Contemporary Left-Wing Activism Vol 1

Democracy, Participation and Dissent in a Global Context

John Michael Roberts, Joseph Ibrahim, John Michael Roberts, Joseph Ibrahim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351047340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Radicalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Within many societies across the world, new social and political movements have sprung up that either challenge formal parliamentary structures of democracy and participation, or work within them and, in the process, fundamentally alter the ideological content of democratic potentials. At the same time, some parliamentary political parties have attracted a new type of 'populist' political rhetoric and support base.

This collection, along with its accompanying volume 2, examines the emergence of, and the connections between, these new types of left-wing democracy and participation. Through an array of examples from different countries, itexplains whyleft-wing activism arises in new and innovative spaces in society andhowthis joins up with conventional left-wing politics, including parliamentary politics. It demonstrates howthese new forms of politics can resonate with the real life experiences of ordinary people and thereby win support for left-wing agendas.

1

Democracy and participation

Liberal and left-wing perspectives

John Michael Roberts¹

Introduction

These days, as Theocharis and van Deth (2018) note, an array of avenues are open to ordinary citizens for them to become active in mechanisms, processes and structures of democracy and participation. Voting in elections is the most obvious, but of course the emergence of the Internet and social media has broadened the outlets for people to get their voices heard in society, and more and more of us are encouraged by politicians to become involved in civic participation through the likes of volunteering. Consumers are also persuaded to take an active stance on certain social issues, such as environmental issues, by buying products aligned with a social cause, and institutionalised participation, such as becoming involved in a community pressure group, is yet another outlet for democracy and participation. And, lest we forget, people can likewise get involved in protest campaigns and/or direct action groups, or attend a demonstration of some sort or another.

But this is not the whole story. Although the mechanisms of democracy and participation have changed, there has also been another significant development. Within many societies across the world, new social and political movements have sprung up that either challenge formal parliamentary structures of democracy and participation, or work with them and, in the process, fundamentally alter the ideological content of democratic potentials. Think momentarily about the Arab Spring. Starting in Tunisia in December 2010, and then spreading across a number of Arab states, the Arab Spring brought together a diverse range of protestors who used conventional democratic practices, such as protesting in well-known public spaces, squares and parks, as well as employing newer democratic media, such as Twitter, to mobilise discontent, demand greater democratic rights, call for an end to political corruption, and campaign against different types of social inequality (Hussain and Howard 2013).

At the same time, some parliamentary political parties have attracted a new type of ‘populist’ political rhetoric and support base. At its simplest, ‘populism’ signals a move away from formal, established political debates and practices towards one embedded in everyday language forms and emotions that channel popular and recognisable ‘feelings’ of anger, fear and hope in society, in and around specific and often national social and political issues. Popular culture is thereby an important ingredient of what is associated with ‘populist’ politics (Kellam 2017: 228–9). As Kellam goes on to note, populism is not strictly ‘left’ or ‘right’, but can be appropriated by groups in either of these political spectrums. So, although right-wing forces have drawn on populist rhetoric to win power – one need only think of Donald Trump – left-wing forces have also been successful at mobilising populist forces for their own electoral achievements. One notable illustration can be seen in the UK, where Jeremy Corbyn's left-wing leadership of the Labour Party has been bolstered and supported through left-wing grassroots activism that has been in place for many years, but only now finds an active welcome in the Labour Party (Perryman 2017).

This collection, along with its accompanying volume (Ibrahim and Roberts 2019), attempts to make sense of the emergence of, and the connections between, these new types of left-wing democracy and participation. Through an array of examples from different countries, it will show why and how left-wing activism arises in new and novel spaces in society, how such activism joins up with conventional left-wing politics, including parliamentary politics, and how this can resonate with the real-life experiences of ordinary people and thereby win support for left-wing agendas.

But before the chapters in the current volume are outlined in more detail, it is important, first, to gain a greater understanding of some of the debates that surround the very terms and ideals of democracy and participation. This is important for a number of reasons. First, although more abstract and theoretical ideas about democracy will be discussed throughout this volume and the second one, it is vital to remember that, for left-wing protagonists, politics should be thought of as an entry point to encourage and get ordinary people to participate in their own democratic mechanisms and institutions. More to the point, the Left should be campaigning for a widening of democratic participation in society for the many, and not the few. So, for example, the Left needs to argue that ordinary people must have a democratic voice in how economic decisions are made that affect their lives. In other words, left-wing activists need to campaign for political and economic democracy and participation. Therefore, although it is indeed vital for left-wing activists to enter into debates about the nature of democracy, leftists must also connect these debates to issues around participation in decision-making mechanisms across society as well. Second, an emphasis on democracy and participation immediately draws attention to empirical examples of left-wing versions of democracy and participation in action. The term ‘democracy and participation’ thereby encompasses a range of left-wing activism, from social movement activism, to leftist single issue campaigns, to left-wing parliamentary and local politics, to the left-wing appropriation of public spaces in cities, and so on. ‘Democracy and participation’ likewise provides a way of exploring the various participatory connections between and across these different left-wing currents and forms. Taking these points on board, this chapter will explore various ideas about democracy and participation, and how democracy and participation might be enhanced in society. It will do so by discussing different frameworks that have been devised to understand democracy and participation, principally by examining liberal and left-wing perspectives on democracy and participation.

