Political Participation and Anticipatory Democracy: An Anticipatory System Approach

This paper addresses an issue of political culture with respect to a subject to be addressed in anticipatory system terms: political participation. To this aim, this approach defines a theoretical political system and its associated governance system in two paradigms: cybernetics and anticipatory. Making a conceptual comparison between the two paradigms, the approach explains how the anticipatory paradigm differs from the classic reactive (cybernetic) one and how the former paradigm would enhance the achievement of an operational solution to the research question concerning the operational aspects of anticipatory democracy. Classic political culture theory aims at providing support to the open governance approach by involving the predictive potential of political attitudes toward governance in a reactive (cybernetic) system paradigm. In the reactive system paradigm, political attitudes toward policy making achieve a predictive capacity as they could guide the transition from current state to a desired state of the policy making process and implicitly of the governance system. Thus, the political system is defined as a cybernetic system in which two main parts – the citizen and the government – use the feedback principle to adjust their own outcome on the feedback received from the other. Their coupling is a typical cybernetic control loop in which each component provides and at the same time receives feedback from the other on policy making. The present paper introduces a different approach: political culture research aims at providing support to the network governance approach by involving the anticipatory potential of political participation in a reflexive system paradigm. In the reflexive system paradigm, political participation in the policy making process achieves an anticipatory capacity as it could provide for the way in which anticipatory democratic participation can evolve toward desirable outcome(s). In this case, the political system could be defined itself as an anticipatory system with reflexive characteristics such that an internal model of the subject addressed here (that is, political participation) is employed to configure the present outcome as dependent on the (desirable) future outcomes(s) and make it evolve toward reaching or making such desirable outcome emerge. This type of system is assumed to be of complex type such that the desirable outcomes is an emergent outcome. The two political culture-based approaches are based on different concepts of ‘governance’, different types of ‘systems’, and different paradigms of interaction between the individuals and the governments. Since the two approaches are defined in two different paradigms, that is, reactive and reflexive system paradigm, respectively, our aim is to emphasize the conceptual requirements on employing the anticipatory systems as a means to identify the anticipatory potential of the political culture in a given governance framework of interest, namely the network governance.