how the power to define such progress and the paths leading to it is structured… Technological progress cannot count as social progress in life conditions without social evaluations of what it is good for, who benefits from it, and what costs it generates. Nor can true social progress as moral–political progress exist where the changes in question are enforced and experienced as colonization. Technological progress must be socially accepted, and socially accepted progress is progress which is determined and brought about by the members of the society in question. (Forst 2019, 1)1
In this direction, I define as progressive those social movements that share with the so-called left-libertarian movement family of the past a combined attention to social justice and positive freedom (della Porta and Rucht 1996). Progress is thus understood as:
the liberation (or ‘emancipation’) of collectivities (for example: citizens, classes, nations, minorities, income categories, even mankind), be it the liberation from want, ignorance, exploitative relations, or the freedom of such collectives to govern themselves autonomously, that is, without being dependent upon or controlled by others. Furthermore, the freedom that results from liberation applies equally to all, with equality serving as a criterion to make sure that liberation does not in fact become a mere privilege of particular social categories. (Offe 2011, 79-80)
In Forst’s terms, I address ‘empowerment initiatives’, ‘especially those where underprivileged groups . . . win participation rights through social struggles’, thus aiming at expanding the scope of agency for individuals as well as collectives. Among them are movements that called for broader inclusion of citizens and reducing domination within and across national borders (Ypi 2012). While progressive movements are my main focus of analysis, I will argue that some of these actors’ claims for broader participation and recognition in the public sphere can spread beyond the original promoter and be articulated by various actors with more ambivalent positions towards global justice. I will also discuss to what extent democratic innovations promoted by progressive social movements can be appropriated by regressive actors.
Studies of social movements have focused especially on their progressive variety, pointing at their emancipatory potential. At the onset of social movement studies, research on collective behaviour by scholars close to the so-called Chicago School stressed that collective phenomena do not simply reflect social crisis, but rather produce new solidarities and norms, which function as drivers of change, especially in the value system. Students of collective behaviour referred to these interpretations in looking at social movements in moments of intense social change (e.g. Blumer 1951; Gusfield 1963; Turner and Killian 1987). Rooted in symbolic interactionism, they gave particular relevance to the meaning attributed to social structures by actors, and focused on how social action based on new norms transformed institutional behaviour (della Porta and Diani 2006, 12–13).
Likewise in research within the new social movement perspective, which paid attention to macro-level social transformations, social movements have been considered as main actors of innovation. Opening the scientific debate on the emergence of new conflicts, Alain Touraine (1985) has considered social movements as constituting the opposition to dominant powers within different societies. In contemporary ones, social movements struggle for control of emerging programmed societies, in which knowledge is especially relevant. Within a resonant approach, Alberto Melucci (1982, 1989, 1996) has paid particular attention to movements as producers of norms in contemporary societies defined as highly differentiated and increasingly investing in the creation of individual autonomous centres of action, but also extending control over the motives for human action. In this perspective, rather than limiting themselves to seeking material gain, new social movements promote ‘other codes’ in order to resist the intrusion of the state and of the market into the everyday life of citizens. Conflicts have therefore been seen as oriented towards the control of meanings, the circulation of information, the production and the use of scientific knowledge, the creation of cultural models for individual and collective identities. Traditionally associated with disruptive forms of political participation, in the Habermasian account of social life movements assume a positive role in mobilizing to resist the invasion of the logics of the system (Habermas 1985).
More recent social science literature has considered social movements as ‘learning sites’ (Welton 1993), capable of building knowledge through discursive processes which consist of the ‘talks and conversations – the speech acts – and written communications of movement members that occur in the context of, or in relation to, movement activities’ (Benford and Snow 2000, 623). Addressing the importance of movements as producers of knowledge, Eyerman and Jamison (1991, 68–9) singled out three dimensions of their cognitive praxis: a cosmological dimension addressing the ‘common worldview assumptions that give a social movement its utopian mission’; a technological dimension which addresses ‘the specific technological issues that particular movements develop around’; an organizational dimension as ‘a particular organizational paradigm, which means they have both ideals and modes of organizing the production and . . . dissemination of knowledge’.
