To Think the Political Participation from the Contingency and Deliberation

Abstract

The article analyzes the deliberative citizenship participation, its problems and possibilities, in the context of crises of the global democracies. The aim is to offer a strategic interpretation about the political participation, from a theoretical framework linking both notions contingency and deliberation. Democracy is understood like a system and method to obtain and enforce power, in which the citizen participation confers legitimacy to the State. In this political system the right to participation is a prerogative for the citizens established like the right to vote for their representatives. In the XX century the right to participation means the fulfillment of some of the main goals of the democracy, to set up a real community of citizens. However, since the late XX, the real impact of participation in democracy has been questioned and a "feeling" of crises has been developed. As a consequence, expectations about the value of the citizen political act became minimal and eventually turned into disaffection towards the public. To guide our final objective, this paper offers three aspects about this issue: a) an analysis of the political participation from contingency, a basic notion of the democracy, b) an analysis of the relationship of both contingency and participation having in common a deliberative proposal and, c) an evidence of how the argumentative component of the deliberation fosters the resignification of participation.