ICTlogy

Jane S. Ley. Former Deputy Director of the United States Office of Government Ethics
Ethics Management in Government: Experience in American Government

The US Office of Government Ethics (OGE) was created after the Watergate scandal to prevent and investigate corruption and other unethical political practices. The office works at the Federal level, but some states and cities have similar bodies that deal with ethics, conflicts of interest and corruption.

The office creates written standards on what the citizen is expecting from a public officer: standards on payments, codes of conduct, etc.

Ethics or conduct is about everything that is not covered by the Law. But it is not about “general ethics” but about widely acknowledged standards and what is a correct (public) behavior and what is not.

For instance, a confidential financial disclosure procedure was created to avoid or to alert about conflicts of interest. This instrument is especially used as a counseling tool, to raise awareness on acts that can enter a conlifct of interest, more than a tool for ex-post enforcement or punishment.

Another project that the office runs is training for each and every new public officer.

There is, though, an enforcement part of the programme. This enforcement part consists in investigating people and practices that are suspicious of unethical behavior, or some information has been made public that raises questions about their behavior.

Discussion

Rogelio Rajala: who provides training? Ley: every agency is in charge of deploying their own training and it’s usually done in house.

Q: what happens when people lose trust in the government? Ley: when the citizen trusts not the government, it is a very difficult situation as anything the government does does not seem legitimate. Only regaining trust is a way forward. We have to raise awareness on people acting evilly and people just acting bad but without a bad intention. This is an important task to do and it helps in recovering trust.

Jordi Tres: does the office intervenes in the selection of the people recruited for the different agencies in charge of public ethics. Ley: OGE trains these officers.

Q: how do we deal with the ‘revolving door’ problem? Ley: the dilemma is that the government wants to recruit the best brains out there, but also to avoid that these best brains (who are working for top companies) use their government position and information to be able to help somebody they are going to work with/for in the future. The latter is the goal of the OGE. But once they’re out of office, there are also laws that prevent conflicts of interest about (not) using confidential information, access to top contacts, etc.

David Morella: how to prevent excessive lobbying power of corporations? Ley: there’s a lobbying law that deals about who talks to whom and about what, that regulates donations to parties and campaigns, etc.

Ismael Peña-López: what happens in the gray area between what is fair and what is illegal, i.e. what is unethical while being legal? Or what happens when the crime has expired (i.e. not guilty, but not innocent either) or when the process of judging a person takes very long? Ley: It depends. For public employeeds, there is a code of conduct and if their behavior is affecting or can affect their duties, they can be fired, or be given other administrative duties out of their actual responsibility. For members of the cabinet, it depends on how embarrassing they are to the president or to the one they are working for. The problem comes with elected members, who can resign but do not necessarily have to. Thus, it will depend on their voters’ outrage, what they did, etc.

Gabriel Capilla: how you deal with conflicts? Ley: our laws are not that much about conflicts of interest but more about incompatibilities. E.g. selling stock of specific companies they might own if they are in an office related with the Treasury.

Carme Olivé: what about local politics? In Spain, most political representation is based on political parties. But a mayor is somewhat similar to a mayor in the US. How can we raise awareness on transparency and ethics a the local level? Ley: the smaller the community, the more likely conflicts of interest will be avoided or found. Notwithstanding, the transparency of the whole process and the public perception of fairness is crucial.

Q: in Spain there is a good amount of people that are involved in trials and charged for different crimes, and the process is taking so long that the presumption of innocence seems not to be enough for the citizen. How can media help in bringing some light to the debate? What happens with the trade off freedom of speech (of media) vs. privacy (of elected representatives being tried)? Do we trust media? Do they help in creating an objective public opinion upon whether an elected representative should resign or be dismissed? Ley: the US do not control the press, and even if there are laws against libel, freedom of speech is very important and rarely is tampered with. And thus trust the public to make up their own decisions.

Óscar Rojas: the US have a law that deals with access to information since 1966, unlike Spain which just approved its own in 2013 and the Catalan Parliament that will very likely approve theirs in 2014. Do you think that the law should be restrictive to accessing information or very tolerant? Ley: the good thing of being a late comer is that you can benefit from what other countries have done in the field. My own principle is that the more information is out there, the better, even if one did not ask for it. And exceptions should be as narrow as possible. If the information is embarrassing to the government, that is not enough to withdraw that information. Only matters of national security, whether someone can be killed because of the disclosure of certain information, etc. would be exceptions to be taken into account.

