Notes from the Workshop on New democratic movements, civic culture and the transformations of democracy, organized by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain, on June 18th and 19th, 2015. More notes on this event: new_democratic_movements.
New democratic movements Introduced by Michael Gould-Wartofsky and Ismael Peña López
Michael Gould-Wartofsky: Occupy Wall Street
Occupy movements: critique of actual politics, focus on the economic side of politics (both how they deal about economics and the economics of power), direct democracy, horizontality, etc.
Occupations where planned on a decentralized way, with a huge network of supporters. After the occupation, people would concur and build the necessary infrastructures to carry on with the occupations.
They would stablish procedures like “the people’s microphone” to initiate debates and deliberation, to set up a “school of democracy”.
What were the conditions of the initial success of Occupy Wall Street (OWS)? The success had to do with giving people a voice, to try and make desires and needs be heard and sometimes met.
OWS enabled the confluence of different ways of activism: traditional demonstrations, hacktivism, slacktivism, artivism…
Dire inequalities of the resources required to participate: time, education, political capital, etc. And there were not mechanisms to share or distribute this power to participate. Instead, inner circles were created including a “division of labour”.
How can we translate deliberation and distributed decision-making in other contexts, like institutional/representative democracy? Can they be translated? Do they scale? Are they sustainable?
Sometimes, the movement would close in itself, and lack of openness led to a certain degree of dogmatism.
Ismael Peña-López: 15M Spanish Indignados Movement
The Indignados movement begins with the terrorist attacks in March 2004, when the government lies to the citizens and they (a) go out to the Internet in the search of truthful news and (b) coordinate by means of SMS.
In May 2011, after some years of essay and error, comes the “pilot project”, the camps. The indignados movement will never more quit the public arena and will be characterized by:
decentralization in decision-making
individualization in initiating action, do-ocracy
enable casual participation, by increasing the granularity of participation
How does the movement work:
process
co-decision
radical subsidiarity
What do assemblies and movements do:
context
agora
interaction
Discussion
Francesca Polletta: Where do these movements came from? Were they spontaneous? We know that some collectives played key roles, we know there were networks before, and, still, we say that they were spontaneous. How do we make sense of that?
Ismael Peña-López: for many years, people share data, information, documents, protocols, guidelines, etc. and they are appropriated by the different nodes of the network. The more exchanges and sharing of knowledge, the more the collective political or social capital grows. In the end, one only needs one spark (“let’s camp in Puerta del Sol on May 15th”) for everyone to act, and they will act similarly because they share the language, the protocols and the tools.
Francesca Polletta: About the process of decision-making, who are these movements prefiguring to?
Marianne Maeckelbergh: maybe prefiguration is not the best approach when the outcomes that the movement aims at are blurry, or not very well defined. Prefiguration works best in stable, well defined issues. But these movements are more about gathering first and buitding later, and thus prefiguration may not be a good methodology at all.
José Luís Martí: are these new movements a new thing? are they new from the movements of the 1960s…1990s?
Ismael Peña-López: They are built upon the shoulders of former movements, but they are brand new in the sense that they were born in a digital age, and not in an industrial age. Thus, they had to adapt to new contexts.
Michael Gould-Wartofsky: They are new people and they interact in new ways. People that were not politicized and now are, people that act in new ways.
José Luís Martí: why do we now see a coexistence of offline and online politics that was not present in e.g. 2004, during and after the terrorist attacks of March 11th, 2004?
Ismael Peña-López: the first decade of the XXIst century is an impasse, where industrial politics are already dying, but technopolitics (with a still young Web 2.0 and social networking sites about to gain momentum) are still not deployed. Some pioneers detach themselves from traditional politics and during a whole decade go out and explore the digital landscape. In the second decade of the XXIst century, they find they’ve mapped technopolitics and can now bridge new practices with traditional ones, taking the best of both worlds.
David Karpf: what is the origin of OWS?
Michael Gould-Wartofsky: OWS generated from a split of a general assembly. After that split, there was the need to come together, to try and put in common what they had in common and leave aside what separated them. And take action.
