Abstract
In constitutional democracies, popular sovereignty allows citizens to agree on how and who is in charge to take decisions. Representative democracy is under strain, as upheld by the majority of scholars dealing with democracy issues. Therefore, decision-making procedures need to be revised in order to make them more adequate for contemporary societies. This is pursued through the development of new tools that revolve around the idea of citizen’ participation generally referred to as ‘participatory democracy’. Hence, this study investigates the interactions between the concept of participatory democracy and two comparative constitutional categories: legal traditions and federal theories.
The research outlines a legal definition of the term ‘participatory democracy’, by distinguishing it from other potentially overlapping concepts, such as direct and deliberative democracy. To this extent, participatory democracy consists of different decision-making procedures that apply deliberation theories, which aim at mitigating the majority principle. In contrast to direct democracy, the tools of participatory democracy do not lead to a ‘yes-or-no’ decision but to the development of deliberative debates between citizens and policy-makers regarding political decisions.
This definition is applied to a mapping of participatory processes carried on in the selected case studies, in search for all those experiences that can fall under the umbrella of ‘participatory democracy’. More specifically, the investigation focuses on Austria and Italy and Spain, that belong to the civil-law family, and on two common-law tradition’ countries, the United States and Canada. These countries show certain similarities with regard to the institutional structure; particularly, they are mature constitutional democracies and compound states (federal or regional).
The analysis clarifies how national and subnational constitutional frameworks permit, and to which extent, to participatory democracy to enter policy-making procedures. Despite the heterogeneities deriving from the legal traditions, mostly evident in the legal approach towards democratic innovations, the way participatory democracy is translated into practical instruments is very similar. This holds true with regard to subjects involved, methodologies, and timeframes. In fact, even though participatory processes spread in different contexts, most of them show common features. Because of the detected similarities, it is possible to develop a ‘general theory’ of participatory democracy. To this extent, the collected data are classified in four abstract categories, subjects, methodologies, institutional schemes, effects.
In conclusion, the work wants to shed light on the relation between innovative forms of democracy and federal theories. The research reveals that the link between participatory democracy and federalism should be found more on a theoretical level than on a practical one. Whereas there is less evidence that participatory processes can work only on a local or subnational level, the ideas behind participatory democracy and federalism clearly pursue the same goal: sharing decision-making powers among multiple centers (both people and territories) for the improvement of democratic procedures and popular government.