Innovation, open innovation, social innovation… is there such a thing as open social innovation? Is there innovation in the field of civic action that is open, that shares protocols and processes and, above all, outcomes? Or, better indeed, is there a collectively created innovative social action whose outcomes are aimed at collective appropriation?

Innovation

It seems unavoidable, when speaking about innovation, to quote Joseph A. Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy:

The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.

In the aforementioned work and in Business Cycles: a Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process he stated that innovation necessarily had to end up with existing processes, and that entire enterprises and industries would be destroyed with the coming of new ways of doing things, as the side effect of innovation. This creative destruction would come from, at least, the following fronts:

• A new good or service in the market (e.g. tablets vs. PCs).
• A new method of production or distribution of already existing goods and services (e.g. music streaming vs. CDs).
• Opening new markets (e.g. smartphones for elderly non-users).
• Accessing new sources of raw materials (e.g. fracking).
• The creation of a new monopoly or the destruction of an existing one (e.g. Google search engine)

Social innovation

Social innovation is usually described as innovative practices that strengthen civil society. Being this a very broad definition, I personally like how Ethan Zuckerman described social innovation in the Network Society. According to his innovation model:

1. Innovation comes from constraint.
2. Innovation fights culture.
3. Innovation does embrace market mechanisms.
4. Innovation builds upon existing platforms.
5. Innovation comes from close observation of the target environment.
6. Innovation focuses more on what you have more that what you lack.
7. Innovation is based on a “infrastructure begets infrastructure” basis.

His model comes from a technological approach — and thus maybe has a certain bias towards the culture of engineering — but it does explain very well how many social innovations in the field of civil rights have been working lately (e.g. the Spanish Indignados movement).

Open innovation

The best way to define open innovation is after Henry W. Chesbrough’s Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating And Profiting from Technology, which can be summarized as follows:

Open Social Innovation

The question is, can we try and find a way to mix all the former approaches? Especially, can we speak about how to have social innovation being open?

In my opinion, there is an important difference between social innovation and innovation that happens in the for-profit environment:

1. The first one, and more obvious, is that while the former one has to somehow capture and capitalize the benefits of innovation, the second one is sort of straightforward: if the innovation exists, then society can “automatically” appropriate it.
2. The second one is the real cornerstone: while (usually) the important thing in (for-profit) open innovation is the outcome, in social innovation it (usually) is more important the process followed to achieve a goal rather than achieving the goal itself.

Thus, in this train of thought, open social innovation is the creative destruction that aims at making up new processes that can be appropriated by the whole of civil society. I think there are increasingly interesting examples of open social innovation in the field of social movements, of e-participation and e-democracy, the digital commons, P2P practices, hacktivism and artivism, etc.

I think that open social innovation has three main characteristics that can be fostered by three main actions of policies.

Characteristics

• Decentralization. Open social innovation allows proactive participation, and not only directed participation. For this to happen, content has to be separated from the container, or tasks be detached from institutions.
• Individualization. Open social innovation allows individual participation, especially at the origin of innovation. This does not mean that collective innovation is bad or avoided, but just that individuals have much flexibility o start on their own. This is only possible with the atomization of processes and responsibilities, thus enabling maximum granularity of tasks and total separation of roles.
• Casual participation. Open social innovation allows participation to be casual, just in time, and not necessarily for a log period of time or on a regular basis. This is only possible by lowering the costs of participation, including lowering transaction costs thus enabling that multiple actors can join innovative approaches.

Policies

How do we foster decentralization-individualization-casual participation? how do we separate content from the container? how do we atomize processes, enable granularity? how do we lower costs of participation and transaction costs?

• Provide context. The first thing an actor can do to foster open social innovation is to provide a major understanding of what is the environment like, what is the framework, what are the global trends that affect collective action.
• Facilitate a platform. It is not about creating a platform, it is not about gathering people around our initiative. It deals about identifying an agora, a network and making it work. Sometimes it will be an actual platform, sometimes it will be about finding out an existing one and contributing to its development, sometimes about attracting people to these places, sometimes about making people meet.
• Fuel interaction. Build it and they will come? Not at all. Interaction has to be boosted, but without interferences so not to dampen distributed, decentralized leadership. Content usually is king in this field. But not any content, but filtered, grounded, contextualized and hyperlinked content.