Q: did the participants in the social movements see themselves representatives of other citizens within the movement? did see themselves as representatives outside the movement? did as a way to becoming elected representatives?
Ismael Peña-López: in general, no one in the social movements was aiming to represent anyone, neither insider nor outside of the movement. And being an elected representative was out of the question until a year ago in Spain. But, the mechanics of participation have made it difficult for some people to participate and, thus, by construction, the ones participating were actually representing the whole collective. In general, though, most movements and new parties are really devoting lots of effort and resources to enable participation, and self-representation, so that no minor contribution is set aside just because it was minor, or punctual.
Jane Mansfield: it seems that Spain had more resources in putting up an inclusive movement. Maybe because of the economic context and the general despair with politics. But also maybe because of the longer tradition of labour and left movements in mobilizing people and being inclusive in doing so.
Q: was really face-to-face deliberation important in social movements?
José Luís Martí: these movements were supposed to be highly technologized, and you could have expected that these super-technological people would just have aimed at online participation, and online voting. But it did not go this way: they aimed at physical gathering, they promoted face-to-face deliberation.
Jane Mansfield: there was an excellent combination of coming together to the squares, and feel empowered and that people could make a change, and then also acting online, coordinating, sharing practices and approaches and tools.
Adolfo Estalella: people during the assembly were not allowed to speak for anyone else but themselves, and the assembly itself was not allowed, or believed to be speaking for no one else than the participants of that given assembly, not for the neighbourhood, not for any association, not for anyone.
Adolfo Estalella: for many people, the assemblies where both a “school of democracy” and a place where to ask for some demands. But demands that were not their own private demands, but related to the collective, to the neighbourhood. The assemblies not only re-imagined politics and political practices, but they did create a new ontology in the field of politics. And they did not only theorized about that, but created prototypes to put it into practice.
Q: the difference of these movements and previous ones is that for new movements, the process was key, and the goals themselves were secondary. New movements are more fighting for transforming democracy rather than reaching a specific goal.
Q: what things these movements feel powerless about? do hey think that they can transform institutions so that they work better? if thy succeed in transforming them, what comes after?
Ismael Peña-López: there is no feeling of being powerless because the aim is to change the whole system, not a part of it. Its about governance, not about empowerment. And it’s not as much as transforming institutions, but regaining the sovereignty upon them. So, there is no “after” at all: once the citizenry — not the “illegitimate” parties that now are ruling them — occupies the institutions, there is no “after” because that was just the point: to regain sovereignty upon the institutions, not to rule them, not to represent anyone.
Mariona Ferrer: in Barcelona en Comú, inclusiveness was something that was cared about, but nevertheless some people fell off because of the speedy pace of the process. In what relates to the participatory process, when it was dealt within small assemblies, consensus was very important; but later, when more people came and assemblies became massive, making decisions became more difficult, so decisions were taken at different levels, and with different degrees of participation or openness: more than in traditional parties, but far from being ideal. And creating the programme was also participatory, but again the limitations of time and resources sometimes forced some shortcuts in participation.
Ignacia Perugorría: maybe initial movements were highly decentralized, but the parties that came after them — especially Podemos &mash; had much more effort put in their design, and with a purpose. So, some of the initial nature of social movements was kept in new parties, but some other nature was borrowed from traditional parties.
Marianne Maeckelbergh: traditionally there have been opposing forces of centralization vs. decentralization. In the case of the 15M, the decentralization happened in the online sphere while the centralization took place in the camps and the plazas and the assemblies. And yes, there was some representation, but the meaning of representation was different from the usual sense of representation in electoral politics: this representation was not as much as deciding for others, but speaking in the name of similar ones.
Notes from the Workshop on New democratic movements, civic culture and the transformations of democracy, organized by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain, on June 18th and 19th, 2015. More notes on this event: new_democratic_movements.
New technologies, social networks, and democracy Introduced by David Karpf
We are living in a period of deep deep inequality of democratic exercise. Yes, one man has one vote, but not everyone has the same means to influence politics.
If you build it… they will not come. It is extremely difficult to make people participate. New media do not create our preferences, but just help in revealing our preferences. This is after an (institutional) effort to make politics unattractive to people, that they should not participate in politics. So, it’s not enough building things for participation, but we need to engage people.
