Participatory Democracy

PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY. The phrase participatory democracy first gained currency—as an ideal, and as a rallying slogan of the Left—in the 1960s. Throughout the decade, the term was widely used in the United States by partisans of the New Left, both to suggest the kind of good society they wished ultimately to create, and the political means they deemed appropriate for working toward that end. Although participatory democracy was the property of no single party, it was perhaps most closely identified with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It was SDS, in its Port Huron Statement of 1962, that first proposed participatory democracy as the focus of a distinctively new, and distinctively American, Left: “We seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that Society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.”

The chief architect of the Port Huron Statement, Tom Hayden, borrowed the phrase itself from his teacher and mentor at the University of Michigan, Arnold Kaufman. In his 1960 essay “Participatory Democracy and Human Nature,” Kaufman had argued that active participation in a democracy—in contrast to mere voting—was justified by the way in which it developed the “human powers of thought, feeling, and action.” Like such predecessors as John Dewey and Alexis de Tocqueville, Kaufman believed that it was active participation, above all, that enabled citizens to use properly their political rights, including the right to vote.

Although Kaufman was present at the Port Huron conference in 1962—and although Tom Hayden shared Kaufman’s faith in the moral and educational benefits of political action—participatory democracy quickly assumed a life of its own as a catchword of the New Left. For some, the phrase was a way of circumventing the tacit American taboo against frankly advocating socialism; assuming that true democracy was incompatible with capitalism, they tended to interpret participatory democracy above all as an implicit call for workers’ control of industry.

Soon enough, yet another sense of participatory democracy took hold. By 1964, some within SDS, in an effort to probe the limits in practice of their democratic ideal, began to experiment among themselves with rule-by-consensus, using techniques learned from pacifist activists and religious groups like the Quakers. A growing number of young radicals, stressing face-to-face interaction and sincere mutual counsel, understood participatory democracy to be incompatible not only with capitalism, but also within conventional electioneering: representative democracy was increasingly regarded as a manipulative and hypocritical sham.

For several years, the New Left’s experiments in democracy attracted thousands of converts. At the same time, this surge of democratic idealism created an organizational conundrum for SDS that first became acute in 1965, and went unresolved for the rest of the organization’s life. By 1965, student sentiment against the war in Vietnam had begun to crystallize; after organizing the first major demonstration against the war in Washington, D.C., in April 1965, SDS, virtually overnight, became an influential national group with a mass constituency. Unfortunately, it was unclear how rule-by-consensus—and the dissolution of representative institutions—could be reconciled with leadership of the burgeoning anti-war movement, which seemed to cry out for some kind of disciplined, accountable, traditionally structured mass organization. Debate raged in SDS over whether and how the organization might avoid becoming another illustration of sociologist Robert Michel’s famous “iron law of oligarchy.” Was participatory democracy compatible with voting and the maintenance of representative institutions? Or did it require abolishing such institutions and relying instead on the exemplary elan of collective direct action and the endless meetings that were the embodiment of rule-by-consensus?

These and a host of similar questions were never adequately resolved by SDS or, for that matter, by the New Left as a whole. The resulting confusion was one, though by no means the most important, reason that the movement, large and powerful though it had briefly been, collapsed with such surprising abruptness in the early 1970s.

In the years after the crackup of SDS, some veterans came to regard the failed democratic experiments of the 1960s with romantic nostalgia. Other dug in for the unglamorous work of creating politically effective citizen-action groups at the grass roots, patiently working with poor and middle-class constituents, and addressing a variety of interests, from women’s rights to the quality of the environment. Meanwhile, intellectuals and scholars, usually writing for readers in the universities, continued to think about the institutional devices that might make something like participatory democracy into a cogent political goal in a modern industrial state.

These ongoing debates over participatory democracy, and the citizen-action groups that made them seem of practical moment, constituted one of the chief legacies of the New Left—one that slowly but surely was revived and reinvented in the decades that followed by organizers, activists and intellectuals, not just in the United States, but around the world. And then, as if out of the blue, the idea of “participatory democracy” reappeared in America, in the spectacular form of the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011-2012, which was centered in New York City, but led to allied occupations of public spaces in many other towns and cities.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) had been inspired, in part, by the staggering growth of inequality in the United States and around the world, as a result of the partial dismantling of social insurance policies that, earlier in the twentieth century, had been the chief egalitarian achievement of labor, liberal, and social democratic political parties worldwide.

