Participation - A Normative Principle of Democracy

Participation in democracy, to state what might be the obvious, is an activity. For most individuals, this will be exercised through the ballot box. For a smaller number it will be seen in joining a political party and lobbying on its behalf. For others it might mean attending a constituency surgery to meet an MP or signing an online petition. The corollary of this is straightforward: hurdles or outright bars to this type of activity restrict participation. If a local MP does not hold constituency meetings, the individual has one fewer means through which to engage. Participation, in this context, is an empirically verifiable activity, which in turn can provide a basic rubric for judging the quality of a democracy. Diamond and Morlino work within this framework. Their account of participation as a dimension of democratic quality measures the public's formal and effective ability to engage in politics across a range of activities: voting, joining organisations, contacting officials, lobbying for interests (Diamond and Morlino, 2004, p. 23). Democratic quality is high, on this account, when we observe a range of citizen participation not just through voting but in the life of political parties and civil society. The framework is clear about what it is doing. It is measuring behaviour: observable activity, not the condition that makes that activity possible. Throughout their discussion of the quality of democracy, participation features heavily in the 7 other dimensions, as well as being a dimension itself. Again, the examples given are measurable: rights within freedom or competition in vertical accountability (Diamond and Morlino, 2004, pp. 8 and 25). The empirical accessibility of participation raises a methodological problem. As Parvin illustrates in his survey of democratic models, from elitist through to participatory, there is no agreement on which variables to use, what weight to assign them or how to evaluate them (Parvin, 2021, pp. 263–264). Different democratic frameworks embed different assumptions about what participation requires and what purpose it serves. The result is not just a technical disagreement between rubrics — they all agree that participation is necessary. It reveals that the measurement of participation presupposes a prior view about its value and purpose. This view the measurement frameworks themselves cannot adequately support. The problem is not that empirical approaches to participation are mistaken. They are necessary and valuable. The problem is that these frameworks rely on an unjustifiable assumption, that participation is inherently valuable. They treat its restriction not merely as a statistical outlier, but as a fundamental democratic wrong, a normative claim that the empirical data alone cannot sustain.

The normative foundation for that claim is addressed in Beramendi, Besley and Levi's (2024) analysis of political equality. Drawing on Anderson's relational account of democratic equality, they argue that political equality is not a procedural guarantee of equal treatment by institutions (Beramendi, Besley and Levi, 2024, pp. i263–i264). It is a statement about how the individual stands in relation to government. Being a political equal means being someone whose participation in collective self-governance is owed recognition, not as a privilege that institutions provide or remove, but as a status that precedes and conditions those institutions. Participation, on their account, is not something a democracy provides. It is something a democracy must presuppose to claim democratic legitimacy at all. A system that prevents meaningful participation does not fall short of an ideal. The system fails the basic normative condition for calling itself democratic. Trantidis (2024) takes this further by showing what happens when that status claim is ignored in practice. Formal procedural equality — the equal legal right to vote, to represent a party, to organise — produces unequal outcomes when the social and economic conditions of participation are themselves unequal (Trantidis, 2024, p. 464). The normative requirement is not that participatory outcomes are equal; they never will be. Individuals will always differ in their capacity and inclination to engage in a democracy. What the principle requires is the recognition that equal participation is possible: that no individual is structurally positioned so that engagement is, deliberately or negligently, closed. It is the difference between unequal outcomes within an open system and unequal outcomes within a closed one.

The two arguments from Beramendi et al. and Trantidis combine. Beramendi et al. establish that equal standing is a precondition of democratic legitimacy, not its result. Trantidis provides a model of formal equality which cannot deliver that equal standing without the conditions that make participation genuinely possible. Together they shift the argument from discussion of access and procedure into a discussion of obligation. The question is not whether a democracy offers participation. It is whether it has recognised the prior claim that every individual brings to it: that they are already, before any regime acknowledges them, someone to whom the terms of collective governance must be answerable. Establishing an obligation is one thing. That obligation, if we accept it, must be expressed through processes that are, by their nature, measurable. Ballots being counted, for example, is a measure of participation with a process which can be made more difficult or easier to follow. The translation from normative principle to institutional practice is necessary. Without it, the obligation remains abstract and unenforceable. This is where the principle is most vulnerable. In declaring that participation is a "broader vision of social justice" (Asenbaum et al., 2025, p. 359), democracy is set a problematic normative standard. The problem is what happens when that standard meets procedure. The ways in which participation is expressed — voting for an MP, consultations on assisted dying, lobbying for a winter fuel allowance — are not wrong in themselves, but they are also not normative. When they are treated as the destination rather than an expression of the prior normative commitment, they fall into arguments of equality and how many or who had equal access to participate. Asenbaum et al. identify this directly: participatory institutions can be prone to co-optation, bypassing or even alienating civil society and in so doing depoliticising participation (2025, p. 361). The mechanism is mistaken for the principle. What is missing is the recognition that the conditions enabling genuine participation are not outputs of processes but their preconditions. A related but distinct failure compounds this. Even where participatory mechanisms are not co-opted, the question of which mechanisms count as genuine participation has itself been narrowed. Deliberative theory, broadly understood as the tradition that locates democratic legitimacy in reasoned dialogue and the search for rational consensus among participants (Parvin, 2021, pp. 263–264), has come to dominate democratic innovation. As Asenbaum notes, drawing on Saward, this amounts to "deliberation's dominant hold on the imagination of democratic theorists" (Asenbaum, 2022, p. 87), crowding out agonistic, feminist and transformative approaches to engagement. The effect is that participation is redefined as reasoned dialogue within managed processes and the broader condition the obligation requires — that individuals have real power over the norms governing their lives — becomes invisible within the very frameworks designed to deliver it. Both failures share the same root. Whether participation is co-opted by institutional procedure or redefined by deliberative dominance, the result is the same: the normative principle, that individuals are owed genuine power over the norms governing their lives, is displaced by the mechanisms designed to express it.