Some last thoughts

Let us now think about the role of some nonprofits, political parties, labour unions, governments, associations, mass media, universities and schools.

It has quite often been said that most of these institutions — if not all — will perish with the change of paradigm towards a Networked or Knowledge Society. I actually believe that all of them will radically change and will be very different from what we now understand by these institutions. Disappear?

While I think there is less and less room for universities and schools to “educate”, I believe that the horizon that is now opening for them to “enable and foster learning” is tremendously huge. Thus, I see educational institutions having a very important role as context builders, platform facilitators and interaction fuellers. It’s called learning to learn.

What for democratic institutions? I cannot see a bright future in leading and providing brilliant solutions for everyone’s problems. But I would definitely like to see them having a very important role as context builders, platform facilitators and interaction fuellers. It’s called open government.

Same for nonprofits of all purposes. Rather than solving problems, I totally see them as empowering people and helping them to go beyond empowerment and achieve total governance of their persons and institutions, through socioeconomic development and objective choice, value change and emancipative values, and democratization and freedom rights.

This is, actually, the turn that I would be expecting in the following years in most public and not-for-profit institutions. They will probably become mostly useless with their current organizational design, but they can definitely play a major role in society if they shift towards open social innovation.

My research on slacktivism has finally been published as a paper both in Spanish and Catalan at two “brother” journals: Educación Social. Revista de Intervención Socioeducativa and Educació Social. Revista d’Intervenció Sòcioeducativa.

This is work that I had already presented at two conferences — 9th International Conference on Internet, Law & Politics; II Jornadas españolas de ciberpolítica — and, thus, is now available in three languages: the former two plus English.

What follows — after the abstract — is a list of the references and full text downloads for the papers. The main idea of the papers is that if we look at slacktivism from the point of view of the “activist”, it is but true that it is a very low-commitment activism. But if we take the approach of the politician or the policy-maker, or if we take some distance and take a look at the whole landscape, what we find is that slacktivism is only a tiny portion of a huge cosmos of people very actively engaging in politics, extra-representational politics though, and that is why most of it flies underneath the traditional political radar.

Abstract

Politics have traditionally looked at the exercise of democracy with at least two implicit assumptions: (1) institutions are the normal channel of politics and (2) voting is the normal channel for politics to make decisions. Of course, reality is much more complex than that, but, on the one hand, all the extensions of that model beyond or around voting –issues related to access to public information, to deliberation and argumentation, to negotiation and opinion shaping, or related to accountability are based on institutions as the core axis around which politics spin. On the other hand, the existence and analysis of extra-institutional political participation –awareness raising, lobbying, citizen movements, protests and demonstrations– have also most of the times been put in relationship with affecting the final outcomes of institutional participation and decision-making, especially in affecting voting.

Inspired in the concept of «feet voting» (developed by Tiebout, Friedman and others) in this paper we want to challenge this way of understanding politics as a proactive and conscious action, and propose instead a reactive and unconscious way of doing politics, based on small, casual contributions and its posterior analysis by means of big data, emergence analysis and pattern recognition.

In our theoretical approach –illustrated with real examples in and out of the field of politics– we will argue that social media practices like tweeting, liking and sharing on Facebook or Google+, blogging, commenting on social networking sites, tagging, hashtagging and geotagging are not what has been pejoratively labelled as «slacktivism» (a comfortable, low commitment and feel-good way of activism) but «casual politics», that is, the same kind of politics that happen informally in the offline world. The difference being that, for the first time, policy- and decision-makers can leverage and turn into real politics. If they are able to listen. If they are able to think about politics out of institutions and in real-time.

Download

Peña-López, I. (2013). Casual politics: del clicktivismo a los movimientos emergentes y el reconocimiento de patrones. En Educación Social. Revista de Intervención Socioeducativa, (55), 33-51. Barcelona: Universitat Ramon Llull.

Peña-López, I. (2013). Casual politics: del clicktivisme als moviments emergents i el reconeixement de patrons. A Educació Social. Revista d’Intervenció Sòcioeducativa, (55), 33-50. Barcelona: Universitat Ramon Llull.