Activists were also inspired by the wave of democratic uprisings that had begun in January 2011 in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, among other Arab countries, before spreading to Russia, Spain, and Greece. The architects of OWS in Manhattan specifically chose to emulate the direct-democratic public assemblies of protesters favored earlier that year by the Indignados—the Outraged—a Spanish anti-austerity movement that occupied Puerta del Sol square in Madrid in May 2011. The ways in which all these activists around the world had harnessed social media to mobilize larges masses of protesters seemed to prove (as one Internet guru boasted) “the power of organizing without organization”—an anarchist’s dream come true.

Hoping to produce a similar upwelling of democratic discontent in America, a group of self-selected activists, about sixty in all, met on the afternoon of August 2, 2011, at Bowling Green, a park in downtown Manhattan with the famous bronze statue of a charging bull, installed in 1989 as a tribute to the financial power of nearby Wall Street.

The people had gathered by the bull in response to a call for a general assembly that would organize an occupation of Wall Street. The idea, which originated with Adbusters, an anti-advertising Canadian print magazine (run, naturally, by veterans of the advertising industry), was popularized on social media by the hacker collective Anonymous, whose followers fetishized the wearing of Guy Fawkes masks as shown in the graphic novel and film V for Vendetta. In the event, only a few dozen seasoned activists showed up, from a variety of political backgrounds. Some were students, others were union organizers. A surprising number at first were libertarians, committed to “leaderless resistance” and also allied with Ron Paul, who had been a maverick Republican candidate for president in 2008. But still more were ardent champions of direct-democratic public assemblies.

Sitting in a circle, the anarchists and participatory democrats debated how they might better organize a Wall Street occupation. They agreed that they would take seriously the online call to create a general assembly—and proposed implementing one of the most radical forms of direct democracy conceivable: a daily meeting, open to all, where virtually all decisions would be made without voting, by consensus, and formally subject to veto by a single “block,” if anyone felt a proposed decision violated an ethical principle.

It all seemed hopelessly idealistic. But against all odds, the movement they helped to launch briefly changed the political conversation in America. Occupy Wall Street compelled the media to pay fresh attention to voices on the left. It focused fresh attention on the dramatic rise in economic inequality in the United States and around the world. And despite a deliberate lack of explicit demands, it “reignited hope in the possibility of a free society,” in part by exemplifying, in the words of one participant, a new world that was “participatory and democratic to the core.”

New York City’s experiment in rule-by-consensus failed even faster than the similar experiment in SDS. Occupy Wall Street became the latest in a long line of failures on the international left to elaborate new forms of horizontal self-governance that can transcend the consensus model, and solve some of the manifold problems of democracy in a complex modern society.

The first and perhaps most obvious problem is scale. It is one thing to create a participatory community of five hundred or a thousand—or even a democracy of forty thousand direct participants, as the Athenians did in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. It is quite another thing to imagine direct, participatory interaction in large and complex societies on the scale of the United States. Perhaps one can envision a federation of nested assemblies, along the lines proposed by Condorcet in France in 1793 or G.D.H. Cole in his Guild Socialist essays, but any serious effort to implement such a structure will require a delegation of authority and the selection of representatives—in short, the creation of an indirect democracy, and at some distance from most participants.

Even more challenging is the fact that many of the protesters’ concerns—for example, systemic debt, structural unemployment, the unfettered power of finance capital, global warming—involve dilemmas that can be addressed best by new forms of global and transnational regulation and governance, not by local assemblies.

Equally insidious are the paradoxical results that occur in a polarizing protest movement that simultaneously demands consensus in its organs of self-government. As a result of the willingness of moderates within such a movement to compromise, the consensus view that prevails is generally the most radical alternative on offer (as had happened before in SDS in the late 1960s—yet another illustration of what one scholar has called “the law of group polarization”).

Despite such problems, the ideal of participatory democracy, in one form or another, continues to shape the aspirations of various movements on the international left. Occupy proved that a handful of networked activists can exploit social media to muster a large, ostensibly leaderless protest movement. But when the tear gas and crowds have dispersed from the city squares, those left behind have had to face the fact that “organizing without organizations” is an anarchist fantasy—and that achieving a more participatory democracy requires engaging with, and re-shaping, representative institutions, not simply rejecting them.

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Graeber, David. The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2013.

Kaufman, Arnold. “Participatory Democracy and Human Nature.” In Nomos III: Responsibility, edited by Carl J. Friedrich. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960.

Mansbridge, Jane. Beyond Adversary Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Miller, James. Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Miller, James. Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2018,

Taylor, Blair. “Long Shadows of the New Left: From Students for a Democratic Society to Occupy Wall Street.” In Revisiting the Sixties: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on America's Longest Decade, edited by Laura Bieger and Christian Lammert. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014.