Participatory democracy's moment.

• Author: Polletta, Francesca
• Position: Participation - Report

If there are two things that unite the stunningly diverse movements of the last five years, it is their reliance on new digital media and their determination to enact, as well as bring about, more participatory forms of democracy. In this paper, I look at these developments separately and together. Why has enthusiasm for consensus-based decisionmaking and leaderless organizations that were seemingly abandoned by the 1970s gained new life? How has that enthusiasm come to be shared by the right and left, by Tea Party members alongside Occupy activists? Without diminishing the importance of economic crises and policymakers' responses to those crises in shaping the movements of the last five years, I call attention to developments both outside and within movements that have made ours into a participatory age. Among those developments, the rise of the Internet has not only made protests easier to organize, it has also produced new understandings of equality, organization, and democracy. Yet the contemporary zeal for participation has also created new challenges for activists. Among these is the challenge to make participatory democracy attractive to people who do not have a deep ideological commitment to it.

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Though diverse in their targets, the social movements of the last five years have shared a common demand for democracy--or for more democracy. The movements of the Arab Spring sought to overthrow authoritarian regimes and secure free elections and freedoms of speech and press that are the linchpins of liberal democracy. But movements with democratic goals have not been limited to countries with authoritarian regimes. Recent movements in democratic regimes have also invoked the cause of democracy. In Greece, anti-austerity protests called for "direct democracy now." The Spanish Indignados denounced a democracy without choice. The Occupy movement in the United States targeted a political system allegedly rigged in favor of the rich. Participants in the Occupy movement in Slovenia chanted "No one represents us." In Latin America, first waves of students, then waves of the broader population challenged political corruption and inequality. International campaigns for intellectual property sharing imagine an "open source government." The tens of thousands of activists who participate in the World Social Forum and associated regional forums call for globalization from the bottom up. (1)

Even more striking, perhaps, has been activists' determination to enact radical democracy within their own movements. To be sure, most fledgling grassroots movements tend to adopt a bottom-up style of operating. Leadership is often informal and collective, drawing together charismatic figures with people willing to pitch in. Boundaries between organizations are porous, and decisions are made on the fly by whoever happens to be around at that moment. But what we have seen in recent movements is something more deliberate. Decisions are made by General Assemblies that are open to all. Consensus, rather than voting, is standard. The watchwords are decentralization, participation, and autonomy.

A half-century removed from 1960s activists' experiments in collectivism, and decades after progressive activists seemed to have abandoned consensus-based decisionmaking as simply unrealistic, participatory democracy has made a stunning comeback. Why now? Where do activists' understandings of participatory democracy come from? Are activists practicing participatory democracy in new ways? And have they managed to overcome the inefficiencies and stalemates that plagued their predecessors?

The short answer is that activists' practice of participatory democracy is profoundly new, thanks in part to a feature of contemporary protest that is as striking as its democratic slogans: its reliance on digital media. For longtime activists, digital media have made it easier to coordinate protests and recruit members, and have also produced new ideas about what radically democratic organizations should look like. For newcomers--the millions of people with no protest experience who found themselves enthusiastically waving their fingers to signal agreement in Occupy s General Assemblies or chanting about direct democracy in Greece, Spain, or Chile--digital media have contributed to an enthusiasm for participation that reaches well beyond protest politics.

DEMOCRACY FROM A(THENS) TO Z(UCCOTTI PARK)

In 1962, members of the fledgling Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) called for a "participatory democracy" in which decisions were made by those affected by them. (2) SDS did not invent the practices of consensus-based decision-making and decentralized leadership that have come to epitomize participatory democracy. Eighteenth century Quakers, 19th century abolitionists and women's suffrage groups, and early 20th century European anarcho-syndicalists, labor groups, and radical pacifists had used those practices long before new leftists discovered them. In fact, SDS activists did not even have internal organizational practices in mind when they talked about participatory democracy. Rather, they used the term to describe a macro-political system. Still, SDS's organizational style at the time was informal, and the group was inspired by the consensus-based decisionmaking used by student civil rights activists in the South. The notion that the movement itself should be radically democratic gained force. By the late 1960s, consensus-based decisionmaking, decentralized administration, and an anti-leadership ethos had been adopted by countless groups in the women's liberation and antiwar movements. In urban neighborhoods, cooperatives proliferated, and in rural areas, communes did as well. (3)

Scholars initially dismissed the political aspirations of participatory democratic forms. They argued that bids to operate as radical democracies were expressive and antipolitical, to be explained in terms of activists' psyches rather than their political purposes. (4) By the mid-1970s, however, that view had begun to change. Political scientist Carl Boggs introduced the term "prefigurative" in 1977 to describe attempts to enact a radically egalitarian society in the lived practices of the movement, and sociologist Wini Breines used the term to describe the 1960s' new left. (5) New leftists' experiments with consensus based decisionmaking and structureless organization were not antipolitical, Breines argued. Rather, they were a political alternative to the narrow instrumentalism and penchant for bureaucratic manipulation that characterized mainstream politics. (6)

The term "prefigurative" would enter activists' vocabulary as a powerful justification for radically democratic decisionmaking. But Breines, like other observers, did not see a prefigurative orientation as a recipe for success. Political reform demanded an ability to act quickly, manage resources shrewdly, and marshal expertise to realize goals. Decentralized and nonhierarchical organization made those things difficult. The inefficiencies of participatory democracy could be tolerated so long as a group was small, poorly funded, and low in political profile. But when opportunities arose for genuine impact, groups inevitably found themselves torn between democratic purists and those willing to give up some democracy in order to get things done. (7)

Another criticism of participatory democratic decisionmaking centered not on its inefficiency, but on its inequity. Participatory democracy could not even do what it was charged to do, namely, eliminate inequalities within the group. This was the complaint made by women's liberationist Jo Freeman. The activists Freeman knew had determinedly eliminated centralized structures and chains of command. But the "tyranny of structurelessness" was that in the absence of formal hierarchies, informal ones took their place. Power based on knowing the right people took the place of mechanisms of democratic accountability. (8)

There were still other criticisms. Political scientist Jane Mansbridge studied a New England town...