Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

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DEMOCRACY TODAY
I have used Carole Pateman’s comment intentionally because I
think that the value of the participatory conceptions of democracy
offered by Pateman et al in the 1970s is where we should be looking
if we are to understand the categorical value of participation. I think
that deliberative democrats are not the natural successors of participatory
democrats as many of them claim because the vision of this
new cohort of democratic theorists stops ‘well short of the sweeping
changes participatory theorists believed must be part of the process
of democratisation’ (Hauptmann 2001: 398).
Part of the reason why real interest in participatory democracy was
relatively short-lived is I think because participatory theorists in the
main were offering critiques of actually existing democracy, but their
accounts were not always backed up with empirical evidence. Mark
Warren for example argues that ‘although the transformative ideals
of radical democracy are attractive for many reasons, they are beset
by a fuzzy utopianism that fails to confront limitations of complexity,
size and scale of advanced industrial societies’ (Warren 1996: 242). I
think that advances in our abilities to conduct research mean that
we can revisit participatory democracy and back it up with research.
And I want to suggest that the place to start is not in the north, or
west, but in the developing world because it is here where we find a
lot of this kind of talk – especially Latin America but in South Africa
too. Participatory theorists focus not only, and not even mainly, on
the impact participation has on political decisions, but rather, on the
impact it has on citizens themselves. Although as Jane Mansbridge
explains, participation can generate ‘greater feelings of political efficacy
and ultimately benefit the larger society by anchoring it in a citizenry
clearer about its interests and responsive to the claims of justice and the
public weal’ (Mansbridge 1997: 424), it is the claim that less participant
citizens have a reduced capacity to develop their faculties through joining
with others that provides support for the claim that participation
has a categorical value in addition to its instrumental one.
So my final point is this: as political philosophers, we need to
incorporate the reality of our complex world into our theories if we are
to make any meaningful contribution to democracy. And I think we
need to start with a re-evaluation of participation, one which takes seriously
the participatory theories that grew out of the 1960s considering