Peña-López, I. (2013). Casual Politics: From slacktivism to emergent movements and pattern recognition. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Internet, Law & Politics. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, 25-26 June, 2013. Barcelona: UOC.

Guadalupe Martínez (Universidad de Granada. Expert in the Tunisian electoral process)
The Tamarod (rebellion) movement. Expression in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Bahrain, Palestine, Iraq.

The Tamarod phenomenon takes place in a specific geographical area — the one that was part of the Arab Spring in 2011-2012 — but an area that is expanding — now towards Syria. But we have to take into account that not all Arabic countries are experiencing this movement, and not all countries are from the Arabic world (e.g. Turkey).

The Tamarod movement stands for rebellion and is liked with the Arab Spring, but it is not exactly its extension. It begins circa Spring 2013, a major visibility during Summer 2013 and a later phase of active action during Fall 2013. The name Tamarod is used in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Bahrain, Palestine an Iraq. In Libya it takes the name of Rafd (rejection) and in Palestine as Qawen (resistance). The focus of reference is Egypt 30 June 2013 and it is an interconnected movement with the Net as a main node (especially Facebook and Twitter).

Common characteristics

There is a sociological mimesis: young, urban and educated citizens with experience in activism.

None of the movements questions the legitimacy of the governments, or how they did get to the government, but they do question how they use power once in office. This does not mean that there are no specific characteristics in each case/country: indeed, the focus of pressure is different as there is a defective illiberal democracy in Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya; a pluralist quasi-comptetitive authoritarianism in Morocco; or an restrictive hegemonic authoritarianism in Bahrain. And the distribution of power is also different: presidential republics (Egypt, maybe Palestine), parliamentarian republics (Tunisia, Iraq, Libya), absolutist monarchy (Bahrain), and constitutional (though authoritarian) monarchy (Morocco).

So, in general, the movement(s) aim at dissolving the ruling institutions, but they do put the accent or focus in different and specific aspects of their respective institutions. Tamarod is a movement for democracy, and in no case is a movement against a specific group (e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood or the islamists). Thus, the relationship of Tamarod with the parties of each country depends on the context, the inner institutional structure of the country, the very same nature of the parties, etc.

The role of the security forces has also been slightly different in each country, ranging from frontal opposition (and fight), no implication at all, or even a positive implication — most of the cases, though, feature a negative implication of the security forces.

Lali Sandiumenge (Journalist. Author of the blog: guerrerosdelteclado.wordpress.com)

The Kifaya platform is born in Egypt in 2004, made up by experienced activists (“from the previous generation”) to ask for dire reforms in Mubarak’s government. Kifaya gathers, thus, people that have taken part in many other protests. The new thing is that the young wing of Kifaya trains other activists on how to use the new tools of technopolitics.

In 2006 there’s the blossoming of the islamist blogosphere. Youngsters belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood thus demand through the Net the freeing of imprisoned activists and, on the other hand, claim having a voice on their own without the mediation of media.

In Mahalla, during 2006 and especially in 2008, there are worker protests, which in 2008 becomes a complete riot, not only about labour rights but about basic needs like food (e.g. rice, which had seen its prices sky-rocketing).

The 6th of April Youth Movement is created in Spring 2008 to support the riots in Mahalla and it becomes the first hybrid movement which is born online but supports an offline movement and vice-versa: to try and spread an offline movement making strong an online movement.

After the murder of Khaled Mohamed Saeed (May-June 2010), a page is created on Facebook and quickly becomes a central forum of political debate around democracy (and the lack of it) in Egypt.

Little by little, the riots in Tunisia spread towards Egypt where activism escalates. The protests then quickly become an international unrest and evolve in parallel in both countries. Besides blog pages, Facebook pages, etc. in Arabic, increasingly lots of activists publish in English to escalate the conflict and place it outside of the region’s boundaries. At last, a general call is made to take Tahrir Square. Mubarak blocks the Internet, causing a Streisand effect and making the movement even more visible and gathering more international support.

Javier Toret (Investigador. Trabaja entre filosofía, política, psicología y tecnología, Datanalysis15M)

There are several factors that made the 15M movement blast, that generated a movement that became unrest and evolved into a huge movement.

