Participatory Democracy - Political Variants

Political Variants

Political variants of participatory democracy include:

Representative democracy is not generally considered participatory. Bioregional democracy is often but not necessarily participatory. Grassroots democracy is an alternative term that has been used to imply almost any combination of the above.

New concepts such as open source governance, collaborative governance, open source politics, and open politics seek to radically increase participation through electronic collaboration tools such as wikis and 'wikigovernment'.

Participatory politics (or parpolity) is a long-range political theory that also incorporates many of the above and strives to create a political system that will allow people to participate in politics, as much as possible in a face-to-face manner.

Deliberative democracy differs from traditional democratic theory in that authentic deliberation, not mere voting, is the primary source of a law's legitimacy. It adopts elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule. When practiced by small groups, it is possible for decision making to be both fully participatory and deliberative. But for large political entities, the democratic reform trilemma makes it difficult for any system of decision making based on political equality to involve both deliberation and inclusive participation. With mass participation, deliberation becomes so unwieldy that it becomes difficult for each participant to contribute substantially to the discussion. Professor James Fishkin argues that random sampling to get a small but representative sample of the general population can mitigate the trilemma, but notes that the resulting decision making group is not open to mass participation.

Demarchy is a hypothetical system where government is heavily decentralized into smaller independent groups. Each group is responsible for one or several functions in society. Officials are volunteers elected to committees controlling these groups by sortition. The system seeks to avoid problems with centralized and electoral governance, while still providing a stable democratic system.

Panocracy or 'pantocracy' also has similarities with participatory democracy. However, it avoids the concept of demos or the people having a single view with the inevitable limitations that come from trying to agree what that view is. It also avoids the expectations that attach to anything called democracy.