Challenging the ‘rules of the game’: The role of bottom-up participatory experiments for deliberative democracy

Deliberative democrats put ‘bottom-up’ legitimacy at the very heart of their normative project: policies and claim that constitutionally fixated ‘rules of the democratic game’ must be justified by inclusive democratic procedures and discourses. Thereby, this account provides a crucial bedrock for initiatives that address the crisis of contemporary representative democracy with the help of democratic innovations or tools for participatory governance. In this article, I suggest an understanding of ‘deliberative democracy’ that systematises and acknowledges the contributions of social movements and civil society actors to democratic legitimacy. ‘Classic’ Habermasian deliberative theory strongly focuses on the ‘orderly’ creation of law – and not on ‘anarchic’ public discourses and social movements that may challenge the institutional status quo. Consequently, a crucial task is to provide an account for how bottom-up political action that can challenge established institutions or constitutional arrangements. I argue that one core strategy consists in enabling social movements and civil society-led initiatives to use the tools of participatory governance (see della Porta & Felicetti 2019). To illustrate the implications of these theoretical considerations, the chapter points towards the the potential of exemplary civil society-rooted initiatives to challenge and reform democratic institutions with such tools: the Icelandic initiative for democratic reform (2010-13) and the German ‘Bürgerrat Demokratie’ (2019; see Fleuß, 2021). Both ‘bottom-up’ initiatives aimed at changing basic ‘rules of the democratic game’, but differ with regards to (a) the depth of their roots in social movements, (b) their relationship to established institutions and political elites and (c) their concrete goals. These initiatives provide a promising point of departure for democratic reform and for achieving the vision of a more participatory democracy – after all, government-driven democratic innovations (see Warren 2014) can rarely be expected to provide foundational challenges to existing constitutional arrangements and institutions. At the same time, these cases also show that civil society actors must cautiously navigate a fundamental tension of radical democratic scholarship: to achieve democratic institutional reform, civil society-led initiatives must both uphold their commitment to counteract and cooperate with established political elites. References: della Porta, D., & Felicetti, A. (2019). Innovating Democracy Against Democratic Stress in Europe : Social Movements and Democratic Experiments Innovating Democracy Against Democratic Stress in Europe : Social Movements and Democratic Experiments. Representation, 1–18 (online: https://doi.org/10.1080/00344893.2019.1624600). Fleuss, D. (2021): Radical Proceduralism. Democracy from Philosophical Principles to Political Institutions. Emerald Press. Landemore, H. (2015). Inclusive Constitution-Making: The Icelandic Experiment. Journal of Political Philosophy, 23(2), 166–191. Warren, M. E. (2014). Governance-Driven Democratization. In Griggs, S., Norval, A. J., & Wagenaar, H. (Eds.). Practices of freedom: Decentred governance, conflict and democratic participation. Cambridge University Press, 38–59.