The Ambiguities of Participatory Democracy: Loïc Blondiaux's 2001 Analysis

Extract

[...] Social networks are not yet in operation. The 'Arab Spring' will show the importance of this infrastructure on the superstructure political debates, but Loïc Blondiaux already has the intuition: There is indeed a paradox, in the age of new information and communication technologies - whose participatory content remains incredibly poor to return to this archaic dimension of face-to-face democracy». The participatory path seems, almost twenty years later, like an endogenous attempt to regenerate the representative, to have shown its limits. [...]

[...] Note that the Porto Alegre City Hall, globally highlighted for its 'participatory budget', was lost by the Workers' Party. The 'participatory', which could find as a synonym the 'consultative' or even the 'citizen consultation' by the political authority and/or bureaucracies, groups a series of initiatives that are disparate and translate different political aspirations. The 'participatory' does not constitute a paradigm shift, but rather nourishes (or attempts to provide for) the classic representative system, by animating it, dynamizing information and the local public space. [...]

[...] The proximity scale can also contribute to the fragmentation of representations of the general interest (favoring the 'Not In MY Garden'1). It is interesting to see Loic Blondiaux use, as early as 2001, the word 'deliberation' several times, which seems to be used more today than 'participatory' in the imagination of a renewed democracy, particularly by those who advocate for the use of lotteries as a substitute or rather a solution for rebalancing2 of a representative democracy whose crisis has deepened since 2001 (Blondiaux writes before April before the 2005 referendum on the TCE). [...]

[...] On the basis of profound sociological changes highlighted for example by Antonio Negri through the concept of " multitudes »4, on can wonder if it is not today the separation between politique" and "le civil" » which is challenged by the possibility of much more horizontal functioning, translating for example into the demand for collective management of 'commons' beyond the divisions between the economic, institutional and social5. In these circumstances, Loïc Blondiaux's text deserves to be re-read, as it recalls two requirements at the heart of democracy: the notion of 'legitimacy' of the one who speaks (how is he designated, for what action, in the name of what), and the importance of details in institutional constructions, which can change their meaning, transforming an opening project into a relegation device if one is not paying attention. [...]

[...] Local democracy and citizen participation: the promise and the trap - Loïc Blondiaux (2001) - To what extent is participatory democracy a ambiguous concept? Link to the article: https://www.cairn.inforevue-mouvements-2001-5-page-44.htm In this article, written at a time when the concept of 'participatory democracy' was emerging strongly in political discourse, around the 2001 municipal elections, before the major series of social movements demanding a new step for democracy (from the alter-globalization movement to the Indignados, the Yellow Vests, etc.), Loïc Blondiaux examines the ambiguities of this concept. [...]