Participatory Democracy
participatory and when there is representation,
Benjamin R. Barber
Participatory democracy is a generic – and
perhaps the original – form of democracy in
the  western world. It can be compared and
contrasted with representative democracy as
well as with forms expressed by correlative
terms such as direct, deliberative, and strong
democracy. Because democracy originated
in  small towns, principalities, city-states, and
rural republics, it was a form of small-scale
self-government that was predicated on a
mono-cultural community, ethnically and
religiously uniform, where differences were
minor and consensus well developed. Such
commonality allowed economic and policy
differences to be adjudicated and legislated
without tearing the social fabric of society
asunder.
In the world of the Greek polis, where the
western roots of democracy are found,
democracy denoted the rule of the demos: the
“people” of Athens and Attica, divided by
Cleisthenes’ reform into 10 “tribes” (phylai) – a
division so organized that it counteracted the
territoriality of the “burghs” (demai) where these
originally autonomous tribal communities lived.
Since democracy entailed self-government, it
mandated from every citizen civic engagement
in the full life of the polis. Frequent assemblies,
offices held on the basis of sortition (choice by
lot), popular juries and citizen legislators
defined a system that made government and
the people one and the same thing – at least for
those males endowed with the title “citizen.”
In principle, all democracy is to a degree
participatory, rooted minimally in an act of
original consent (a “social contract”) as well
as in periodic participation in elections. To this
extent, to say that democracy is consensual is
already to say that it is participatory. In modern
times, however – when the challenge of scale
The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, First Edition. Edited by Michael T. Gibbons.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0752
has made democracy more representative than
accountability, and indirect government, in
which the people select the rulers rather than
ruling themselves – participatory democracy
has come to be seen as an alternative form
of  democracy, in part because modern repre-
sentative democracy weakens citizenship but
broadens the citizen base. More and more
citizens do less and less to actually govern
themselves, turning participatory democracy
and representative democracy into conceptual
antonyms, two fundamentally distinctive forms
of democracy rooted in contrary understand-
ings of popular sovereignty, as direct self-rule
by a self-circumscribed people, and (some-
what cynically) as indirect rule by “circulating
elites” (Schumpeter 1942) chosen by “all” the
people – who, however, remain otherwise passive
spectators of the legislative process.
Representative government, answering to a
broad but “thin” citizenry, quickly became asso-
ciated with the alienation of politicians from
those who elected them (the so-called “iron law
of oligarchy”) and with popular distrust of
politicians and of the government they consti-
tuted – distrust on the part of citizens who did
nothing but periodically vote. Such alienation is
typical of recent populist revolts against
government by groups such as the American
Tea Party. To counter such civic alienation,
mixed democratic regimes sometimes try to
incorporate elements of participatory democ-
racy in the representative system – using the
popular election of judges, the initiative,
referendum, and recall, or devices such as delib-
erative polling, to maintain elements of citizen
involvement beyond mere voting.
If mixed government permits some partici-
pation in a representative system, for the most
part participatory democracy nevertheless
stands in stark contrast to representation,
where the citizen nowadays becomes a passive
“client” of government; a “watchdog” to whom
2
the government remains accountable but
whom it otherwise ignores; and a periodic
elector responsible for selecting those who
actually govern, free only on election day.
Philosophers of participatory democracy such
as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Robert Michels
have understood this “thin” representative
construction of democracy as being contrary
to democracy’s core meaning. Where there is
representation, the democratic principle itself
is nullified, since citizens are separated from
legislation and on election days their liberty
vanishes with their ballots.
The choice between participatory and repre-
sentative democracy is not, however, arbitrary.
The transition from one to the other was
ordained by historical changes in the nature and
scale of society. Scale has in fact been the prime
conditioner of democracy’s development. Born
in and designed for small-scale societies of the
kind found in ancient Greece, in early modern
Europe, and in pre-Revolutionary America,
democracy appeared to be essentially threat-
ened by the emergence of large-scale societies,
urban conglomerations, and the nation-states
of  the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The
American Founders doubted whether founding
a democratic republic of “continental extent”
could even be feasible.
