Political movements have embodied the utopia of anti-politics. This normative burden and depoliticized perception keep the sociological social movement theory in captivity, which prevent the creation of a realistic overview of collective actions. Hence I elucidate the movements’ role and function in the political processes and in the functioning of democracy with the means of political theory. According to my presupposition the three rival theories of democracy (deliberative-participatory-, neoclassical representative- and leader democracy) are connected logically to the forms of direct democracy, such as classical direct -, referendum - and the populistic “protest-democracy”. Thus various movement-concepts could be set up and compared to each other to point out their differences and show the limits of the bottom-up approaches. The hypothesis of my research is that the nature of movements is fundamentally political and the direction of these collective actions is mainly top-down, which makes them the leaders’ instruments easily.
