Innovations, Reinvented Politics and Representative Democracy

Agnès Alexandre-Collier, Alexandra Goujon, Guillaume Gourgues, Agnès Alexandre-Collier, Alexandra Goujon, Guillaume Gourgues

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367134129
• eBook ISBN: 9780429649226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This volume focuses on the issue of change in democratic politics in terms of experimental or actual innovations introduced either within political parties or outside the party system, involving citizen participation and mobilization.

Including a wide and diverse range of alternatives in the organization of groups, campaigning, conducting initiatives and enhancing practices, they not only question the relevance of traditional institutions in representing citizens' values and interests, but also share a common goal which is precisely – and perhaps paradoxically – to reshape and invigorate representative democracy

This book is of key interest to scholars and students of party politics, elections/electoral studies, social movement and democratic innovations and more broadly to comparative politics, political theory and political sociology.

1 Do political innovations matter?

Representative democracy at a crossroads

Agnès Alexandre-Collier, Alexandra Goujon and Guillaume Gourgues

In France, representative democracy is in complete turmoil. The ‘Yellow Vest’ movement, which was initiated in November 2018, has shown, if proof were needed, that the way representative democracy operates is still and will always be problematic. The essence of this form of government is to be incomplete and open for debate. It is precisely its capacity of being constantly and cyclically subjected to criticism about its democratic nature that contributes to its strength (Dahl, 1989; Manin, 1997). Although this mobilization, which has probably been one of the most significant in the modern political history of France, is extremely complex in its forms, motivations and social composition, one can hardly ignore the prevalence of institutional and democratic demands among the protesters. A striking example is to be found in Citizen-Initiated Referendums (CIR).¹ This proposal, which had been developed and discussed for almost fifteen years in restricted activist circles, has suddenly reached the wider public thanks to the Yellow Vest movement and has given way to countless debates, statements and controversies. Although the CIR do not encompass all the Yellow Vests’ political requirements, they have come to symbolize the citizens’ growing dissatisfaction with representative democracy. The Yellow Vests are not alone in demanding a reshaping of the system. With the CIR’s competition, some parliamentarians in opposition, belonging to very different parties, have not remained silent. In April 2019, they triggered a legal provision which has existed since 2008 but has never been used, namely the Shared-Initiative Referendum,² in order to oppose a government plan to privatize Paris airports. This initiative comes in the wake of tensions around the government plan of a constitutional reform initiated in 2018, which had been accused of deliberately reducing the independence of Parliament.

Yet, the French case is neither exceptional nor new. The present situation provides us with all the ingredients of a more or less underlying but endless controversy in many countries about the need to reshape representative institutions. This controversy altogether involves citizens who demand more direct intervention without fully rejecting elections (which are often demanded in authoritarian regimes), political professionals who are willing to improve the conditions of their mandates and their organizations, governments keen to reshape power relations and also journalists and scholars who keep redefining what democracy could or should be. The city square movements in Europe and in the US in the early 2010s, Israel’s Tent Protest in 2011 or the Umbrella Movement in Hong-Kong in 2014 are blatant illustrations of these citizen demands across the world. Although these people’s protests destabilize established democracies, they are also interpreted as calls for more transparent and inclusive representative democracy like coloured revolutions in Eastern Europe in the mid-2000s or Arab Springs in the early 2010s (Della Porta, 2016); protests in Algeria since spring 2019 reveal that, where they fail, political competition and its representative corollary are still key factors of democratization.

Yet this democratic debate at the national and international levels has paved the way for several ‘political innovations’. Whether these innovations are promoted by social movements or reformers (like the RIC), experimented by public authorities or political parties (with for example participatory budgeting) or inconspicuously conducted by a public administration or an interest group, what they all have in common are new ways of experiencing and thinking political representation. They suggest reinventing the representative regime by opposing its inherent philosophy in more or less radical ways. The present book will precisely tackle these innovations.