Research on knowledge-practices within social movements singled out a broad range, moving:
from things we are more classically trained to define as knowledge, such as practices that engage and run parallel to the knowledge of scientists or policy experts, to micro-political and cultural interventions that have more to do with ‘know-how’ or the ‘cognitive praxis that informs all social activity’ and which vie with the most basic social institutions that teach us how to be in the world. (Casas-Cortés et al. 2008, 21)
In fact, social movements are: ‘1) engaging in co-producing, challenging, and transforming expert scientific discourses; 2) creating critical subjects whose embodied discourse produces new notions of democracy; and 3) generating reflexive conjunctural theories and analyses that go against more dogmatic and orthodox approaches to social change, and as such contribute to ethical ways of knowing’ (Casas-Cortés et al. 2008, 22). Practices of knowledge are both formal and informal, as the activist knowledge is formed through different types of knowledge-practices including concepts, theories and imaginaries as well as methodological devices and research tools. Moreover, they ‘entail practices less obviously associated with knowledge, including the generation of subjectivities/identities, discourses, common-sense, and projects of autonomy and livelihood’ (Casas-Cortés et al. 2008, 28).
Social movements are first of all important actors in what Rosanvallon (2006) defined as counter-democracy, in that they criticize hegemonic thinking, especially its impact on subalterns. In fact, progressive social movements play a counter-hegemonic function (Freire 1996) as
the character and relational mode of oppressed people tends to be marked by the identification with the oppressor and an often unintentional desire to emulate him/her in terms of identity, position in the social structure and ways of relating to the ‘other’. If that often unconscious tendency is not identified and actively deconstructed, the odds are that the oppressive relationship will be reproduced, this time with new protagonists. (Motta and Esteves 2014, 2)
This critique of existing knowledge aims in particular at the unlearning of the dominant discourses, and the learning, instead, of oppositional and liberatory ones (Foley 1999, 4).
Learning is then oriented towards emancipation, going beyond the critique of hegemonic thinking and experimenting instead with alternatives. Being self-reflexive actors, progressive social movements acquire and produce knowledge in different stages of their activities. Learning is related to participation in the general activities of progressive movements, including meetings, protest, organizing, educational activities, as well as in self-reflection on their actions (Mayo and English 2012, 202–3).
Critical and creative approaches to knowledge aim at social transformation. Scholars have stressed the capacity of progressive social movements to offer alternative analysis and develop responses to situations of exploitation and exclusion starting from the direct experience of those situations. Thus, ‘If scientific knowledge aspires to develop generalizable theoretical and methodological models (some of which is indeed often relied upon by movement actors), “peoples’ knowledge” is based on grounded experience that can differently enhance particular processes of social emancipation’ (Casas-Cortés et al. 2008, 48).
Social movement knowledge is in fact said to be situated rather than universal, committed rather than detached, focused on changes at the roots of the system rather than on the symptoms (Mayo 1999). It tries to provide useful skills; to develop a critical understanding of power and of agency (Foley 2004); and to connect the local and the global (Crowther et al. 2005). The knowledge produced is ‘embedded in and embodied through lived, place-based experiences, [which] means that they offer different kinds of answers than more abstract knowledge: knowledges that are situated and embodied, rather than supposedly neutral and distanced (Casas-Cortés et al. 2008, 42–3). Movements generate knowledge which moves from practice to theory (Gordon 2007). Their knowledge is therefore considered as basically oriented to articulating theory and praxis, taking concrete realities as the point of departure: ‘The goal is that of creating an appropriate and operative theoretical horizon, very close to the surface of the “lived”, where the simplicity and concreteness of elements from which it has emerged achieve meaning and potential’ (Malo de Molina 2004, 13).
The importance of social movement knowledge is also related to its emergence in action. In particular, movement theorizing is
grounded in the process of producing ‘social movements’ against opposition. It is always to some extent knowledge-in-struggle, and its survival and development is always contested and in process of formation. Its frequently partial, unsystematic and provisional character does not make it any the less worth our attention, though it may go some way towards explaining why academic social movements theory is too often content with taking the ‘cream off the top’, and disregarding – or failing to notice – everything that has to happen before institutionalized social movement theorizing appears in forms that can be easily appropriated. (Barker and Cox 2002, 11)
Thus, theorization based on alternative knowledge and practices represents an aspect of citizens’ engagement in creating collective institutions such as social movement organizations, which are expected to empower them in the pursuit of their aim of resistance and change (Barker and Cox 2002, 21).
In sum, progressive social movements have engaged and engage in democratic innovation. They experiment with new ideas in their internal life, prefiguring alternative forms of democratic politics, and they spread these ideas within institutions. They not only transform democratic states through struggles for policy change, but also express a fundamental critique of conventional politics, thus addressing meta-political issues and experimenting with participatory and deliberative ideas. Historically, progressive social movements have been the carriers of participatory and deliberative democratic qualities, calling for necessary adaptation through innovation in democratic institutions, playing a most relevant role in countering social injustice and struggling for democracy. In these struggles, they have produced innovative ideas and alternative knowledge. This has been, and is, all the more important in times of crisis, which old institutions appear unable to address. Rather than gradual change, these critical junctures require new ideas, even new paradigms, with which social movements may already have experimented. As mentioned, progressive social movements experiment with democratic innovations in their internal practices. In fact, their activities are oriented towards prefiguration of alternative forms of internal democracy. Self-reflexive actors, they experiment with new ideas of democracy, which are then the basis of proposed changes in democratic governance.
