Breaking the Monolithic View of 'The Citizen': Political Representations and Spaces for Direct Participation

After some decades of relative continuity in the theory of democracy, recent evolutions in the context of a huge economic and political crisis forces us to rethink the essence of democracy, specifying the role of citizens in its procedures and decisions. We already live in complex, often multilevel, political systems that have developed a network of institutions giving rise to fragmented politics and policies which follow different procedures for decisions. To rethink the role of majorities and the spaces for participatory mechanisms, we need to differentiate between decisions about the basic structures of the political system and the procedures for choosing representatives from the criteria for deciding politics and policies. The first need parties and elections to conform a majority, which has to be qualified (a supermajority) when deciding changes on basic institutions (ignored in the Brexit). What cannot be presumed anymore is the “founding fiction” (Rosanvallon, 2007) of our democracies: the assumption that the general interest is defined through the application of the majority rule, understood as a comprehensive principle of legitimation. This legitimation arises from different sources that provide multiple forms of citizens’ involvement in their different roles: experts, party’s politicians, activists or ordinary citizens. The paper focus on the discourses of citizen participation approached from a renewed view of the theory of representation. Its goal is to decompose the monolithic category of “the citizen” that helps to sustain populist discourses of various types, but also some theoretical positions that disregard the role of ideology in democratic politics (Rosemblum, 2010). To do that, it aims to identify and differentiate the various components of the “system of representation”, in which forms of citizens’ participation play a representative role (Urbinaty, 2011; Saward, 2010; Plotke, 1997), outlining a compounded map that match the institutional complexity of contemporary democracies.