Problems of political participation in contexts of de-democratization

Abstract

In this introduction to the dossier “Philosophy of political participation”, co-edited with Moira Pérez and Blas Radi, I map some of the topics and problems that motivated our call for papers. In the first section, I introduce two main models of political participation in democratic contexts, along with the thesis that a particular traditional way of understanding it promotes today’s de-democratizing phenomena. In the second section, I suggest that it is fruitful to study political participation by focusing on the problems that inclusion in collective formal processes of political decision causes for certain people and collectives, within the framework of systems of structural domination. In the last section, I briefly present the works collected in this dossier.