Focusing on ‘political innovations’ in representative democracy is an intellectual and analytical bias. Instead, we could have focused on ‘democratic innovations’ that had largely been explored in literature. Indeed, since the early 2000s, the search for remedies to the crisis of representative democracy has paved the way for scientific analyses of ‘democratic innovations’. This literature has expanded particularly within the framework of participatory democracy and its processes. Graham Smith defines these innovations as ‘institutions that have been specifically designed to increase and deepen citizen participation in the political decision-making process’ (Smith, 2010, p. 1). They include a wide range of invented or reinvented procedures to weaken the ‘representative’ nature of modern democracy deemed too remote from citizens and therefore deficient. What we call ‘innovation’ as far as democracy is concerned is often associated with the increased participation of citizens in policymaking procedures. This is what is usually labeled as participatory or deliberative democracy.

Although this literature is prolific, especially from a normative point of view, about how to move beyond representative democracy, it generally fails to expand the scope of procedural innovations beyond deliberative experiments formalized and/or carried out by academic specialists (see, among others, Dryzek, 2014; Caluwaerts and Reuchamps, 2018) in what could be perceived as genuine deliberation ‘industry’ (Lee, 2015). However, beyond this well-identified set of experiences, we are thus faced with a variety of phenomena, some of which it is difficult to identify as ‘democratic innovations’. This makes the following definition by Michael Saward particularly useful: ‘democratic innovations can – and usually refer to revived and adapted older ways of thinking about politics and democracy as much as the genuinely new’ (Saward, 2000, p. 5). Yet, if we choose a broader definition of innovation, less focused on deliberative democracy, we can identify multiple hotbeds of innovation within these representative institutions. From this perspective, innovation is less an experiment designed and assessed by social scientists who label it than it is a set of practices, inventions and devices implemented by professional political actors, citizens or interest groups and aiming at changing more or less radically what is usually perceived as ‘politics as usual’ in representative democracy. In this book, we choose to consider innovation as any attempt to get a political organization out of its stabilized routine. These innovations are accompanied with heterogeneous narratives about democracy and do not always aim to make it more deliberative, far from it. They can intend to reform the organization and funding of political parties, elite selection, the way elected politicians are controlled, to foster citizen participation and to rely on a wide variety of methods ranging from village assemblies to e-democracy. Innovation can recycle old recipes of collective action, adapt them to current issues or create new tools and practices from scratch.

If we choose to define these innovations as ‘political’, it is with the aim of demonstrating their diversity while connecting them to a single issue, namely the permanent and incremental reform of political institutions. Recent developments in contemporary democracies – such as the organizational transformation of parties, protest movements in public places, elections of non-professional politicians or the mobilization of political actors in social media – all provide innumerable examples of this transformation. They show that innovations can be found in all aspects of political life. By exploring both the ideas and processes behind the notion of ‘political innovations’, we intend to study what these innovations change – or leave unchanged – in the way representative systems operate, in other words their ‘innovative weight’. One can wonder whether these innovations seek to regenerate representative institutions as much as they intend to give a new role to citizens.

Our main objective will be to streamline the approach to ‘democratic innovations’ by taking a closer look at ‘political innovations’. This notion will deliberately include all the changes that can be observed in the practices and organization of representative democracy initiated by its members. These innovations can be observed and studied through the sociology of party politics (Scarrow, 2015; Gauja, 2016), the analysis of parliamentary activity (including legislative studies) as well as through the study of social movements (Ancelovici, Dufour and Nez, 2016). In this introduction, we will explore our main hypotheses, demonstrate what our approach will add to the existing literature and offer a synthesis of our main results and theoretical proposals based on the different contributions we have gathered for this volume.

