Democratic evolution between institutionalization and spontaneity: Challenges to contemporary democratic politics

• Autor(a) principal: Danner, Leno Francisco
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Civitas - Revista de Ciências Sociais (Porto Alegre. Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/index.php/civitas/article/view/23254
• topic: Modernization. Institutionalism. Spontaneity. Democracy. Power.; Modernização. Institucionalismo. Espontaneidade. Democracia. Poder.

In the text I criticize the excessive importance given to institutionalization as the core of democratic dynamics, correlatively to minimization of the importance given to spontaneity of initiatives by the citizen and social movements as political subjects capable of conducting decision-making political processes and managing autonomously specific fields of social life. That situation conducts to reduction of democratic politics to representative politics, and to monopolization of political power  by political parties. Here is revealed the worse problem that must be faced today: the deeply imbrication between political institutions, political parties, and economic oligarchies; the centrality of the institutionalization inhibiting social spontaneity as the core of democratic dynamics. I defend that the overcoming of this problem needs to invert the current democratic dynamics: spontaneity of citizen initiatives and social movements should gain primacy over institutionalism, what means the decentralization of decision-making political processes and forms of social life management.