The chapter therefore starts by first examining critically the classic study by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba on ‘civic culture’ and democracy (1963). Their liberal approach to democracy and participation was criticised by several scholars, and, in the 1990s, Verba and colleagues (1995) introduced a new framework to study democracy and participation. Again, however, criticisms were made of this new framework, some of which are outlined below.

Following this discussion, the chapter moves on to examine the term, ‘social capital’. Arising during the 1990s as a way to explain why people might not engage in the processes of democracy and participation, and what might be done to reverse this problem, social capital is associated strongly with the work of the American political scientist Robert Putnam. For Putnam, social capital is a means to focus on issues and problems about how to build networks of trustworthiness between people in communities, which might then make them feel inclined to participate more in civic institutions. Unfortunately for critics, theorists such as Putnam tend in their respective accounts to accept the main ideological ingredients of liberal democracies, rather than acknowledging that in many respects liberal democracies might have been responsible, in part, for perpetuating particular social inequalities in the first place, which then have led to a decline in social capital. As noted by Pierre Bourdieu, whose ideas are elaborated on further below, social capital has been a means for those with wealth and prestige to reproduce their own privileges through the creation and maintenance of specific social networks.

If there is some truth to the claim that social capital reproduces at least some types of inequality, then perhaps one way forward is to create a form of democracy that explicitly forbids social inequalities from entering the democratic process in the first place. By so doing, a space opens up for people to deliberate and reach a consensus among themselves about possible solutions to everyday issues and problems that affect them. Deliberative democracy, as it has become known, has therefore proved popular among some academic scholars and policymakers exactly because it aims to overcome a number of inequalities in societies so that a diverse array of individuals and social groups can get their voices heard about matters that concern them. Although laudable, deliberative democracy has nevertheless attracted criticism, not least about its wish to foster a consensus in society. The problem here for critics is that ‘consensus’ is often seen by them as a way to smuggle in liberal ideals about respecting equality that, in practice, gloss over real inequalities and power relations in society. The latter then serve to silence voices in society, particularly those from less privileged backgrounds. Thus, rather than create what is seen to be a somewhat fictitious ‘consensus’, critics are more prone to encourage dissensus between groups in society that more readily highlights social differences between them, including differences of opinions, different social backgrounds and different material resources people have access to that promote and sustain interests above other interests.

Social movements, and in particular rising global social movements such as the anti-capitalist movement, alongside various leftist global populist movements, celebrate the idea that dissensus can in fact lead to the formation of a wide-reaching progressive politics. Exactly by recognising that a ‘consensus’ with many mainstream political groups has in recent years failed to challenge the dominance of neo-liberalism, a host of global social movements seek to break with consensus politics in order to push political and social thinking towards a leftist and socialist direction. The chapter therefore ends by outlining some key features of global social movements, but also highlights some of their limitations in order to argue that a fully-fledged socialist politics is the only realistic way to avoid the problems inherent in liberal versions of democracy and participation. The chapter then briefly outlines the rest of the contributions.

But to begin, then, we first outline a liberal approach to democracy and participation. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s path-breaking study, The Civic Culture, marked a watershed moment in approaches to the study of democracy and participation. Published in 1963 and comprising a comparative survey of values across five nations (United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy and Mexico), Almond and Verba’s exploration of the concept civic culture quickly established itself as a classic. The concept of ‘culture’ had fallen out of favour with political scientists more interested in Marxist and structural-functionalist explanations (Street 1997). Almond and Verba reclaimed this important concept for political science and sought to assess the extent to which culture could be seen as a useful conceptual device with which to explain political action. The next section outlines their arguments in more detail, as well as their limitations.