Triggered by dissatisfaction with centralized and bureaucratic representative democracy, since the 1970s so-called new social movements have pushed for various forms of participation in decision-making, spreading through a sort of ‘contagion from below’ (Rohrschneider 1993). Emerging trends within social movements that mobilized in the wave of protest against the financial crisis and for democratization illustrate this form of democratic innovation. Recently, the Global Justice Movement as well as anti-austerity protests have produced knowledge about direct democratic processes (Cox 2014, 965). In the beginning of the new millennium, with their reflexive practices inspired by Zapatistas and the building of deliberative spaces, the Global Justice Movement paid specific attention to knowledge production. More recently in the 2010s, those who protested in Tahrir, Porta del Sol, Syntagma Square or Zuccotti Park, and later in Gezi Park or Place de la République, have both criticized existing representative democracy as deeply corrupted and experimented with different models of democracy, stressing especially participatory and deliberative qualities. As a protest repertoire and organizational form, the acampadas – long-term camps in squatted public spaces – have been seen as the incarnation of a democratic experiment that has been adopted and adapted in different contexts. Aiming at participation and deliberation, the acampadas developed from previous practices of internal democracy, such as social forums, in the attempt to learn from their limits and try to address them (della Porta 2015b). In these activities, conceptions of participation from below, cherished by progressive social movements, have in fact been combined with a special attention to the creation of egalitarian and inclusive public spheres (della Porta 2013). With their emphasis on consensus, the acampadas privileged the participation of lay persons – the citizens, the members of the community – mobilized as individuals rather than members of associations of various types (Juris 2012), building on their personal experience and knowledge.
Contemporary progressive movements have considered transparency, equality and inclusivity as important democratic values. In particular, the setting up of camps in open-air space has aimed at enhancing the public and transparent nature of the process, expressing a reclaiming of public spaces by citizens. Choosing open spaces as the main site of protest, activists place a special emphasis on the inclusivity of the process, which involves the entire agora. The heterogeneity of participants is mentioned as a most positive aspect of the camps, in which people of different backgrounds, classes and ideology sit together and talk with each other (Gerbaudo 2012, 69). In this way, the acampadas, by occupying and subverting the use of prominent urban public spaces, aimed at reconstructing a public sphere in which problems and solutions could be discussed among equals (Halvorsen 2012, 431). Within the camps, the general assemblies aimed at mobilizing the common people – not activists but communities of citizens – through placards and individualized messages. Alternative practices were also developed in the everyday management of camp activities, including through free kitchens, medical tents, libraries, media centres and information centres for visitors and new participants (Graeber 2012, 240).
In all these activities, there were attempts at balancing the principle of direct democracy with a search for consensus. In the camps, consensual decision-making was built upon the practices devised by the horizontal wing in the Global Justice Movement (della Porta 2009), as collective thought was expected to emerge through inclusivity and respect for the opinions of all, even in large assemblies involving often hundreds of thousands of people. A consensual, horizontal decision-making process was based on the continuous formation of small groups, which then reconvened in the larger assemblies. Deliberation through consensus was in general seen as an instrument against bureaucratization, but also against the routinization of the assembly, and a way to construct a community (Graeber 2012, 23). So, the acampadas have been sites of contention, but also of exchange of information, reciprocal learning, individual socialization and knowledge building. Their ultimate goal was building a community through the personal knowledge of the participants and their direct experiences, including the expression of strong emotions. So, the occupied free spaces had to develop ‘possible utopias’, by attracting the attention of the media and inspiring participation, but also by ‘providing a space for grassroots participatory democracy; ritual and community building, strategizing and action planning, public education and prefiguring alternative worlds that embody movement visions’, as well as networking and coordinating (Juris 2012, 268). Camps were thus considered as places not only for talking and listening, but also for the building of collective identities, happening through the development of strong emotions and longer-lasting relations. Open public spaces were to create intense ties and sharing of a common belonging through encounters among diverse people. Camps therefore had to show opposition but also to prefigure new relations, experimenting with another form of democracy.
