Between Centralism and Participation: Organisation and Democratic Practices in Student Unions of Secondary Education in Italy

Organising at national level and favouring democratic and deliberative spaces can be two difficult tasks to implement together for structures mobilising in multiple settings and with a varied base of activists. Italian school student unions, national organisations that represent and mobilise students of secondary education, have developed an interesting hybrid, mixing elements of the traditional democratic centralism (proper of the leftist tradition and then of the galaxy of unions and organisations of the Italian left) to a tendency to horizontality and a pivotal role of deliberative processes. Through that mix, these organisations rarely resort to majority rule, and keep the research of a consensus-based synthesis as the main practice of decision making. Being active on different levels, from the extremely local to the national one, these unions can be seen as permeable democratic fora, operating in a partly formalised setting, often going beyond statutory prescriptions to get more inclusive and connected to the student movement at large. With the common practice of open assemblies at the local and regional levels, and with a quite unconventional role of delegation at higher levels, these unions appear defined in their procedures but engaged in continuous contaminations with new people and even with competing student collectives and organisations, leading to a flexible attitude towards formality, and to a renewed questioning on the adopted participation tools that sometimes can even lead to great changes and internal re-structuring. The study will be based on interviews, observations and documents related to the action of the Italian school student unions Rete degli Studenti Medi – RSM (est. 2008) and Unione degli Studenti – UdS (est. 1994), in the period that occurs between 2014 and 2024, and it will try to locate these understudied structures between the associational and the deliberative-participatory models of democracy of social movement organisations. The strategies to adapt some ideas of democracy to a context of decline of traditional representative and participatory structures will emerge, looking at years characterised by multiple crises, from neoliberal attacks to public education to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also of unprecedented changes in technology and in political communication, with the affirmation of social media and of online platforms with effects on decision making, internal democracy and organising.