Deliberative democracy and the politics of traditional leadership in South Africa: A case of despotic domination or democratic deliberation?

A heated debate developed in South Africa as to the meaning of ‘deliberative democracy’. This debate is fanned by the claims of ‘traditional leaders’ that their ways of village-level deliberation and consensus-oriented decision-making are not only a superior process for the African continent as it evolves from pre-colonial tradition, but that it represents a form of democracy that is more authentic than the Western version. Proponents suggest that traditional ways of deliberation are making a come-back because imported Western models of democracy that focus on the state and state institutions miss the fact that in African societies state institutions are often seen as illegitimate or simply absent from people's daily lives. In other words, traditional leadership structures are more appropriate to African contexts than their Western rivals. Critics suggest that traditional leaders, far from being authentic democrats, are power-hungry patriarchs and authoritarians attempting to both re-invent their political, social and economic power (frequently acquired under colonial and apartheid rule) and re-assert their control over local-level resources at the expense of the larger community. In this view, the concept of deliberative democracy is being misused as a legitimating device for a politics of patriarchy and hierarchy, which is the opposite of the meaning of the term in the European and US sense. This article attempts to contextualise this debate and show how the efforts by traditional leaders to capture an intermediary position between rural populations and the state is fraught with conflicts and contradictions when it comes to forming a democratic state and society in post-apartheid South Africa.     

The uses of history by the Polish democratic opposition in the late 1970s

During the late 1970s, members of the Polish democratic opposition revised and reinterpreted key elements in the Polish past in support of their contemporary ideas about Polish society and opposition. The birth of the independent press in Poland in 1976 provided these debates with a medium for wide dissemination and discussion. Analysis of democratic opposition debates in the independent press on the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, historic Polish–Russian relations, and the struggle for and achievement of independence in the early twentieth century shed light on the ways in which the democratic opposition perceived Polish society and the legacy of tolerance, diversity, nationalism, and socialism within it. It also reveals the major divisions within the democratic opposition and its primary tactical proposals prior to the birth of the Solidarity trade union in 1980. Forty years later, these debates continue to reverberate.     

Explaining non‐participation in deliberative mini‐publics

This article investigates citizens’ refusal to take part in participatory and deliberative mechanisms. An increasing number of scholars and political actors support the development of mini‐publics – that is, deliberative forums with randomly selected lay citizens. It is often argued that such innovations are a key ingredient to curing the democratic malaise of contemporary political regimes because they provide an appropriate means to achieve inclusiveness and well considered judgment. Nevertheless, real‐life experience shows that the majority of citizens refuse the invitation when they are recruited. This raises a challenging question for the development of a more inclusive democracy: Why do citizens decline to participate in mini‐publics? This article addresses this issue through a qualitative analysis of the perspectives of those who have declined to participate in three mini‐publics: the G1000, the G100 and the Climate Citizens Parliament. Drawing on in‐depth interviews, six explanatory logics of non‐participation are distinguished: concentration on the private sphere; internal political inefficacy; public meeting avoidance; conflict of schedule; political alienation; and mini‐public's lack of impact on the political system. This shows that the reluctance to take part in mini‐publics is rooted in the way individuals conceive their own roles, abilities and capacities in the public sphere, as well as in the perceived output of such democratic innovations.     

On the political and democratic preconditions of equal recognition

Alan Patten’s Equal Recognition is a compelling justification of a liberal, procedural conception of recognition. This conception is built upon a convincing conception of moral equality, but it does not offer a full theoretical discussion of recognition. I argue that the liberal recognition provided by Patten is too formal and narrow to address all relevant issues regarding conflicts of recognition in democratic societies. In particular, it does not consider the political and democratic preconditions that should be granted to minority groups or immigrants in order to provide them fair opportunities to effectively (and not only formally) reach equal recognition.     

Rethinking the Tunisian miracle: a party politics view

Five years on from the Tunisian revolution, Tunisia stands as the sole success story of the Arab Spring. The country since then has managed to adopt a pluralist and democratic constitution, and held three free and fair elections. Accordingly, in the eyes of several observers, Tunisia is now in the process of consolidating its new democracy. However, the reality on the ground seems much gloomier, as most recent opinion surveys suggest that there is a significant degree of dissatisfaction, not only with political parties and Parliament but also with the very institution of democracy. Nevertheless, what accounts for this change? After the collapse of the long-lasting and oppressive Ben Ali regime, how, just in five years, has Tunisians’ confidence in the democratic process changed? This article accounts for this state of affairs from a party politics view, arguing that political parties, which are the main protagonists of the consolidation process, fail to fulfill their role of acquiring legitimacy for the new regime. While party–state relations seem to be stabilized due to the inclusiveness of the constitution-making process, both inter-party relationships and the relationship between parties and society suffer from numerous flaws which, in turn, hamper the democratic consolidation process.     