Civic culture and civic voluntarism models of participation

Almond and Verba begin their exploration by first considering the concept ‘political culture’. ‘When we speak of the political culture of society, we refer to the political system as internalized in the cognitions, feelings, and evaluations of its population’ (Almond and Verba 1963: 13). From this initial starting point, Almond and Verba seek to make connections between the ‘micropolitics’ of everyday attitudes and the ‘macropolitics’ of systems, such as a formal political system. Simply stated, Almond and Verba take the view that a relationship can be found between a country’s political system and its political culture to help form a civic culture. What is interesting to note here is that the concept of civic culture is wide enough to include implicit political attitudes within what is thought to be the realm of micropolitics located in non-political institutions, such as voluntary organisations. These non-political, everyday realms are important because they provide valuable arenas in which to experience and discuss democracy and participation, and this can then flow into more conventional political institutions (Almond and Verba 1963: 299).

For Almond and Verba, civic culture is that element in society most conducive to a stable democracy. This is because a civic culture is characterised by ‘citizen’ or ‘political’ competence and ‘administrative’ competence. Whereas the former refers to a person’s level of political knowledge and confidence to influence politics, the latter refers to a person’s expectation of fair treatment by political authorities. Almond and Verba claim that an ideal civic culture is one in which citizens are competent in being both active – participating in trying to influence politics – and passive, or deferential, when engaged in administrative competence. Almond and Verba found that the level of and relationship between these two categories varied across nations owing to the historical nature of each country explored. Britain, they believed, was the only country that enjoyed a civic culture where deference to authority was combined with a positive attitude towards active participation (Almond and Verba 1963: 6).

Almond and Verba’s development of the concept of civic culture generated a substantial amount of critical commentary and debate around both their own work and the concept of political culture generally. One problem noted concerned Almond and Verba’s conflation of different levels of analysis in their account. For example, Welch (1993) notes a tension between their wish to make generalisations about civic culture across nations so that comparative analysis is possible, while recognising the fact that each country requires a detailed analysis of its specific culture within its unique borders. As Welch suggests:

The comparative project … amounts to an attempted explanation of the presence of stable democracy in some countries and its absence in others in terms of pre-existing political conditions. It is a comparative explanation with political culture as the independent variable. The sociological project consists in an investigation of the social conditions under which democracy functions. It is a contribution to the ‘empirical theory of democracy’ in which a range of sociological variables is taken to be explanatory.

(Welch 1993: 14–15)

This tension is noticeable in some of the variables used by Almond and Verba. For example, Almond and Verba work from a highly generalised attitudinal variable of what they consider should be the norm of participation. This revolves around the claim, ‘One ought at least to take an interest in what goes on in the community’ (Almond and Verba 1963: 128). However, this variable is so comprehensive as to be almost meaningless. McLennan (1989) makes a useful remark in this regard when he says: ‘Whilst 72 per cent of Britons did endorse this requirement, one feels that more can be learned about democratic responsiveness from the 68 per cent of Italians who seemed unable even to go along with this bland formulation’ (McLennan 1989: 29). Correspondingly, the ‘positive’ findings that Almond and Verba cite as evidence of healthy pluralist democracies in Britain and the USA can in fact show the opposite. On their own estimations, only 39 per cent of respondent in Britain believed that individuals should play an active role in politics, and only 21 per cent of American respondents believed that each individual should try and understand issues and be kept informed about them (Almond and Verba 1963: 127–9). Hardly a ringing endorsement of civic activity (see also Kavanagh 1989; Topf 1989).

This has prompted some to argue that Almond and Verba are implicitly less concerned with democratic pluralism than they are with the stability of the liberal democratic apparatus. Civic culture provides such stability by enabling individuals to be involved in civic affairs, thereby making the political system responsive to their involvement. Yet, on Almond and Verba’s reckoning, citizens should also be ‘deferential’ to the political system and, in effect, leave political decision-making to the politicians. For Pateman (1989), Almond and Verba thereby reinstate a liberal theory defence of democratic participation. This rests upon the idea that participation within the democratic process must be constrained within the limits of conventional and parliamentary political practices. As a result, other types of democratic activism, such as extra-parliamentary politics associated with the likes of civil rights movements, gender politics, environmentalism, workplace and trade union democracy, and so on, are neglected. Pateman goes as far as to suggest that political competence on the part of individuals equalling a ‘general acceptance’ on their part of the political system does not adequately consider the socialisation of liberal norms and ideology within the population at large.

The question that needs to be asked is whether or not the replies to questions designed to measure feelings of competence might also be reflecting an acceptance of the ‘norms of democratic ideology’, or the evaluative dimension of political culture.

(Pateman 1989: 81; see also Jessop 1974)

The specific problem with this liberal model can be appreciated in greater detail if we momentarily explore some of Verba’s later work. In particular, more than tw...