Occupying Space: Representation, Participation and Democracy in Occupy Wall Street

Many Occupiers rejected representative democracy as an organizing principle. They preferred the prefiguration of participatory democratic spaces. Despite this critique, I hold that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) provided both, a space for participation and a space of representation. I wish to inquire after the relationship between representation, participation and democratization in this case. Building on Saward (2010), who suggests to analyze representative claims beyond formal political processes, I will argue that OWS provided a representational space for marginalized voices. This can be interpreted as a strategy to foster democratization (cf. Young 2002). However, I contend that Occupiers also aspired democratization in another way. Occupiers widely encouraged participation in the prefigurative democratic spaces and in the various community projects of OWS. Polletta’s work on the strategic choice of participatory democracy in American social movements is valuable for an analysis of OWS (Polletta 2002). Why was participatory democracy a strategic choice in Occupy? My interview data indicates that a major goal of OWS was to multiply the actors for democratization at the local scale. Occupiers seemed to aim at the democratization of all spheres of society. The occupation was widely perceived by observers as an innovative form of contentious politics. But occupations and prefigurative spaces are not new to researchers of contentious politics. It has been analyzed that movements can pursue confrontation through occupation of places with high symbolic values (see e.g.,Tilly 2000). Others have studied the ‘free spaces,’ who facilitate the development of movements (for an overview see Polletta & Kretschmer 2013; also Della Porta 2009). Building on these two strands of literature, my paper will put OWS in the context of a history of different uses of space for collective action. My paper will be based on interviews that were conducted with Occupiers in New York City in March 2012.