Discussion
Jane Mansbridge: what if everyone — especially parties and politicians — use the same tools as activists?
Ismael Peña-López: it’s the ethos behind that changes the landscape. Parties have been using the Internet and doing “politics 2.0”, which is but traditional politics with a digital support. While citizens are doing “technopolitics”, which is something brand new, decentralized, distributed.
Mayo Fuster: one of he difference between Occupy Wall Street and the 15M Spanish Indignados is the ability to create confluences of movements. In Spain, there has been some degree of success when it comes to come together, join forces, including connections with the free culture and the free software movement. This has been very successful in Spain while in the US fragmentation has stood.
Ismael Peña-López: it is true that power is still unevenly distributed, but the tools are more and more evenly distributed. It may be only a matter of time that things change and become more balanced. On the issue of participation, it is true that people do not want to participate (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2002), but also that it is provided that institutions work (Font et al., 2012). If they do not work, people will participate to fix them.
Marianne Maeckeberg: there has been a deep difference between the Spanish Indignados movement and Occupy Wall Street. While the former tried to tame technology so that it did what they wanted to sere their purposes of achieving a higher level of democracy quality, OWS was obsessed with “having the spotlight back”, of appearing on the news. And when media came back not, they were disappointed. In the meanwhile, the Indignados organized and even got to the local and regional governments.
Can Kurban: information is the core of politics, of democracy, of decision-making. And it still is important if some people get more informed, even if not more people get more informed. This can be crucial to spread the information.
Q: what happens if people do not want to be bothered with political information? how do we engage them?
Ismael Peña-López: we begin to have evidence that the “Daily Me” is ceasing to be true (if it ever was) and that people that use the Internet and especially social networking sites are more exposed to political information even if they are not looking for it. This is due to the fact that political content is easily created and spread on the Net, and it comes to you through people you trust.
Q: what was the role of youth unemployment in the success of the 15M Spanish Indignados movement?
Mariona Ferrer: of course it had a major role. But not only. Also the quality of the employments of the most qualified people, the precarious employment of a big majority, the previous movements for free culture, etc.
José Luís Martí: what was the role of technologies?
David Karpf: I don’t think technologies made the institutions irrelevant. But they did make them more vulnerable. And this provides new opportunities for new activism.
José Luís Martí: you could o a lot of stuff to influence politics in the past, but now you can much more and much easier.
Mayo Fuster: the use of technology is becoming organic. It’s not about a quantitative change — more people using these tools — but a qualitative one, with increasingly people using in a different way these tools and for different purposes and thus changing the system, probably forever. As Benkler said, these tools are making it possible to reduce the costs of transaction and, thus, change behaviours and organizations. And this is changing everything. And these changes are not only more democratic, but also more efficient.
Adolfo Estalella: these movements, and especially coders, are challenging the way we understand code itself and legal and social code in general, challenging how we understand politics, etc.
Ismael Peña-López: more than the profile of who used the technology, it is more relevant to look whom the technology reached. Or, even better, whom benefited from the use (maybe by others) of the technology for political or civic purposes. And it did reach many people, and many disconnected from the net, or from political networks. Indeed, this is the point of interest in the connections that technology brought: not only the coordination of synchronous action, but sharing information and protocols so that they could be applied in place, and free from the network.
Jane Mansbridge: the collective intelligence is just that, gathering scattered information from remote corners and putting it together for anyone to make use of it.
Notes from the Workshop on New democratic movements, civic culture and the transformations of democracy, organized by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain, on June 18th and 19th, 2015. More notes on this event: new_democratic_movements.
Transformations of democracy. Deliberative democracy, participatory democracy, digital democracy Introduced by Jane Mansbridge
Trust in government has worsened in most places, plummeting towards illegitimacy.
We need more and more of public goods, goods that are freely available for everyone once they are created: roads, a stable climate, etc. And we create them by coercion, legitimate coercion through which we force ourselves to create such public goods. And this only happens through deliberation.
