Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

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DEMOCRACY TODAY
Before considering the types of political involvement, one might
ask why the participation of broader parts of the population is desirable
at all. Following Schumpeter (in Schmidt 2000: 203) ordinary
citizens are not suited to engage in political processes. Instead, they
are viewed as incompetent, infantile and giving way to their affects,
which leads to irrational decisions and behaviour. While this image of
the incompetent citizen has partly been confirmed by political psychologists
(e.g. Jervis 2004: 259-263), the contrasting opinion states that the
process of participation is conducive to civic skills and that it should
therefore be promoted first and foremost (e.g. Hüller 2010: 88, Miller
2001: 416). A claim that can also count on some support from political
psychology (e.g. Kuklinski et al. 2001). The present paper will follow
this line of thought, which is also sustained by what neuroscientists
usually call “use it or lose it”, a formula that refers to the simple insight
that only skills which are practiced regularly can be maintained and
developed (e.g. Bauer 2006: 57). Clearly, this only relates to the ability
of a citizen to act in a participatory process and does not say anything
about the quality of its outcome. [1] This topic will be addressed again
at the end of the paper.
A variety of approaches has already been applied and tested in
order to increase citizen participation in political processes. At the
same time, it is difficult to differentiate the diverse perspectives clearly
from one another, as for example, deliberative, participatory, direct,
difference and cosmopolitan democracy (Smith 2009: 5) surely overlap
in more than one respect. Therefore, the further proceeding will
concentrate exemplarily on deliberative democracy – which is perhaps
the most prominent the mentioned approaches – and on information
and communication technologies – particularly the internet – as a
potential facilitator of citizen participation of any kind.
A whole range of deliberative forums have been organised, carried
out and analysed so far. In spite of their differing designs, all of
them aimed at bringing citizens together on an equal basis to discuss
some specific political problem (e.g. Fishkin/Luskin 2005). In line
1
Following the distinction by Scharpf (1970) between the input- and output-perspective,
this approach – as participatory approaches usually do (cf. Schmidt 2000: 547) – adopts
the former, stressing the value of citizen-participation in principle.