Since direct democracy in its ancient form
had been conditioned by a simplicity of man-
ners and interests, a relative homogeneity of
culture and religion, and above all a small
demographic and geographical scale that
allowed the citizenry to meet in common in a
public place, how could a democracy of millions
ever make sense? To eighteenth-century theo-
rists like Montesquieu and Rousseau, it could
not. The ideal size of a democratic republic, if
not 500, would be perhaps 5,000, with an outer
limit of, say, 20,000 citizens (the number of
active citizens engaged in politics in Athens
during the Periclean Age in the mid-fifth
century bce; and the rough size of Geneva in
the eighteenth century, when Rousseau cele-
brated it). Aristotle had pointedly observed
that democracy could exist only on a territory
a man could traverse in a day, on his way to
the democratic assembly meeting on the Pnyx
(on these dilemmas, see Arendt 1958).
By the eighteenth century, Europe’s capital
cities and burgeoning nation-states had
become too large for democracy. Kant had
insisted that freedom (autonomy) demanded
self-legislation. Rousseau and Jefferson alike
doubted that large-scale cities could be self-
legislating, let alone nurture the engaged citi-
zens and modest-scale democracy required.
Yet two novel ideas rescued democracy from
the challenge of scale: first, the principle of
representation, which preserved popular sov-
ereignty but removed the legislative function
from the direct purview of citizens; and,
second, federalism, which divided power
vertically and permitted localities to main-
tain small-scale participation (as in the
French provinces) even as central power was
exercised by sovereign representatives whose
power was commensurable with the large-scale
states over which they ruled (as with
the Bourbon kings).
In America, the Founders wrestled noisily
with these contradictions between participa-
tory and representative democracy – tensions
between direct popular government and
indirect rule by chosen surrogates. But the
American representative principle was not
merely a pragmatic way to preserve democracy
in large-scale societies; it carried with it an
explicit critique of direct democracy. Direct
popular rule risked enthroning not merely the
popular sovereign, but an incompetent and
impassioned mass (a mob or, using the French
term, a foule). Representation had the virtue
not only of facilitating popular sovereignty
in  large-scale settings, but of placing a filter
between the masses and prudent or “good”
government. Representatives had the obliga-
tion not only to represent the people’s will but,
in Edmund Burke’s terms, to filter it through
and to subordinate it to their own prudent
judgment acting in the interest of the entire
nation. Even the popular right to choose repre-
sentatives might sometimes be prudently dele-
gated to other wise electors, as was meant to
happen with the early American “electoral

college” through which, in the first years of the
American Republic, both the senators and the
president were chosen.
The transition from participatory to repre-
sentative democracy was not, however, solely a
marker of prudence and of maintaining a
democracy in the face of scale. It also resulted
from the Enlightenment’s rationalist distrust of
power – especially democratic power! – that
fed the skepticism of Founders like James
Madison about not just direct democracy, but
popular power tout court. Hamilton worried
about mobocracy, while the “tyranny of the
majority” that later excited Tocqueville’s fears
clearly made many Founders nervous. The
ancients had worried that, just as aristocracy
could deteriorate into oligarchy, so too democ-
racy could morph into ochlocracy – Aristotle’s
term for people’s tyranny.
This is not to say that the spirit of modern
representative democracy is essentially anti-
democratic. But there is undoubtedly an
element of caution and skepticism about power
in the Founders’ approach to representation.
If power is dangerous, popular power may be
the more so because it tries to ground itself in a
self-righteous legitimacy that mistakes the
people’s will for a voice of reason. Indirect
rule  can become a check on popular power
consistent with the rule of law and rational
constitutional limits on all power.
This critique of popular power that equates
it with popular prejudice and popular passion
was hardly unknown to early democrats or
champions of participatory democracy. On the
contrary, they insisted from the start that
popular government meant not government
for, by, and of the people, by rule for, by, and of
citizens. Citizens are public not private, delib-
erative rather than impulsive, and educated
into the ways of civility and commonality
rather than wedded to private passions.
Democracy required not just the empowerment
but the education of citizens.
Hence there is no democratic theory, and
certainly no participatory democratic theory,
from Plato and Aristotle to Rousseau and
Jefferson, that is not also a pedagogical theory.
3
Every notion of citizenship is rooted in a notion
of civic education. Plato rejects democracy
only because he thinks the majority cannot be
educated sufficiently to govern; he wants all
who are citizens to govern, but argues that only
philosophers are capable of being citizens.