And to be more deliberative you have to be more reflective. But there has not been a requirement for more deliberation.
Habermasian standards for good deliberation should be, if not challenged, at least revised.
Respect and absence of power, for instance, are very likely still unchallenged nowadays. But reasons might be. Deliberation, yes, is about reason, leaving aside emotional considerations. But this does not mean that there are no emotional reasons behind some issues.
Aim at consensus, on the other hand, may still apply. But it has usually left aside the conflicts between different interests. And clarifying interests when interests conflict may help in subsequent searches for consensus.
Equal power in the group and consensus in the group are two issues that we have been looking forward as ideals in any deliberation process. Equality, openness and consensus as main pieces to do better democracy together. But these ideals are more contextual that we often think of. Equal power, for instance, is a highly contextual and, more important even, contingent principle. Circumstances change and we have to take that into account.
Discussion
Mayo Fuster: trust has left institutions and has found networks as a way to channel it. So, the decrease of trust in institutions has been corresponded by higher trust in P2P and decentralized ways of decision-making.
Mariona Ferrer: Deliberation was also about understanding the complexity of the issues at stake, and being empowered to understand them and to face them.
Jane Mansbridge: it depends on the purpose, deliberation may deliver better or not. If the purpose, the mission, is to understand, then deliberation and consensus are just great. If the goal of deliberation is to make a decision, things may be a little bit more complex.
David Karpf: participating in social movements is partly about one’s own transformation: by participating, one transforms onesef. Besides, there’s the goal of social transformation. And sometimes there is a trade-off between the personal and the social transformation.
Adolfo Estalella: local assemblies usually had their own personal, local, micro goals, very specific, and very explicit on the other hand. E.g. stopping evictions, helping migrants to integrate, etc. But most assemblies had not specific goals headed towards specific decisions, but the goal was to be itself, to be a “political topos”, to establish a political space.
Ismael Peña-López: if the goals were making decisions, yes, the goals may not have been very clear in past social movements. But if the goal was to draw a comperehensive diagnosis of the problems felt by the citizens, the goals were clear and the movements succeeded not only in the diagnosis, but in putting those problems in the pubic agenda. The problem is that governments did not answer accordingly, they did not take the gauntlet, and threw it back to the movements asking for “concrete proposals”, which the movements did not succeed at making.
Q: Why are we so much thrilled now about consensus when, in the past, we had enough with some deliberative majoritarian processes.
José Luís Martí: we should not take consensus as unanimity. Consensus is about the process, and it can lead indeed to voting, and to the rule of the majority. But the process of how things are discussed, the concurrence of actors, the comparison of different options, that is the nature of deliberation and consensus.
Jane Mansbridge: the has been a raise in the feeling of autonomy. This raise in the feeling, the need for autonomy is a powerful driver towards consensus and partly against unanimity, or the majority rule.
Marianne Maeckelbergh: a good reason for consensus beating majoritarian processes is that they take into consideration the voice of the minorities. And even if the result may not be the minority’s will, it is taken into account. With simple majoritarian voting, this is not so.
Jane Mansbridge: Many people see these movements and practices as prefigurative, as a “model for tomorrow”. But this is a mistake: this is an actual practice, a today’s practice, rooted in the nature of our times.
Ismael Peña-López: two more answers on why now we care about consensus and not the traditional majoritarian processes. First, because as the motto We are the 99% says, the problem is that most governments are not seen as representing the majority. Second, because “now we can”. Meaning: the costs of participating in democracy have lowered down dramatically due to technology. So, maybe, majoritarian processes were just good for the context given, they were optimal for the resources (time, money) given for participation. But now the citizen can be an active actor in democracy, at ridiculous costs. And the citizen is claiming that, now that they can participate, they want to.
FAROS is the childhood and youth health observatory of the Sant Joan de Déu Hospital, one of the most renowned hospitals specialized in children and youngsters in Spain.
Every year they publish a book — the FAROS report — which deals about a topic of especial relevance for families and carers, helping them to understand it and to address it.
