The Political Turn of Citizens: Between Social Movements and Democratic Innovations

The new participatory mechanisms offer a logic of collective action different to what has been the usual fare in the cities – one that is based on proposal rather than demand. As a result, it requires urban social movements to transform their own dynamics in order to make room for a new political subject (the citizenry) and to act upon a stage where deliberative dynamics now apply. The present article aims to analyse this conflict because it’s at stake the role of associations in the processes of democratisation and the setting forth of a new way of doing politics by means of deliberative procedures. We start from Habermas, who understand democratic process in two stages: first, a casual discussion outside institutions among citizens, and then a formalization of this debate in a public opinion that would influence the institutional actions. The key link in this chain is social movements, which would amplify a demand in the public space in order to influence the representatives of the political system. The new participatory mechanisms changed this scheme. What for Habermas and others was a natural sequence of informal discussion-social movements-political system gave way to formal discussions bounded by procedures and a direct influence on policy. The result is ambiguous. The new participatory tools face important challenges as 1) citizens participation is treated mainly as an exposition of their preferences rather than a discussion about common goods and 2) citizens can’t overcome the procedures, usually established by rulers. We want to go further looking at the citizen’s view of democracy. The problem for us lies on the way citizens fail to connect themselves to centres of power and we think that proceduralism as Rawls’s veil of ignorance give us a key tool to overcame the problems of this democratization process.