The consequences of the failures are not merely theoretical. When participation is defined as observable activity, rather than a prior condition of democratic legitimacy, it becomes available for selective definition and deliberate manipulation. Populist movements illustrate this. The populist claim is, typically, a claim about inequality of participation: that the real people have been excluded, that their voice has been suppressed, that a corrupt elite has captured the system. This is the normative language of participation — the language of equal standing, of owed recognition, of democratic legitimacy — deployed in the service of its opposite. As Chambers (2024, pp. 18, 22) observes, populists defend authoritarian-leaning institutional reforms with direct appeals to the people, popular sovereignty, democratic participation and majority rule, drawing on the democratic vision of participation even though the intent of their reforms is to consolidate power. Participation is not extended. It is redefined. Those within the favoured party or group participate; those outside it are reframed as the elite, the corrupt, the inauthentic, whose participation in the system is itself the problem. Hungary under Fidesz, where electoral law was restructured to systematically disadvantage opposition parties and minority communities, illustrates the mechanism. The MAGA movement's continued assault on electoral administration in the United States operates by the same logic: not the immediate abolition of elections but the progressive narrowing of whose participation within them is treated as legitimate. These movements did not create the problem. A democratic tradition that had already reduced participation to procedure and measurable activity had built the opening before they arrived. Participation was already available to be offered and removed simultaneously, because it had never been grounded as anything more than an outcome. A framework that assumes the value of equal participation without being able to defend it cannot resist those who are willing to define participation selectively and call the result democratic.

What that grounding requires is not a better catalogue of participatory rights but a different account of what gives those rights their authority. Forst's discourse-theoretical account of basic rights provides it. For Forst, the right to justification is the irreducible moral claim of every person to be recognised as an equal normative authority: someone to whom the norms governing their life must be answerable (Forst, 2016, p. 8). This standing is not awarded by democratic institutions. It is their precondition. Democracy is, on this account, the attempt to give institutional expression to a moral status that individuals already possess before any regime acknowledges them. The connection to participation is direct. To participate in democracy, in any normatively meaningful sense, is to exercise the standing that the right to justification establishes: to be someone whose claim, whose disagreement must be taken seriously as a condition of legitimate governance. Passive, excluded, or simply formal participation is not participation in this sense. It is the procedural form of participation stripped of its substance: citizens counted in turnout statistics who have no real standing in the processes that determine the norms governing their lives. This is precisely the condition described above: participation that has been institutionalised, narrowed and selectively defined until the standing it was supposed to express has been removed. Where the justificatory ground is absent, participation does not simply become unequal. It becomes a mechanism of legitimation for decisions that have, in fact, been made without the genuine engagement of those they affect. Forst notes that rights cut from their normative ground are often turned into means of domination, with ideology clothing itself in the language of liberty (Forst, 2016, p. 27). The same is true of participation. A system that counts ballots without recognising the equal standing of those casting them does not simply fall short of participatory ideals. It actively uses the language and form of participation to legitimise exclusion. Participation is not what a democracy grants. It is the condition on which the democratic claim depends.

The argument proposed here is not that empirical approaches to participation are mistaken. They are necessary. Without measuring turnout, engagement, civic activity and institutional access, democratic deterioration will go undocumented and unchallenged. The backsliding literature, the inequality research, the survey work — all of it matters. However, measurement implicitly assumes that equal participation is worth defending and that assumption is normative. It cannot be derived from the measurement frameworks it underlies. A framework that measures participation without being able to explain why equal participation is required — why the exclusion of any individual from meaningful engagement is not merely a deficiency but a democratic wrong — has no principled ground from which to resist those who will define the participating people selectively. A framework can record declining turnout among marginalised groups. It cannot explain, from within its own terms, why those groups are owed participation in the first place. That explanation requires the prior recognition that participation is not what democracy gives individuals. It is part of what individuals bring to democracy as a condition of its legitimacy. Democracies that cannot give a normative account, grounded in the right to justification, before they begin measuring it are vulnerable to those who will measure it selectively, define and, more dangerously, redefine the people conveniently and call the result democratic. Participation is not an output of democratic process. It is one of the conditions without which the democratic claim cannot be sustained.