The 2015 edition of the FAROS report its entitled Las nuevas tecnologías en niños y adolescentes. Guía para educar saludablemente en una sociedad digital [New technologies in children and youngsters. Guide for a healthy education in a digital society]. As it can be inferred from the title, the report deals about minors accessing technology, the use of devices, online and videogaming, social networking sites, privacy and security, socialization, etc.
I was kindly invited to write one of the final chapters about the pros and cons of digital life. Unlike the preceding co-authors, my approach is not about one specific point of view or technology, but more panoramic. It tries to bring to the debate that the use of technology is a matter of socialization. And, as such, it does carry embedded the very same advantages and risks of interacting with others. Without fully digital inclusion, one will not be in risk of e-exclusion, but in risk of sheer social exclusion. On the other hand, an inappropriate digital inclusion will be very much like inappropriate socialization, putting us in risk of being abused, be an abuser (or a criminal), lack education opportunities and so on.
My chapter is called El doble filo de la tecnología: una oportunidad de inclusión y un peligro de exclusión [The double edge of technology: an opportunity for inclusion and a risk of exclusion] and can be downloaded as follows.
Lots of gratitude to Olga Herrero for counting me in and making it possible.
New political movements for real democracy in Europe Chaired by Pablo Gerbaudo
Daniel Ripa, Podemos Spain
There is a tension between citizens aiming at participating in politics and the traditional institutional structures which provide no way to channel this aims for participation.
Podemos Asturias has managed to organize a referendum, both online and offline, to validate the political programme for the upcoming local elections.
Digital participation enables people to get over institutions and go their own way, with or without the institutions.
As important as ending with corruption is avoiding it: what failed in the current system and how can corruption be stopped before it happens… or just avoided.
Gala Pin, Barcelona En Comú
Participation is not something managed by a department at the city council, participation is not a project, not a sectoral issue: participation should be a way of thinking, of doing things.
There is no online vs. offline participation, but a multilayer strategy so that everyone can participate and in different ways.
A third challenge is how to have a proper balance between institutional leadership and collective and distributed participation, how to “rule by obeying”, how to elaborate bottom-up initiatives that can be put into practice.
Last, open data is necessary as it is the fuel of informed participation.
Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Pirate Party Iceland
The coalition of movements in Iceland after the crash was a disaster. Things should be kept as simple as possible, and promise as little as posible, in the sense of promising what can be done, with a sense of reality.
And yet the constitution was great. It was a discussion about what kind of people we want to be together. But when the new Iceland Constitution got to Parlialment, politicians were not able to properly finish the job.
Many people do not want power, but given the appropriate, relevant, timely, and easy to use tools, people will participate.
Most movements can be summed up by Debt, Budget and Constitutional Process, that is, having sovereignty back. And it is not about voting, but about community building.
Andreas Karitzis, Syriza Greece
For a change to take place, something new must replace the old one.
There now is a struggle to recover sovereignty that has not been given away to the governments, but that actually has been given away to third parties (other governments, private firms, international powers) and that make governance of the local an almost unreachable quest.
There now is a huge gap of disconnection between democracy and the basic needs of the citizens. And this gap is the one that a new approach to democracy is aiming at fixing.
Digital participation processes will help in amplifying organizational processes, but it will not be enough.
Generative democracy is the one that pursues to liberate people’s capacities to participate, to be engaged.
Silvana Denicolo, 5SM Italy
Three pillars: protest, proposal and proactivity.
Movimento 5 Stelle appeared in time where there was very few activism. It has now flourished and has gone way beyond “keyboard activism”: online activism must complement — not replace — face-to-face activism.
Discussion
Q: Do we risk some depolitization by using (too much of) these technologies? Birgitta Jónsdóttir: the problem is about expectations and overpromising things. Participation should be coming with both some pedagogy, but also with resources so that proposals can be put into practice if so people vote to.
Q: Are we missing ideology in new politics? What are the risks of populism? Are we limiting ourselves just to “improve our lives” and setting aside values? Birgitta Jónsdóttir: is not lack of ideology, but so basic demands — like respect for human rights — that are beyond (or actually come before) ideologies.