There is a process of learning, specially in the field of technopolitics. “Hacking + activism + netstrike = hacktivism”. Added to this process, there is a context of an economic crisis, which is one of the determinants, but not the determinant of the 15M movement. Indeed, it is more important the political crisis around the legitimacy of democracy and a need to regenerate it: #nolesvotes, Generación NiNi against the bipartidism, Juventud Sin Futuro, etc.

Technopolitics is way beyond cyberactivism and is not at all slacktivism. Technopolitics is an idea of intervention, is feeding back the physical and the digital layers to improve political activism.

The 15M movement started in social networking sites: 82% of the initial participants new about the movement online — especially Facebook. 1.5M were very active and circa 8.5 participated in any way. 76% of the participants came not from traditional political activism: it was initiated by a brand new generation of activists.

The different movements were interconnected: 31% of the participants of the #nolesvotes movement then came to participate in the 15M. In other words, the 15M movement was slowly born in many other movements that evolved, merged and exploded into a new one.

There is a multilayer activism, which begins in the physical layer (i.e. the streets and squares), then up to the digital layer to try and impact the mass media and political layers.

What the 15M does is to gather all the energy spread across different social networking sites and digital platforms, and to make it go out of the Internet and onto the “plazas” or camps.

After that, the movement boosts. Searches on the internet about the movement, or even keywords as “democracy” peak after the camps, the network dramatically increases its size, a network of camps and replicating nodes is created, nodes are empowered, etc.

Israel Solorio (Researcher. YoSoy132 Movement, Mexico)

In Mexico is difficult to think about any social movement without taking into account the Zapatist movement and how they used technological tools for their own political actions. Other movements that affected were, of course, the Spanish Indignados movemement of the 15M, and also the killings of Tlatelolco during the student mobilizations in 1968. Among many others.

A difference from the YoSoy132 movement and the 15M movement and Democracia Real Ya is that the Mexican case was totally unintended. It all starts with a boycott to candidate Peña Nieto at the Universidad Iberoamericana.

The movement achieved major visibility through individual spokesmen that made it to the headlines and mainstream media, especially TV channels — though a specific individual ended up being hired by the main corporation, Televisa, which was a blow to the credibility of the movement.

Differently from the Spanish 15M movement, which was against political parties in general, YoSoy132 was definitively against the candidate Peña Nieto. Then, when Peña Nieto won the elections and came to office, the movement went into a sort of stand by state, with some action, but mainly remaining latent.

Discussion

Q: how are these movements being populist (or not)? Martínez: it is difficult to state. Many times they are just asking for a genuine regeneration of democracy, but it is also true that, in the Arab region, they often use populist messages and iconography to raise awareness and wake up people by the feelings.

Q: do you think mainstream mass media are censoring the news they do not like, or is it just that they do not understand or do not how to explain the movements? Martínez: it is interesting to state that many media — especially those that are against the government — in the Arab region, media are actually reinforcing and amplifying the movements. Toret: it really depends on the place. In any case, it is true that it is a common characteristic that these movements try to break the circle of power made up by governments and mass media and that determine the public agenda. Solorio: the role of media has been evolving along time. Initially they amplified the movement, as they wanted to foster political debate (or fight the candidate), but now they are more against it and aim at its destruction.

More information

• Collective notes taken on Titanpad.
• Aggregator at RebelMouse.

Political behaviour and political communication

Este grupo de trabajo abarca diferentes aspectos metodológicos vinculados con la medición de comportamientos, valores y actitudes sociopolíticas, así como la repercusión que dichos aspectos pueden tener en el análisis de la relación entre ellos. En este sentido, tendrán cabida en él ponencias que incorporen elementos asociados al diseño de investigaciones empíricas, la operacionalización de conceptos, o la creación de indicadores e índices de medición tanto de comportamiento político y electoral, como de actitudes y valores sociopolíticos. Serán bienvenidos también los trabajos que traten de la adaptación de los indicadores-conceptos (y en su caso, preguntas de cuestionario) al contexto de la investigación comparativa. Tienen su espacio así mismo en este grupo otros aspectos más específicos de la metodología de encuestas tales como el impacto del modo de administración del cuestionario (CAPI; PAPI; CAWI, etc.) en la tasa de respuesta o los resultados obtenidos, los sesgos de la no respuesta parcial o total y cómo (intentar) remediarlos, y otros temas relacionados.

