Deliberation and the Norm of Participation

Abstract

Participation is a term that by its own nature reflects the desire to be a part of something that is greater than the individual experience. In modern societies, the desire to socialise is most often positioned within the political borders of democracy. The rise of representative democracy, beginning in the seventeenth century and exerting its political power with increasing force in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, formalised what was originally a socially-held demand for participation. In light of this tradition, citizen-participation has for many years been considered a means of connecting the elected government with the wider social community. Mechanisms such as voting have been designed to communicate the interest of the public to their representatives. In recent years, citizens‟ failure to engage with these mechanisms has generated a growing body of literature on declining levels of participation. This failure has also led to the inability of liberal democracies to legitimise their own authority.