Experiments of democratic participation in Cities, A European perspective Chaired by Fabrizio Sestini
Joonas Pekkanen, Forum Virium Helsinki and Open Ministry, Helsinki
More than 13,000 decisions in 2014 which now, by using Helsinki Decisions API, can be consulted, retrieved, filtered, geolocated, etc. The decisions involved most city board and city council members, linked institutions, etc.
The next challenge is to move from “talking to a third person” to “talking to each other”. To do so, the “social object” has to be found/created, so that it becomes the centre of the discussion. The aim is to turn public decision into social objects.
Marcelo D’Elia Branco, InforLibero, Brazil
After 2011, and for the first time in History, we lived a set of globally connected revolutions that were not initiated by institutions. The global revolution reached Brazil in June 2013 after a protest against pubic transportation prizes.
We have to be aware, though, of the fact that not everything that looks like a citizen revolution, a networked mobilization is not always what it looks like: in Brazil, on the streets, there are both citizen movements and the opposition to the government (by right wing parties), both aiming for a transformation, but with a very different nature both in the source and in the goals.
The “Marco Civil de Internet” (the Internet Civil Framework, or Brazil Internet Bill of Rights) was made collaboratively and using the Internet as a platform. The goal behind this bill of rights was to protect freedom of speech and other civil and political liberties in Brazil that in the new context of the Internet had been left unprotected. It had three pillars: net neutrality, privacy and freedom of speech. Among other things, it was a reaction to Brazil’s 2008 act on cybercrime, which abused many citizen rights.
Marcelo Branco critizises the agreement between the Brazilian government and Facebook to provide free Internet by means of the project Internet.org. He argues that it is a biased Interent access and that it opens a gate for espionage [I am for the project: better a biased Internet than none, provided this bias is public and opt-in is by default].
Robert Bjarnason, Citizens Foundation, Reykjavik
Electing representatives once every four years is totally outdated. This is one of the basis for disaffection in politics especially among youngsters.
“Your Priorities” enables citizens to add ideas and points for and against the arguments of such ideas.
Better Reykjavík was born out the 2008 economic and trust crash as a citizens initiative. Opened a week before the municipal elections in 2010 and over 40% of voters participated, 8% adding content and over 1,500 ideas in total were created. Now there is a formal collaboration with the city of Reykjavík, connecting citizens with their representatives. Over 70,000 people have participated out of 120,000 inhabitants. 15 top ideas are processed by the city every month, 476 ideas have been approved.
The platform accompanies ideas with the required budget to make them real. This has a strong pedagogical power for the citizen, that has to allocate its “own budget” (in the platform) to the ideas of their choice, not being able (of course) to vote everything, but having to prioritise.
Sören Becker, Author of energy democracy in Europe Citizen power and ownership in the German energy transition
There is an energy transition in Germany, with renewable energies increasingly replacing nuclear power. And not only a change of the source of energy, but also a shift towards new decentralized forms of organization and ownership, with circa 900 energy cooperatives (generation and grid operation).
Beyond that, the movement has achieved implication from municipalities, asking for the remunicipalisation of networks for electricity, gas and district heating.
Different aspects between state vs. cooperative ownership of energy supply concerning the demos, participation, financial benefits and main challenges.
Summing up, new participatory utilities can provide ownership beyond projects and coproduction, inducting indirect democratisation effects through organisational shifts. But there still are issues of control: membership vs. representation, state power vs. citizen control, smart information technologies vs. open access, ensuring ecological orientation and social values.
Hille Hinsberg, Praxis Estonia
The Estonian open government context is based on secure individual online access to private and public government data on citizens; low bureaucracy and good ICT skills to get things done; trust in government-provided infrastructure. e-Voting has taken place on 8 consecutive elections, over 30% of all votes were digital in 2015.
After the 2013 financial scandal, an assembly was formed heavily supported by a participatory process. 6,000 proposals and comments online; collating and analysis of web content; impact assessment and peer review on proposed legislative amendments; stakeholder deliberation seminars; grass-root participation, Deliberation Day, 314 participants or 62% of recruited sample select proposals to be sent to the Parliament.
Estonia has witnessed a decreasing trust for institutions, and in increasing trust for citizens and civil society.
