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Nick Mahony
© Nick Mahony 2007
It is widely argued nowadays that democracy and opportunities for more direct forms of political participation need to be extended to address disenchantment with the political elite and to fill the vacuum left by greater individuation and the turn to consumerism. Yet the value of democracy and wider forms of participative politics are highly contested and therefore not unproblematic goods. User feedback and public consultation are increasingly used by corporations and governments to embed consumerism and markets. Wars are waged and inequalities deepen in the name of extending democratic culture. So at the same time as there is an unprecedented level of agreement about the need for more democracy and popular empowerment, there is still enormous disagreement about what this should or shouldn't mean in practice - especially in the UK.
Even apparently progressive ideas such as the devolution of power and other innovations designed to engage citizens in the renewal of the social fabric have been captured in the UK by New Labour to serve such causes as performance improvement and privatisation. So the debate to engage in here is not about the merit of the ideal of increasing opportunities for public participation in politics, but about why so many innovative ideas for renewing politics get translated into practices that reinforce, rather than call to account or challenge the exercise of institutional power.
Let's consider for a moment some of the ways in which the ideas of devolution have been translated into practices in the UK, for example, particularly through proposals for a 'new localism'. This emphasis on 'the local' as a privileged site of democratic, participative or collaborative governance has resulted in proposals and practices which progressives should challenge for a number of reasons. First, they have produced forms of politics that limit people to local forms of engagement, cutting local constituencies off from the national and global public policy issues that impinge on - and indeed serve to generate - such locales. Second, they have conceived of governmental 'centres' and local 'peripheries' as separate, bounded territorial domains. This neither takes account of how governments implement their policies locally, nor the ways in which communities are configured across, rather than within, different territories. Third, the idea that power is currently 'held' centrally, somewhere 'within' central government is also highly problematic. States don't simply 'hold' power, rather governments' exercise power through their privileged access to resources such as money, technology and expertise in attempts to bring people into various kinds of relationships with processes of governance. Unless publics have greater access to such resources, new 'local' participation practices are likely to simply offer governments yet another means through which they can attempt to exercise power over citizens.
The issue of public access to political processes in the UK can be picked up in other ways. Many media professionals, for example, cast our long-established political institutions as out-of-step and for this reason unpopular with a contemporary society that is marked by consumerism, reality TV and ever declining levels of deference to experts and professionals. However, on those occasions when media actors have experimented with attempts to engage viewers or listeners in political participation, the resulting public proposals, while in some cases popular, have often also been reactionary and these 'innovative' practices quickly shelved.
So, even if the issue of unequal access to resources is better addressed and new public participation practices can be made popular, there are no guarantees that such 'new' political processes will generate recognisably progressive outcomes. This begs the question of how a public debate about the future of public participation in politics should be conducted, especially in the context of a society in which there has been a collapse of faith in the institutions of state, political parties and political representatives. Part of the challenge of projects such as this one organised by Soundings will be to consider whether it might be possible to develop progressive political programmes not just within left-of-centre enclaves of 'resistance' but through interaction with the plural publics outside them. As well as addressing the real grievances of such groups this work is also likely to need to tap into the passions and enthusiasms of publics using the media, the internet and public events. However, questions will then also arise about how activities such as these, which rely as much on affect as 'reason', can, or indeed should, be related to the more formal work of such political organisations.
This Soundings project has been instigated at a moment when discussions of how to realise and increase public participation form the moral high ground of political discourse across the partisan divides. From the perspectives opened up by the forms of questioning briefly highlighted above, the politics of public participation is certainly about more than theories of 'deliberative democracy', 'citizens juries' or a 'new localism'. Relating the politics of public participation to wider social, economic, cultural and organisational contexts makes it more complicated, but this doesn't make it any less important. Indeed, it has never been more vital to participate in these forms of politics. But how?
Nick Mahony is a doctoral student with the Open University's Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance.
(This is an abridged version of an article by Janet Newman and Nick Mahony that will appear in Soundings issue 36)
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