Democratic Participation, Engagement, and Freedom

It is commonly supposed that democracies should encourage greater political participation and civic engagement. This article identifies two distinct perspectives on political participation and civic engagement: a ‘freedom-centred’ model and an ‘ethical’ model. The ‘freedom-centred’ model defended here draws on the republican concept of freedom as non-domination, together with the political liberal notion of fair deliberative proceduralism, while the ethical model draws on Aristotelian, perfectionist, sources. It is argued that the ‘ethical’ model is overly concerned with the ‘moral renewal’ of modern social life, and is insensitive to problems of domination posed by its account of civic reciprocity and trust. By contrast, the ‘freedom-centred’ model developed offers a systematic account of personal and political freedom, which provides qualified support for deliberative modes of participation and engagement.

Deliberative Democracy in Northern Ireland: Opportunities and challenges for consensus in a consociational system

The 1998 Multiparty Agreement established a consociational system that contains within it an explicit dualism: unionist/nationalist, north and south of Ireland, and British and Irish. But although this formula has facilitated relatively stable and devolved governance, it is based on a distorted representation of a society in which there are much more complex divisions and, indeed, many common problems. Citizen-led efforts towards deliberative democracy since the 1980s have demonstrated both the will and the capacity for alternative, consensual political expressions. This chapter examines the challenges and opportunities facing these citizen-led initiatives in a political environment which, despite the significant decline in violence and terror, seems stubbornly resistant to the idea of broadening the various means of democratic participation.

Civic engagement and the arts and humanities: a UK perspective

Higher education in the UK is in a state of flux and this is having particular impact on the humanities. On the one hand the pressure to support a STEM agenda is seen by some as forcing higher education down a narrow economic agenda, while government requirements for assessing the social and economic impact of research has raised concerns about excessive utilitarianism and a downgrading of ‘disinterested enquiry’. This paper argues that these concerns may be misplaced. The research impact agenda has the potential to promote more socially engaged research and more democratic engagement in the creation and dissemination of knowledge. In the US concerns about the democratic role of higher education more often seem to focus on the student experience. By contrast, in the UK concerns about citizenship education and democratic participation more often focus on high school students, perhaps because university students are more likely to have a formal role in institutional governance. The paper concludes that the papers in this forum have a very American feel, but the issues they address resonate on a much wider scale.

Caged birds and cloning machines: how student imagery 'speaks' to us about cultures of schooling and student participation

With the advent of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), there is an increasing requirement that schools ensure children and young people's views are voiced, listened to and taken seriously on matters of significance. Encouraging these shifts by law is one thing; changing the culture in schools is another. For a significant proportion of schools, actively engaging students' voices on how they experience education poses a significant challenge and crucial gaps may exist between the rhetoric espoused and a school's readiness for genuine student involvement. This ethnographic study illuminates tensions that persist between headteachers' espoused views of how students are valued and students' creative images of their actual post-primary schooling experience. If cultures of schooling are to nurture the true spirit of democratic pupil participation implied by changes in the law, there is a need to develop genuine processes of student engagement in which students and staff can collaborate towards greater shared understandings of a school's priorities.

Impact of political violence, social trust, and depression on civic participation in Colombia

Civic participation is important for peacebuilding and democratic development; however, the role of mental health has been largely overlooked by policymakers aiming to stimulate engagement in civil society. This study investigated antecedents of civic participation in Colombia, a setting of protracted political conflict, using bootstrapped mediation in path analysis. Past exposure to violence, experience with community antisocial behavior, and perceived social trust were all significantly related to civic participation. In addition, depression mediated the impact of past exposure to political violence and perceived social trust, but not community antisocial behavior, on civic participation. In this context, findings challenged depictions of helpless victims and instead suggested that when facing greater risk (past violence exposure and community antisocial behavior), individuals responded in constructive ways, taking on agency in their communities. Social trust in one’s neighbors and community also facilitated deeper engagement in civic life. Relevant to the mediation test, interventions aiming to increase civic participation should take mental health into account. Limitations and possible future research are discussed.

The Democratic Dynamics of Government Consultations. Speaking Freely and Listening Properly

There is a growing use of consultation and e-consultation procedures by governments. This chapter seeks to examine the role of consultation as part of a new technology of government. Consultation on policy development can reinvigorate democratic engage- ment but often it can silence views through a sort of participatory disempowerment; it can loosen the democratic anchorage of the public service within the state. The chapter develops a governmentality perspective interrogating what participation, democratic engagement and free speech mean in this context, and how ideas of publicness are constructed, managed and controlled. The focus is on the nature of consultation, its relationship to ideas of free speech and speaking freely, and its potential to empower subaltern counterpublics which can formulate oppositional interpretations and urge alternative conclusions. The aim is to develop an idea of the democratic adequacy of the consultation process and draw out a sense of how democratic engagement here can be structured – for good or ill.

The Right to Participation of Minorities and Irish Travellers

The idea of participation is becoming increasingly important in international human rights law and recent political and constitutional theory. There is an emerging international law right of minorities to participate in public life. There are many problems though with putting this right into practice. It is not enough to offer formal opportunities for representation or even to facilitate more participatory processes. This article explores how participation is more easily proclaimed than practised by examining the position of one ethnic minority, Travellers, in a liberal democracy, Ireland. While there are many formal opportunities for participation, these do not necessarily result in effective participation on a basis of equality, and may still result in decisions which fail to consider the Traveller culture and identity. Travellers still suffer from an imbalance of power in these arrangements. There are hopeful avenues to pursue in improving participation, the role of civil society and the use of a dialogue between non-governmental organisations and international organisations to put pressure on a national government, including special representation to offset the disadvantages of traditional representative democracy and emphasising the role of special parliamentary bodies; and the need to address the politics of recognition so as to strengthen the hand of disadvantaged groups such as Travellers.

The Equalization of Effective Communicative Freedom: Democratic Justice in the Constitutional State and Beyond

Jurgen Habermas takes the realization of rights through the democratic self-organization of legal communities to be the normative core of emancipatory politics. In this article I explore the implications of this claim in relation to the requirements of justice. I argue that Habermas's discourse theory of democratic legitimacy presupposes a substantive principle of justice that demands the equalization of effective communicative freedom for all structurally constituted social groups in any constitutional state. This involves the elimination of a range of structural injustices rooted in the complex interrelationships between political, economic and cultural orders. In the final section I sketch briefly the implications of this analysis in the context of ongoing globalization processes. It is suggested that the most effective way to establish a just system of global governance is to equalize effective communicative freedom among nation-states.