From Governance-Driven Democratisation to Democracy-Driven Governance: Democratic Innovations in the 21st Century

Since the 2008 financial crash new social movements have gained momentum often making transformative demands and in some cases translating their aspirations for greater equality into local electoral victories of associated political parties and coalitions (Tormey 2016). A primary strategy of these new forces of participatory politics is to connect social movements to the state through “bottom-linked” forms of collaboration and social innovation (Pares et al 2017). Scholars of democratisation have argued that the resulting institutional innovations, while drawing inspiration from now well-tested forms of deliberative democracy such as mini-publics, tend to be characterised by bottom-up agenda setting and are more critically oriented (Sintomer 2018). The chief ambition and challenge of these new forms of participatory politics are to successfully institutionalise the pre-figurative politics and social justice values that inspired them in the first place. We refer to this “second-wave” strategy as one of “democracy-driven governance” (DDG). Whereas its first-wave predecessor, “governance-driven democratization” (Warren 2013), mobilises citizens into an elite-driven reform project, DDG mobilises the bureaucracy to respond to social innovation initiatives developed in response to the effects of the economic crisis, which also unleashed a legitimacy crisis of the old establishment (Blanco et al 2017; Pares et al 2017). This paper develops a conceptual distinction between GDD and DDG; it then draws on case studies of these different forms of participatory governance, as well as critical scholarship on democratization, in order to assess the opportunities and constraints for these different approaches to act as a democratizing force in the context of contemporary capitalist political economy.