Rousseau writes a novel (Émile) whose theme
is democratic education for a citizen who
does  not live in a democracy. And, although
they were political adversaries, both Thomas
Jefferson and John Adams were certain that
America’s new democracy could work only if
citizens had access to universal education.
Jefferson deemed his founding of the University
of Virginia more significant to America’s
democratic future than his presidency.
John Dewey, with his Democracy and
Education (Dewey 1916), is perhaps the most
celebrated advocate of democratic education as
the condition for democratic governance, and
today in the United States the quarrel between
private and public education turns at least
in  part on what it means to educate “public
citizens,” if not in public schools. Alexis de
Tocqueville (1838–40) understood that liberty,
though a right, was also an “apprenticeship” –
indeed the “most arduous” of all apprentice-
ships, because it was the necessary precondition
of prudent democratic government.
Citizens are not, then, merely “rights-bearing
persons” or “interest-driven consumers” of
government. Whether as direct participants in
self-legislation or as prudent voters in a repre-
sentative democracy, they must be civic-minded
and reflective, always seeking the common
ground they share with others. In this regard,
participatory democracy is intimately associ-
ated with deliberative democracy. To act as a
citizen is not merely to voice private interests. It
is to interact and deliberate with others in search
of common ground and public goods. Indeed,
the aim of participation is not merely to express
interests but to foster deliberation and public-
mindedness about interests. Experiments in
deliberative democracy by contemporaries such
as James Fishkin have demonstrated that citi-
zens can change their minds about private opin-
ions and become more open to public goods
4
when exposed to deliberative procedures.
Classical participatory democrats understood as
well as Madison did that popular passions had
to be “filtered” if direct democratic government
was to succeed; but they thought that the filter
was internal, put in the heads of students
through intensive citizen education and deliber-
ative practices.
Nowadays advocates of participatory democ-
racy focus on new technologies like the cellular
phone and the Internet, which offer horizontal
point-to-point (person-to-person) communi-
cation, and they suggest that citizens may be
able to develop virtual communities across bor-
ders that facilitate self-government, even in
large-scale mass societies. Although the social
networks are currently focused on private social
relations and commerce, their architecture
affords new avenues of civic and political net-
working as well (see, e.g., Manuel Castells
1996). On the World Wide Web the world
becomes a virtual village, and where physical
communities are barred from self-legislation by
size or distance, virtual communities are not. If
participatory democracy depends on educa-
tion, association, and communication, then
digital technologies that facilitate them become
its obvious tools. Recent presidential elections
in the United States (Howard Dean in 2004 and
Barack Obama in 2008) have offered opportu-
nities for interaction (“meet-ups”) among citi-
zens that give a participatory dimension to
classical representative electoral campaigns.
The potential for a renewal of participation and
self-legislation is yet to be tapped. Perhaps, in
the great cycle of history, the way forward
through global technology will point back to
new possibilities for participatory democracy
and self-legislation in a world where scale has
been made less daunting.
SEE ALSO: Arendt, Hannah (1906–75);
Citizen/Citizenship; Democracy ; Dewey, John
(1859–1952); Direct Democracy ; Iron Law of
Oligarchy ; Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826);
Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804); Michels, Robert
(1876–1936); Popular Sovereignty ; Public Goods;
Representation; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78)
References
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Networked
Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education. New
York: Macmillan.
Schumpeter, J. (1942) Capitalism, Socialism and
Democracy. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Tocqueville, A. de. (1838–40) Democracy in
America, vols. 1–2, trans. H. Reeve. New York:
Adlard & Saunders.
Further Reading
Barber, B. (1984) Strong Democracy. Berkeley :
University of California Press.
Dahl, R. A. (1963) Preface to Democratic Theory.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dunn, J. (2005) Democracy: A History. New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press.
Elster, J. (Ed.) (1998) Deliberative Democracy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fishkin, J. (1991) Democracy and Deliberation. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hamilton, A., Madison, J., and Jay, J. (1999 [1791])
The Federalist Papers, ed. C. Rossiter. New York:
Signet Classics.
Michels, R. (2009 [1911]) Political Parties. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Pateman, C. (1970) Participation and Democratic
Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rousseau, J.-J. (2002 [1762]) The Social Contract
and the First and Second Discourses, ed. S. Dunn.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.