Abstract

SIGNORELLI, Gisela. Democracy Beyond Elections: Affective Turn Towards Participation to Manage Complexity. Temas debates (En línea) [online]. 2023, n.45, suppl.1, pp.175-182. ISSN 1853-984X.

Democracy has good credentials but they seem to be insufficient. Governments are powerless to solve structural problems such as inequality and violence in a context of high complexity. This increases the gaps between citizens’ expectations and what the democratic representative system manages to guarantee.

Although Argentina has achieved a continuity of forty years of democracy -an unprecedented and invaluable fact in its history- and a high percentage of people choose the democratic system as the best form of government, distrust of political power and state institutions is growing. To this is added the impact of the disruptive phenomenon that means the Internet in our lives and, therefore, in politics. All of these consolidate an unencouraging scenario with high rates of disaffection and shifts to the more conservative right.

To think about democracy beyond elections is to think of the participatory element with the greatest prominence, that of concrete action with citizen commitment in the construction of the commons, transmuting indignation into hope. Democracy is the best system to manage complexity and participation is an element to unlock it by recovering two of its fundamental pillars: social equality and popular sovereignty. Participation in an institutional and instituting sense -in constant feedback- as the creation of popular power. To recover from the affective dimension the fabric of democratic, which today is broken, for the consolidation of a "strategy of radical reformism" (Mouffe, 2023).

Keywords : democracy; participation; affections; the common; radical reformism.

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