Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy

Traditionally, in Democratic Theory, discussions have remained at a high level of abstraction (Smith, 2009: 8) and only in recent years, new approaches have shown a real commitment when it comes to designing institutions based on different democratic models. In this sense, scholars who study democratic innovations are developing an enriching work in order to study institutional mechanisms inspired in (i) the deliberative model (mini-publics), the (ii) participatory theoretical position (participatory budgeting), (iii) proximity democracy (neighborhood councils and assemblies), (iv) Community Development (mechanisms reflected in the Community Development Plan) or (v) direct democracy (referendum, plebiscite). However, the agonistic model of democracy is the only model which has not been institutionalized: is the only approach which has not inspired mechanisms of democratic innovations, giving growth to a deep knowledge gap. Only a few exceptions have tried to tackle this challenge (see Wingenbach, 2011), and this could be due to the fact that agonistic democracy is generally interpreted as a critique against (confronting) institutions (Wingenbach, 2011: 79). Nevertheless, is realistic to state that agonistic approaches have more to offer apart from a purely negative critique: it is plausible to think and theorize about how to institutionalize different positions of agonistic democracy. In this sense, Mouffe’s proposal includes perhaps the clearest articulation of the necessity of institutions: she emphasizes that the adversarial agonism must develop a theory of institutions in order to transcend the risks of antagonism, related to the growth of the far Right in Europe or expressions of religious fundamentalism. Mouffe insists on getting the importance of antagonism, and by acknowledging it, tries to transform the antagonistic dimension into an adversarial model, since one of the main challenges of her proposal of agonistic democracy consists in defusing the potential antagonism (Mouffe, 2013: 6), not by reaching consensus but by making it compatible with pluralism (Mouffe, 2013: 7), what in the post-Marxist language is called agonistic pluralism: a principle which entails a clear potential in order to imagine how to institutionalize agonistic democracy and agonistic democratic innovations. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to explore the potential possibilities for institutionalizing Mouffean agonistic democracy, believing that it can go beyond abstract discussions by being implemented through democratic innovations. In this sense, this paper asserts that the material implementation of agonistic democracy could occur when applying three of the six theoretical positions of participatory democracy drawn by Ganuza and Sintomer (2011: 43) -participatory democracy, community development and proximity democracy- given that these positions are connected with the principles of Mouffean agonistic democracy. Indeed, these theoretical positions -participatory democracy, community development and proximity democracy- have followed the method of inductive reasoning, focusing more enthusiastically on practical applications; while the agonistic model follows the method of deductive reasoning; therefore, this article maintains that both agonistic and participatory democracy can converge, establishing synergies and finding themselves in the middle of their ways.