Is the left still “special” regarding participation? Left-wing parties and democratic innovations in Spain

From an ideological standpoint it is possible to trace the link between left-wing parties and participatory innovations. The republican ideals of collective autonomy and common good (Rousseau, 1996) fueled the model of participatory democracy (Barber, 1984; Held, 2006; Hilmer, 2010), born as an answer to the legitimacy crisis of late capitalism. On the other hand, the liberal-democratic right has traditionally kept a more distant position about the citizens’ direct involvement in politics, emphasizing the notion of individual autonomy (negative freedom, see Bobbio, 1996). However, the rise of the New Public Management paradigm in the late 70s and the expansion of democratic innovations by mid 2000s (Smith 2009) have challenged the idea that the left has the monopoly of citizens’ participation. Indeed, right-wing parties are leading and implementing participatory practices and institutions at almost the same rate as left-wing ones. Thus, the crucial question today is not whether parties differentiate on doing or not some participation, but on which participation (goals, styles, outcomes) are being developed. Do different policy priorities result in the use of alternative participatory practices? And more specifically, is there still a distinctive left-wing participation style? Building on works on ideology and citizens’ participation, we contend that left-wing parties still stand for differentiated goals, processes and outputs. In particular, we expect left-wing parties to launch participatory institutions preferably aimed at social justice and citizens’ empowerment, as compared to any other political parties. We also expect them to advocate for more inclusive (open) and deliberative processes, and to give participants a higher degree of decisive power, in line with the citizens’ empowerment goal. In order to put these expectations at the empirical test, we analyze the participatory institutions existing in Spanish municipalities larger than 1000 inhabitants of two of the largest regions in the country (2019-2023). The dataset includes 608 institutions and the characteristics of the municipalities, including parties in charge of center-right, center-left and left parties. Results show that, once we control for a few structural factors, differences among municipalities governed by different parties are small, and mostly concentrated on inputs (aiming at different policy goals).