The debate on democracy in the last decade of the 20th century changed the terms of the post-war debate. From this confrontation emerged the hegemonic concepts within democratic theory that prevailed in the second half of the 20th century. Hans Kelsen formulated this question in neo-Kantian terms, still in the first half of the 20th century.
In the case of the current debate on democracy, this means a hegemonic and counter-hegemonic conception of democracy. Such an approach led the hegemonic concept of democracy to focus on the role of electoral systems in representing the electorate (Lipjart, 1984).
Non-hegemonic conceptions of democracy in the second half of the 20th century
Criticized for the limitations of his concept of the public sphere (Fraser, 1995; Santos, 1995; Avritzer, 2002), Habermas seems to have only made an effort to integrate social actors from northern countries (see Habermas, 1992). According to this view, proceduralism has its origins in the diversity of ways of life in contemporary societies. First, it raised again the question of the relationship between procedure and community participation.
Third, there is the problem of the relationship between representation and cultural and social diversity. In the next section, we will present a synthesis of the case studies in this project.
Participatory democracy in the South in the 21st century
The success of most participatory experiments in the recently democratized countries of the South is related to the ability of social actors to transfer practices and information from the social level to the administrative level. Until 1975, Mozambique lived under the colonial yoke, and South Africa, until the late 1980s, under an apartheid regime. The inclusion of Colombia's case studies aims to show its presence, even in the most unfavorable conditions.
In the context of a post-colonial state, which seeks to define from the outside an identity of "modernity". The emergence of a black elite linked to the state and new political institutions does not mean that the situation of the majority of the population, especially the poor in rural and urban areas, has changed. The focus on opposition to racism in the democratic struggle against apartheid does not seem to have given adequate expression to the interests of the majority of the black population.
The transition of the ANC from liberation movement to majority party in the post-apartheid era meant that many of the demands of social movements were now laid down for legislation, including those related to women's rights. She picks up the theme of the relationship between gender identity and class identity in a study of women in the Mozambican trade union movement, and. Women's issues” re-emerged in this context, due to their increased visibility as a result of the privatization process.
This agenda emphatically included the idea of participation and political inclusion of the poor and marginalized tribal castes. Likewise, recent democratization processes also include the element of the institution of participation. Uprimny and Villegas analyze the way to achieve this recognition at the level of the Constitutional Court, and in the third volume of this collection, the domestic issue will be dealt with more extensively.
The vulnerabilities and ambiguities of participation
The fear of "democratic overload" advocated about the transformations that took place from the beginning of the 1980s in hegemonic democratic theory and practice in the core countries, which were then exported to the semiperiphery and periphery of the world system. The idea of "democratic overload" was formulated in 1975 in a report of the Trilateral Commission prepared by Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki (1975). 9 For some authors, this priority is inscribed in the very matrix of the paradigm of Western modernity, emphasizing the idea of progress based on infinite economic growth.
For the authors, the case of the Constitutional Court of Colombia shows how, in a situation of demobilization of citizens, the demand for equality and justice can pass from the political to the judicial sphere. This phenomenon is not exclusive to Colombia (Santos et al, 1995), but in this country the weakness of the mechanisms of political representation is profound, a fact that has enabled the Court to assume a more prominent role. Thus, in the case of Colombia, we have a double dimension. On the other hand, many of the actors who dominated the Constituent Assembly weakened in the following years.
Thus, Colombia emerges as a particular example of the vulnerability of participation, revealing the ambiguous influence of a powerful judiciary on social movements. This dynamic brings with it the perverse consequence that these possibilities define the "mental and moral horizon of alternative possibilities". Two cases, the Medellín and Western Boyacá militias, dominated by entrepreneurs linked to the emerald trade, illustrate this situation.
The tension between stable macro-institutional forms and the dynamics of violence could become a common feature of countries, especially in the South, in which the importation of formal democracy is only one way of integrating into globalization. This example illustrates the need for more plural and transversal action in different spaces of political production. We can now systematize some characteristics of cases in which participation fails to take off at the end of the decolonization or democratization process.
The potentialities of participation
The internal regulations of the community are quite detailed, women and young people play an important role in them. Thus, in the midst of the most anarchic violence, a social grammar and a culture of peace, dialogue and solidarity are created. In the case of Brazil, the authors argue, the motivation to participate is part of a common legacy of the democratization process that led social democratic actors, especially those from the community movement, to debate the meaning of the term participation.
In the case of the city of Porto Alegre, this debate was linked to the opening of actual areas with the participation of the political community, especially of the Workers' Party. First, there are regional assemblies where participation is individual, open to all members of the community, and the rules for deliberation and decision-making are defined by the participants themselves. In the case of participatory budgeting, this grammar has two elements: fair distribution of public goods and democratic negotiation of access to these goods among the social actors themselves.
In the case of Porto Alegre, the participation of the population has increased practically every year, while in Belo Horizonte, in addition to a little more variation, there has also been an increase. In about half of the cases (71), these administrations were affiliated with the Workers' Party (Grazia, 2001). Currently, two main forms of democratization of the Indian political system can be mentioned.
We can therefore perceive a huge process of participation, which is initiated by the transfer of the budget decision-making process to the local level. Cooperation, on the other hand, is designed as part of a larger political process of democratic reform of the country. Porto Alegre and Kerala express an attempt to expand democracy based on the potential of the local culture itself.
Conclusion: Theses on widening the democratic canon
In the case of India, the resources are transferred to the committees themselves, leading to accusations of corruption, as Heller and Isaac point out. There are more questions raised than answers given in the studies included in this volume. In what follows, we will pose some questions and provide answers, in the form of theses, to some of the questions.
The second reason for the loss of intensity of representative democracy lies in the increasing promiscuity between the two markets whose separation grounds the legitimacy of representative democracy: the political market and the economic market. The third reason for the loss of intensity of representative democracy lies in the breakdown of the relationship between authorization and accountability. Accountability has to do with transparency in the exercise of the representatives' mandate and with the political content of the relations between the representatives and the represented.
It presupposes the recognition by the government that participatory procedural, the public forms of monitoring of governments and the processes of public deliberation can replace part of the process of representation and deliberation as conceived in the hegemonic model of democracy. 13 The theme of identities and the principle of recognizing difference is covered in detail in the third part of this volume. If this is the case, it is possible to conclude that the deepening of democracy does not necessarily occur because of the same characteristics present in the core countries where democracy was first introduced and consolidated.
On the other hand, the construction of close complementarities between participatory democracy and representative democracy lies in the development of mediations between local and national scales. In the case of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, this formulation is explicit. We have seen how nineteenth-century revolutionary aspirations of democratic participation were gradually reduced to low-intensity forms of democracy over the course of the twentieth century.
1966), The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (1995), Towards a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in Paradigmatic Transition.
