Contesting Participatory Governance: New Analyses of the Conditions for Democratic Inclusion

Abstract

The panel aims to highlight how participatory governance, in terms of presence, voice and recognition is shaped by assumptions of gender, race, class, and educational inequities. Democratic theory and studies of contestation have often assumed, following philosophers like Habermas and Arendt, that politics happens when “private people come together as a public.” Thus, researchers usually take the distinctions between public and private, political and personal, for granted. By contrast, political economy, and intersectional analyses have examined the “private” and “personal” as spheres of politics, sometimes with an aim to understand how these spheres connect with participatory and deliberative spaces. In this panel, we want to explore these connections further, empirically and theoretically, especially in light of the recent crises that have reinforced inequalities in life conditions.

Title	Details
A common-based approach to urban policymaking: self-government, co-production and popular control in the Citizen Asset Programme in Barcelona	View Paper Details
Democracy’s Invisible Labor: The Ethics and Politics of Caring for Democracy	View Paper Details
Can participatory democracy be inclusive from a social class perspective?	View Paper Details
Social inequality in advisory councils’ participation: the importance of cultural capital and bureaucratic knowledge	View Paper Details
Is Sortition Democracy Compatible with Capitalism?	View Paper Details