Who answers what and when? The effects of questionnaires in the no answer in the surveys of the CIS barometers.
Lucía Medina Lindo, Robert Lineira, Jordi Muñoz Mendoza, Guillem Rico Camps

• Analyze the effect of the design of surveys in the answers
• Assess whether the results of surveys shape opinion

The analysis goes through the people that did not answered or stated that they “do not know” to political surveys.

• Length of the question: the longer, the more no answers. Not conclusive.
• Position in the questionnaire: the later the question comes, the more no answers. Yes, and significant (tiredness effect).
• The more the options a question has as suggestions for answer, the better. Yes.
• Autonomy of the question. The more you have to know about the options, the worse. Yes.
• Central categories. They act as a harbour and make people answer less no. Yes.

Methodological problems in the measurement of the remembrance of one’s vote: the post-electoral surveys of the CIS.
Jaime Balaguer, Mónica Méndez Lago

Analyze the bias in the remembrance of one’s vote through individual data. Why is that that there are biases?

• Around 30% of people state having voted a party that they did not.

Change of option, memory (one option, other non stated), occultation.

• Index of no collaboration
• Interest in politics
• Political knowledge
• Partidism
• Ideological identity
• Moment of the decision
• Doubts about the voting option (no significant)

Conclusion: better to use the pre-electoral survey and not the post-electoral, as the post-electoral has suffered many influences and is of lower quality.

Decided or undecided. An investigation of individuals’ (in)decisions to Catalan independence
Xavier Fernández-i-Martín, Toni Rodon

Do people that answer the question about the independence of Catalonia do it honestly?

• Undecided people that dk/na: nonresponse: do not answer, item nonresponse: do now want to answer, uncommitted nonresponse, indecision
• Uncertainly about their preference: social conformity, social ambivalence
• Heterogeneity in the distribution of uncertainly and undecided

Hidden preferences:

• Abstention too high, people hiding preferences
• Spiral of silence
• Cross-pressure. People living in ”adverse” scenarios for their true options

According to the model, there is highest consistency for the “yes”, high consistency for the “no” and low consistency for the abstention. And the consistency of the “yes” is growing along time, then refuting the spiral of silence hypothesis.

Measuring tolerance towards corruption. An application of the unidimensional scaling.
Pablo Cabrera Álvarez, Danilo Serani.

What is the relevance of political corruption? There is a tolerance towards political corruption, not blaming or accepting practices ethically refuted. There are several degrees of tolerance: from tacitly accepting corrupt practices to even defending them (e.g. demonstrations in favor of corrupted politicians).
There is a cognitive dissociation where one condemns corruption while, on the other hand, some corruption is tolerated or even defended.
Analysis based on building a Likert scale of corruption tolerance.
Hypotheses:

• Social nature: Power corrupts man
• Efficacy: It does not matter whether the politician is corrupt, but that he performs well
• Indistinction: Everyone is corrupt, everyone does it.

The scaled proved significant, though the wording of the options could be affecting the final results.

The gender gap in political knowledge: is it all about guessing?
Mónica Ferrín, Marta Fraile, Gema García

Is there really a difference/gap in political knowledge between men and women? Do women really know less about politics than men? Why? Reasons in literature:

• Socialization: politics is a man thing
• Socioeconomic inequalities between men and women make them more prone to be knowledgeable in politics
• The format of questions affects the result. Men are less risk averse and usually answer. Women, more risk averse, would rather not answer than providing a wrong answer.
• Different interests and areas of knowledge.
• Other: surveyor effect, context effect, etc.

Political representation and citizen participation: whan can political theory bring to institutional reform?

En el contexto en el que nos encontramos, con una crisis económica que no solo está mostrando las debilidades e ineficiencias de nuestro sistema político, sino que comienza a afectar a su legitimación democrática, resulta imperioso revisar la organización y el funcionamiento de nuestras instituciones más básicas. Pero hacerlo exige huir de propuestas de reforma reactivas, condicionadas por la coyuntura y dirigidas a corregir malas prácticas, y a hacer un análisis de nuestras instituciones democráticas que tenga en cuenta la enorme complejidad de los procesos políticos en sistemas multi-nivel, cuyas instituciones apenas han modificado su diseño o sus fines para tener un mejor encaje en el sistema final, o para que este adquiera una mayor coherencia como un todo. Este panel tiene por objeto presentar las aportaciones teóricas que pueden ser relevantes para orientar globalmente esas reformas y mejorar la calidad de la democracia, centradas en la renovación del discurso de la representación política y la participación ciudadana (Anskersmit, Saward, Warren, Mansbridge, etc.) y su repercusión institucional (rol de los parlamentos, mecanismos deliberativos, representatividad de los grupos de interés, etc.).