Membership ballots and the value of intra-party democracy

On the face of it, membership ballots present a clear case in which intra-party democracy comes into collision with core principles of representative democracy: they weaken the autonomy of representatives, and undermine the authority of the voters. In this article, I investigate whether this is correct, and whether membership ballots are, therefore, democratically illegitimate, using the controversial 2013 Mitgliederentscheid in the German Social Democratic party as a critical case. I argue that there is nothing democratically suspect about membership ballots and mount a defence of intra-party democracy as intrinsically valuable, appealing to a principle of equal respect for persons as autonomous agents. It turns out that endorsing this principle has two possible implications: that the content of the ballot must be open to deliberation, and that these deliberations should be rendered open to non-members. I discuss these implications and offer some institutional design guidelines.     

Limits of regulatory responsiveness: Democratic credentials of responsive regulation

Responsiveness and accountability constitute the process of democratic representation, reinforcing each other. Responsiveness asks elected representatives to adopt policies ex ante preferred by citizens, while accountability consists of the people's ex post sanctioning of the representatives based on policy outcomes. However, the regulatory literature tends to interpret responsiveness narrowly between a regulator and regulatees: the regulator is responsive to regulatees’ compliance without considering broader public needs and preferences. Democratic regulatory responsiveness requires that the regulator should be responsive to the people, not just regulatees. We address this theoretical gap by pointing out the perils of regulatory capture and advancing John Braithwaite's idea of tripartism as a remedy. We draw out two conditions of democratic regulatory responsiveness from Philip Selznick – comprehensiveness and proactiveness. We then propose overlapping networked responsiveness based on indirect reciprocity among various stakeholders. This mechanism is the key to connecting regulatory responsiveness with accountability.     

#Democracy: social media use and democratic legitimacy in Central and Eastern Europe

Since 1989, many of the former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have made the dramatic change from communist regimes to democratic nations that are integrated in the European sphere. While these sweeping changes have given rise to a successful transition to democracy unlike any the world has ever seen, there remain issues with governance as well as citizen support for the regime. While other studies have shown that mass media can influence a person's attitudes and opinions in the region, none has explored what effect social media can have on orientations toward democracy in the region. In the following paper, I build several hypotheses based on previous studies of media effects and democratic survival. I then employ survey data to empirically test whether social media increases support for democracy. The study finds that not only does using social media increase support for democracy, but also simple usage rather than information seeking provides more consistent effects on a person's support for democracy in CEE.     

Does nationalism promote democracy? Comparative analyses of Ukraine's ‘Maidan’ revolution and Poland's ‘Solidarity’ mass mobilisation

The increased number of ‘democratic revolutions’ around the globe has raised questions of how mass mobilisation contributes to democracy and of what role nationalism plays in this process. Mass mobilisation is viewed as the best option for breaking down communist regimes due to the rise of new political elites to positions of power within the state. On the other hand, the revolutionary character of mass mobilisation movements, together with the uncertainty of the link between democracy and nationalism, may lead such movements to impact negatively on democratisation. Ukraine's ‘Maidan’ revolution and Poland's ‘Solidarity’ movement allow for a comparison of two types of mass movements in terms of both causes and outcomes. This article claims that the mass protests in Ukraine, as opposed to those in Poland, did not lead to democratisation but rather to the opposite: the polarisation of both political elites and civil society. The role of nationalism, in this respect, was shaped and interpreted by political leaders.     

Partidos políticos e innovación democrática: más allá de purezas y perversiones

This article aims to review the conceptual import of the term “political mediation”, to shed light on the analytical reach of indirect politics, whose scope of possibilities has been usually thought of as confined within the opposites of political representation and clientelism. An analytical exercise is put forth as a possible and tentative means not only to establish a vocabulary which may be more sensitive towards present time demands, but also to –in Bunge's words– initially allow for the reinterpretation of older symbols of our political vocabulary. Towards this goal, besides a linguistic and conceptual itinerary of the term “mediation”, each of the three analytical dimensions of indirect politics is developed, favoring dialogue with theories of representation, which channels into an analytical model we call the “cube of indirect politics”. The article ends with a brief case-classification exercise aimed at showing the displacement produced by the model in the understanding of given experiences in indirect politics.