Participatory Democracy - History

History

Participatory democracy has been a feature of human society since time immemorial. The most famous example of participatory democracy is the Haudenosaunee confederacy (also known as the Iroquois confederacy) which operates under the oldest living unchanged constitution in the world, and is the basis of the United States constitution. It is a common practice of non-civilized peoples and tribal nations. In 8th and 7th century Ancient Greece, the informal distributed power structure of the villages and minor towns began to be displaced with collectives of Oligarchs seizing power as the villages and towns coalesced into city states. This caused much hardship and discontent among the common people, with many having to sell their land due to debts, and even suffer from debt slavery. At around 600BC the Athenian leader Solon initiated some reforms to limit the power of Oligarchs and re-establish a partial form of participatory democracy with some decisions taken by a poplar assembly composed of all free male citizens. About a century later, Solon's reforms were further enhanced for even more direct involement of regular citizens by Cleisthenes. Athenian democracy came to an end in 322BC. When democracy was revived as a political system about 2000 years later, decisions were made by representatives rather than by the people themselves. A minor exception to this was the limited form of direct democracy which flourished in the Swiss Cantons from the later Middle Ages. In the late 19th century a small number of thinkers including Oscar Wilde and Emma Goldman began advocating for increased participatory democracy. It was in the 20th century that practical implementations of participatory democracy once again began to take place, albeit mostly on a small scale, attracting considerable academic attention from the 1980s.

A brief period where a region was governed almost totally by participatory democracy occurred during the Spanish civil war, from 1936–1938, in the parts of Spain controlled by anarchist republicans. In 1938 the anarchists were displaced after being turned on by their former republican allies in the Communist party as well as suffering attacks by the loyalist forces of General Franco. The writer George Orwell, who experienced participatory democracy as he was in Spain with the anarchists before their defeat, discusses it in his book Homage to Catalonia, and says participatory democracy was a "strange and valuable" experience where one could "breath the air of equality" and where normal human motives like snobbishness, greed and fear of authority had ceased to exist.

The mystic and philosopher Simone Weil, who had helped the Spanish anarchists as a combat soldier, would later promote participatory democracy in her political manifesto The Need for Roots.

In the 1960s the promotion and use of participatory democracy was a major theme for elements of the American Left.

In the 1980s, the profile of participatory democracy within academia was raised by James Friskin, the professor who introduced the deliberative poll. Experiments in forms of participatory democracy that took place within a wider framework of representative democracy began in cities around the world, with an early adopter being Brazil's Porto Alegre. A World Bank study found that participatory democracy in these cities seemed to result in considerable improvement in the quality of life for residents.

In the early 21st century, low profile experiments in participatory democracy began to spread throughout South and North Americas, to China, across the European Union and also to Great Britain. A partial example in the USA occurred with drawing up the plans to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, with thousands of ordinary citizens involved with drafting and approving the plan. In 2011, participatory democracy became a notable feature of the Occupy movement, with Occupy camps around the world taking decisions based on the outcome of working groups where every protestor gets to have their say, and by general assemblies where the decisions taken by working groups are effectively aggregated together. Those involved with the Occupy movement have been described as very much attached to their forms of participatory democracy, even to the extent of "fetishizing it." .

The decision-making process used by the Occupy movement is an example of an attempt to combine equality, mass participation and deliberation, though at a cost of slow decision making. By November 2011 the movement had been frequently criticized for not yet coalescing around clearly identifiable aims, though many have argued that the experiment with participatory democracy was the only plausible aim.