Participative Democracy in local Mexican governments: the country capital
Ernesto Casas Cárdenas.

The republican perspective approaches negotiation and agreements as endogenous.
Deliberation requires:

• Equity in socioeconomic terms.
• Equality before the law and sharing of values.

Hypothesis: Success of participation is related to the commitment of the authorities with the agreements achieved.
Informal relationships between citizens, civic organizations and authorities have a key role in relationships, but can logically hurt formality.
Conclusions:

• Informality and scepticism of political parties are important barriers to the development of participation.

Liberal and democratic? The participative theory of civic neorepublicanism.
Rafael Vázquez García, Aleksandra Sojka

Can civic neorepublicanism integrate the values of liberalism and of communitarism?
It seems that after WWII democracy is not working: is too much formalist, infested with protocol, non-participative. Can we bring participation back into democracy?

• Less participation weakens democracy.
• Civil society as a fosterer.

Civic neorepublicanism:

• Plurality of groups
• Autonomy between different spheres of life
• Publicity in interaction
• Privacy as space of moral development of individuals
• Necessary legality that enables its functioning.
• The health of democracies relies on moral commitments.
• Volunteer associations.

Obedience to law has to be accompanied with moral values and strong criticism: civic disobedience is, thus, highly democratic.

Democracy, crisis, alternatives and the reproduction of the patriarchate
Jone Martínez Palacios.

Has participative democracy taken into account the gender issue?
The social contract that builds societies and democracies has surely not taken into account the feminine factor but, on the contrary, is reproducing the patriarchate of society. In this sense, democracy is not in crisis, but <em>was born</em> in crisis.
It now seems that there is an ongoing regeneration of democracy in which a new contract is being drawn and agreed, led not by the three democratic powers but led by the fourth power of civic participation.
The problem is that most participatory or deliberative democracy experiences are not explicitly addressing the issue of a sexual contract.
Proposals

• Link the economic debate to the democratic debate.
• Deepen the quality of democracy, including a notion of gender.
• Take women as full citizens.

What is represented. A renewed approach to the concept of representation.
Gonzalo Cavero Cano.

Context:

• Diversity of values
• Multilevel systems
• Giving away of sovereignty
• More actor in the political arena
• Elected and non-elected actors

Weaknesses of representation:

• Distance between representatives and citizens
• Centrality of the representative vs. Importance of what is represented
• Non-electoral representation

Changes:

• Complex institutional system
• Difficult accountability
• Globalization and ICTs
• Multiple political arenas and models of governance
• The “simple mechanism” of representation becomes a “series of complex practices” (Lord & Pollak, 2013)

So, besides the crisis of representation, is there also a crisis of legitimacy of the model?
Does not seem so.
The constructivist turn of representation (E. Severs)

• Centred in the communication processes
• Enables studying extra-parliamentary actors.
• Based on scheme of principal – agent – representation.
• Representation is more seen as an event, a process, rather than a “moment”
• This model puts into the equation of representation actors that were usually labelled as participation or civil society.

Conclusions:

• More a crisis of performance, more than a crisis of model
• Concept of representation is in tension
• The constructivist approach can contribute to explain a more complex reality
• “When we become more familiar with institutions and we cease to question the justifications of their existence, they atrophied by disuse”

Yes, they do represent us? Contemporary challenges to the idea of political representation in Spain.
Pedro Abelllán Artacho.

Two big issues in Spain that challenge representation: the 15M Indignados movement, and the Catalan independentist movement. Possible approaches to these phenomena.
15M:

• We want representation
• We want “complete” democracy
• We have representation, but “those ones” do not represent us
• In this model we cannot be represented

We need an idea of representation vs. Representative government
Complex sovereignty and will: apply Quebec to Catalonia
Catalan independentism:

• Recognition and presence, now
• I am Catalan because I speak Catalan / live in Catalonia
• If you are Catalan you are not Spanish
• They do not want us

Identity as a basis for democracy.
Application to the 15M: identity between representatives and represented citizens.