Understanding representative government through ‘political innovations’

Our initial hypothesis is that representative democracy is currently pervaded with simultaneous and complementary innovation streams that are hardly ever addressed from within a single analytical framework. Our aim is to organize a dialogue and set up analytical bridges between them in order to offer the widest possible understanding of the innovations which affect and reshape representative democracies. Our hypothesis is based on the postulate that these innovation streams do not necessarily converge and can even turn out to be contradictory. For example, the new ways of funding political parties and the systematization of open primaries can have competing and conflicting effects on the expected democratization of political parties. Our comprehensive project is deeply embedded in our geographical and disciplinary context. Although we have not sought to explain our analytical proposal through our areas (France, Europe and the US) and fields of research (political science, communication studies, areas studies), it seems important to clarify the origin of our project by mentioning where it was precisely started and shaped.

Most contributors to this volume are based in French universities. Although they are specialized in different cultural areas (the US, the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Ukraine), they all hold a similar view of the current intellectual and academic context, namely the sharp fragmentation of the political space in representative regimes. In this academic field, works are clustered around specific objects and seldom overlap. Political parties, participatory and deliberative mechanisms and social movements are thus analyzed independently from each other. Yes this siloed approach has become problematic, as it makes it difficult to provide a comprehensive view of the way the representative system operates, while preferably focusing on micro-reforms. This observation is however not specific to French-speaking research. In his book about the ‘crisis’ of representative democracy, Yannis Papadopoulos (2013) makes a similar observation about international literature, with political science showing a tendency to segment issues such as party systems, media, citizen participation, lobbying and therefore struggling to provide a comprehensive approach to democracy. The strength of some broader perspectives lies in their ability to establish links between a priori disjointed processes. In the case of Colin Crouch’s ‘post-democracy’ (2004), the decrease in electoral turnouts should be analyzed in the light of political leaders’ enthusiasm for targeted co-optation of expert interest groups. In Armin Schafer and Wolfgang Streeck’s ‘politics in the age of austerity’ (2013) mechanisms of financializing sovereign debts often minimize the very role of universal suffrage, reducing possible alternatives and dismissing the need for any contradictory public debate. Although we do share Papadopoulos’s view, our theoretical objectives are different. Whereas he seeks to discuss the idea of a ‘crisis of representative democracy’ or that of a ‘democratic winter’, we offer to grasp and analyze the way the representative system is in a constant process of reforming itself.

Unlike quantitative perspectives centered around the official phases of reforms in democratic systems (Bedock, 2017), we have chosen a collective focal point, which is both qualitative and quantitative and targets official reforms as much as less visible instrumental changes. Our project is based on a simple idea, which is to gather specialists of different ‘segments’ of the representative system by inviting them to question the idea of ‘innovations’ in their case study. The aim for them is to identify what has changed in representative democracy by agreeing not to prioritize changes but to interrelate them in a comprehensive perspective. Our book primarily contends that political actors do not necessarily seek to overcome the institutions of representative democracy but to reinvent them (through elections, candidate selection and the role played by citizens who are no longer to be considered as simple voters). Political ‘innovations’ aim to rehabilitate very classical and often idealized conceptions of political representation, such as rediscovering the so-called golden age of mass parties or reaffirming a principal-agent relationship between the governed and the governing.

‘Innovations streams’ and the democratic puzzle

Although we attempt to overcome ‘siloed’ approaches and propose a holistic overview of ‘political innovations’ in representative regimes, there is still a long hard way to go. We have chosen not to write an essay but to gather different specialists from different aspects of the representative regime in order to try to provide a typology of political innovations that we wish to highlight. Our demonstration is based on the principle of the jigsaw puzzle: political innovations are comparable with the pieces that can be observed separately, but they take on a new meaning when they are put together.

The overall scheme can be considered to be our research output, since it is as much the original frame of the present book as its main result. Although we originally drafted it to establish a dialogue between the different chapters, in return it helped us consolidate and refine our model. This model is based on a basic principle: instead of listing and categorizing existing political innovations, we identify ‘innovations streams’ by drawing inspiration from the theoretical model developed by John Kingdon (2011) to set up the notion of ‘policy windows’.³ By reasoning through ‘streams’ we aim to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Do political innovations matter?: Representative democracy at a crossroads
• Part I Elite selection stream
• Part II Governance stream
• Part III Technological stream
• Index