Héloïse Nez

The Struggle for a Voice: Tensions between Associations and Citizens in Participatory Budgeting

The emergence of new participatory mechanisms, such as participatory budgeting, in towns and cities in recent years has given rise to a conflict between the old protagonists of local participation and the new citizens invited to participate. These mechanisms offer a logic of collective action different from what has been the usual fare in cities — one based on proposal rather than demand. As a result, urban social movements need to transform their own dynamics in order to make room for a new political subject (the citizenry and the non-organized participant) and to act upon a stage where deliberative dynamics now apply. This article aims to analyse this conflict in three different cities that set up participatory budgeting at different times: Porto Alegre, Cordova and Paris. The associations in the three cities took up a position against the new participatory mechanisms and demanded a bigger role in the political arena. Through a piece of ethnographic research, we shall see that the responses of the agents involved (politicians, associations and citizens) in the three cities share some arguments, although the conflict was resolved differently in each of them. The article concludes with reflections on the consequences this conflict could have for contemporary political theory, especially with respect to the role of associations in the processes of democratization and the setting forth of a new way of doing politics by means of deliberative procedures.

Does participation mean reciprocal learning? The relationships between diverse stakeholders during participatory budgeting in Paris

ABSTRACT This article analyses the process by which lay citizens acquire new knowledge through participation and, reciprocally, how elected officials, civil servants, and associative leaders may learn from lay citizens. The aim is to develop a better understanding of the relationships and dynamics between these different stakeholders since the turn towards participatory democracy. Participatory devices generate new dynamics among social movements’ actors and the creation of knowledge stemming from interactions between participants, who all learn from each other. Nevertheless, these mutual forms of learning do not necessarily imply the disappearance of power relations and knowledge imposition attempts by dominant stakeholders during the debates.

Street Politics in the Age of Austerity: From the Indignados to Occupy

In a recent piece, McAdam and Tarrow (2010) discuss the question of the relationship between contention and convention in political action. Self-critically, the authors observe that their joint effort (together with Charles Tilly) to overcome the compartementalization of studies concerning different forms of political action had given little attention to elections. They consider the inattention to the connection between elections and social movements ‘a serious lacuna’ of their Dynamics of Contention (McAdam et al. 2001), ‘as it is in the entire broad field of contentious politics’ (p. 532). To overcome the segmentation of the study of elections and social movements, they propose a series of six mechanisms that they think ‘link movement actors to routine political actors in electoral campaigns’. These mechanisms focus on how movements influence the electoral process: movements may turn into parties who participate in elections, or they may form within parties; they may introduce tactical innovations which can be adopted as electoral tools; they may become active in electoral campaigns or react to the outcome of elections. In our own attempt to link the two worlds of social movements and political parties, I have been interested in the opposite causal relationship, i.e. in the question of how political parties influence the mobilization by social movements (Kriesi et al. 1995). In our comparative analysis of the mobilization of the new social movements, we were able to show that the configuration of the old and new left, and whether the left was in or out of government made a key difference for their success.

Podemos: The Emergence of a New Political Party in Spain

In the last few years, Spain has experienced some dramatic social and political changes including the birth of a new party Podemos—literally “We can” echoing Barack Obama’s presidential campaign slogan “Yes, we can”—on 17 January 2014 in the wake of the “Indignant Movement”. An economic and social crisis characterised by the rise of poverty and social inequalities coupled with a deep political crisis fuelled by the corruption of the main political parties—the PP (the Popular Party, a right-wing party) and Psoe (the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party)—favoured the emergence of Podemos. Within less than two years, it succeeded in challenging the traditional two-party system, rejuvenating political elites and, to a certain extent, the monarchy itself—as King Juan Carlos, aged 76, abdicated in favour of his son Felipe VI—while introducing a new code of ethics limiting multiple offices as well as more social justice.