Some of the mentioned innovative ideas about democracy have been at the basis of institutional experiments that were indeed inspired by the same principles of participation and deliberation. Besides engaging in internal practices of democratic innovation, social movements are in fact also carriers of innovation in institutions, performing this role in a variety of ways and with different results. In short, social movements raise claims not only on specific policies, but more broadly on the way in which the political system as a whole functions: its institutional and formal procedures, elite recruitment and the informal configuration of power (Kitschelt 1986). Movements have often obtained decentralization of political power and channels of consultation with citizens on particular decisions; appeals procedures against decisions by the public administration; the possibility to be allowed to testify before representative institutions and the judiciary, to be listened to as counter-experts, to receive legal recognition and material incentives. Repertoires of collective action, which were once stigmatized and dealt with as public order problems, have slowly become legal and legitimate (della Porta and Reiter 1998), while direct democracy has been developed as a supplementary channel of access to those opened within representative democracy (della Porta, O’Connor et al. 2017a). Social movements also contribute to the creation of new arenas for the development of public policy, such as expert commissions or specific administrative and political branches, for example state ministries or local bureaus on women’s and ecological issues in many countries. Within international organizations, such as the EU, movement activists have been co-opted by specific public bodies as members of their staff (Ruzza 2004) and opportunities for conflictual cooperation develop within regulatory agencies through consultation, to incorporation in committees, to delegation of power (Giugni and Passy 1998, 85). These institutions mediate social movement claims and even ally themselves with movement activists with whom they may have frequent contact.
In recent times, democratic innovations have included participatory arenas open to the participation of normal citizens in public debates on relevant (and often divisive) issues. Especially at the local level, there have been various attempts at increasing participation, through the creation of high-quality communicative arenas and the empowering of citizens. In fact, one can distinguish, with Graham Smith (2009), two main institutional formulas: assembleary, or oriented to the construction of a ‘mini-public’, usually selected by lot. The former in particular have seen the participation of social movement activists in neighbourhood assemblies or even thematic assemblies, neighbourhood councils, consultation committees, strategic participatory plans and the like. In particular, participatory budgets have spread from Porto Alegre, a Brazilian city of 1,360,000 inhabitants, to being recognized by the United Nations as one of the forty ‘best practices’ at global level (Allegretti 2003, 173). In order to achieve social equality and provide occasions for empowerment, citizens are invited to decide about the distribution of certain public funds through a structured process of involvement in assemblies and committees. The objectives of these institutions include effective prob-lem-solving and equitable solutions, as well as broad, deep and sustained participation. The participatory budget has been credited with creating a positive context for association, fostering greater activism, networking associations, and working from a citywide orientation (Baiocchi 2002). Even though the intensity of participation, its duration and influence, vary greatly between the various participatory devices, they all point towards the limits of a merely representative conception of democracy. The aim of improving managerial capacities, through greater transparency and the circulation of information, is linked with the transformation of social relations, by reconstructing social ties, fostering solidarity and eventually ‘democratising democracy’ (Bacqué et al. 2005). Such instruments have been analysed as improving the capacity to address problems created by local opposition to the construction of big infrastructure (Bobbio and Zeppetella 1999). They are supposed to increase the legitimacy of public decisions as ‘all potentially affected groups have equal opportunity to get involved in the process and equal right to propose topics, formulate solutions, or critically discuss taken-for-granted approaches, and because decision-making is by exchange of argument’ (Baccaro and Papadakis 2008, 1).
Going beyond the discussion of democratic innovations within movements and existing research on participatory institutions and social movements (which I have addressed elsewhere, see della Porta 2013; 2015b), I want to analyse in this volume some institutional outcomes of contemporary progressive movements in terms of the spreading of their participatory and deliberative conceptions and practices in constitutional processes, direct democracy and party politics. In fact, as mentioned, a main assumption in this work is that, at a time in which tensions in democracies are increasing, progressive social movements might offer important resources for reinvigorating democratic participation and deliberation. Notwithstanding that institutional democratic innovations and social movements have been mostly considered in isolation from each other, the two often interact:
Deliberative democracy and collective action have often been opposed as offering conflicting ways of constructing the common good, based on cooperative discussion on the one hand, and adversarial protest and negotiation on the other. Social movements have however shaped the inception and organization of democratic innovations to a large extent. Historically, the first wave of deliberative and participatory institutions appeared in the 1970s as a response to social movements’ claims for a greater inclusiveness of the political process. Social movements also influence the way democratic innovations work, by participating in, or on the contrary boycotting, new forms of democratic engagement. Finally, social movements’ internal democratic practices and reflections about the limits of informal decision making have inspired the field of deliberative democracy, which has, in turn, influenced collective action research. (Talpin 2015, 781)
