Hybrid Democracy: How Deliberation and Representative Democracy Institutions Can Cooperate.

This paper expands on the thinning distinction, in scholarship and in practice, between two forms of democracy generally kept conceptually separated: contestatory democracy and representative democracy. In scholarship, perceptions of these two strains vary sensibly from author to author but all in all they can be sorted into two major families, each characterized by its own logic and origin story. The problem is that new hybrid forms of democratic rule emerge from contaminations between these two strains, and these forms challenge the principled distinction between them. Populism, and its effects on institutions and social routines is a case in point, as here contestatory democracy penetrates institutions and contributes directly to reshaping democratic structures across the divide between representative and contestatory. We argue that the reactions in scholarship to this development vary, but there is one dominant line of reasoning that values ‘containment’ as the strategy suitable to preserve the democratic quality of a system (Urbinati 2014 is a case in point). Here the populist push is contained by reinforcing the formats and processes of representative democracy: it is institutions, more than political processes, that contain potentially undemocratic drifts. The containment logic frames in fact this hybridization as undemocratic: it is a liability, not an opportunity, for democratic rule. We argue that deliberative democracy provides a way out from these conundrums, as it brings contestatory dynamics to cooperate with the political processes expressed in democratic institutions. This work starts from a review of existing and working cases where deliberative dynamics cooperate with political processes happening in democratic institutions and proposes a comparative analysis of two realities at two different stages of development. The comparative analysis includes the case study of DUMBO, an already existing multifunctional urban district (Distretto Urbano Multifunzionale di BOlogna) located in Bologna and the peripheral neighborhood of Sinigo. This latter, located in the North East of Italy and being part of the Autonomous province of Bolzano, is the classical marginal periphery that saw its development after the second world war with the economic activity mostly developing around chemical industries. The abandonment of such production plants resulted in the progressive emptying of the neighborhood with a high risk of community disintegration and a consequent degradation of the social tissue. Focusing and comparing these two cases, this work explains how contestatory dynamics can, and effectly do, dialogue with “traditional” political processes delineating the potential long term impact(s) that such dynamics might have on the overall perception of democracy expressed by citizens.