Revisiting the Notion of 'Good-Enough' Citizens: An Exploration of Current Discourses on Political Participation

The so-called crisis of political representation and the pessimism on the possibilities of new institutional mechanisms to solve it, grant a central role to citizen involvement in contemporary democratic theory. It seems that the “good-enough” citizen (Dahl) should approach the political animal to stop the decline of legitimacy of our democratic systems. But not all normative discourses embrace the same descriptions. We move from representations of the ordinary citizen involved in governance practices to the more concerned one participating on deliberative procedures, to end with the conscious activist who fight for a good cause. The aim of the paper is to analyze from a normative point of view the political implications of these descriptions and the way they help to support alternative “representative claims” (Saward).