Keywords

1 Envisioning the Future of Democracy Between Twilight and Emerging Forms and Scales, Views from the Basque Atalaia (Watchtower)

The most common use of the word atalaya (a term of Arabic origin that in Basque is written atalaia) is an architectural reference to high buildings, normally towers, from which to survey extensive areas of land or sea. The first documented references to the presence of atalayas on the Basque coast date back to the beginning of the fourteenth century, although it is thought that they were first used in the eleventh century or even earlier. For centuries, they served, among other things, to warn fishermen of the arrival of storms and the presence of shoals of fish and, above all, of whales. They also detected vessels heading for port, especially those that were in difficulty and needed to be tugged to safety, and enemy ships. Their exceptional location enabled them to fulfil an extremely important function in fishing ports, and they are often described as “eyes on the sea”, because communities that live by the sea need to observe it constantly, particularly in areas like the Basque Country where the coast is rugged and wild and the sea rough. In figurative terms, the same expression is used to refer to the quest to find positions (or states) from which it is possible fully to discern a reality. Referring to democracy as a reality and seeking to observe it from a single watchtower would be more a naive than utopian act, because although the classical vision of democracy, based upon the expressions demos (the people) and kratos (rule), and its fundamental principles appear simple (Popper, 1998), there is no consensus regarding the precise definition of this term. It is an overarching concept that not only is projected upon the functioning of the institutions and mechanisms of citizen participation in political decision-making but also has a profound relationship with phenomena such as equality-inequality, freedom of expression, justice, poverty and education, among many others (Krauss, 2016).

In a recent interviewFootnote 1, Anne Applebaum, author of the book “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism”, emphatically declared that the symptoms of the weakening of democracy at a global level are evident and that unlike in earlier eras, that weakness is apparent not only in recent democracies, but that North American and European countries with a long democratic tradition are also experiencing these symptoms. That idea of decline, along with the analysis of the symptoms of weakness and phenomena that reflect it, has become a persistent commonplace during the last decade, particularly intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. The future of democracy, added Anne Applebaum, cannot be regarded as already written; its survival or demise, says the author, depends on the decisions taken in this respect. Modern democracy, caught between its liberal and radical versions and besieged by reactionary alternatives, has continued to spread across the planet. In turn, capitalism has been transformed into corporate capitalism. There has also been clear erosion of the social state and of the conception of the public in recent decades, in the context of the hegemony of neoliberal ideas. The crisis of 2008 does not appear to have taught any lessons. There is a certain risk of increasing extremism and authoritarian tendencies, in a climate marked by a false debate over the primacy of efficiency and security over democracy and rights. This is creating the temptation to “return to the state”, but rather than to the social state, to the “strong”, authoritarian state of the twentieth century, re-centralised and critical of transnational political (but not economic) scales. Centrality of the concept of innovation, but restricted in turn to economic and technological spheres, and conditioning their scope in the public and institutional space to compliance with requirements of functionality and efficiency according to neoliberal criteria. This work seeks to contribute to that reflection and adoption of those decisions and strategies for an adaptation of democracy that would facilitate its survival.

There is considerable academic interest in this question. The SCOPUS database includes over 90,000 documents related to the term, and it is evident that interest in the issue has grown since the 1990s and has increased exponentially in the context of the two major global crises of the twenty-first century: the economic crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic. Searches of other scientific databases, such as the Web of Science, generate similar results, illustrating the huge and growing academic interest in democracy (Bornmann & Mutz, 2015). Another noteworthy characteristic of this evolution is the way in which fields of study and approaches to the complex thematic terrain of democracy have diversified.

In this context, the innovative aspect of this work is the atalaia from which the question is addressed. The starting point is the premise that Basque society is an exceptional atalaia from which to contemplate the emerging forms and scales of contemporary democracy. It shares with other work methodologies the desire to explore the dangers, shortcomings and challenges facing Western societies in the light of the decline of democracy and the emergence of new political scales in which the concepts and tools of classical democracy prove unsatisfactory. But it has an important differentiating element, which is that the main reference of the texts, projected onto scales that range from the local to the global, are strategies and experiences of Basque society.

Let us turn to the Basque Country. It is located in the easternmost part of what is known in English as the Bay of Biscay, in reference to one of the provinces of which it is composed, straddling the French and Spanish states. It is formed by seven historical territories, divided into three regions under different authorities: to the west, and within the Spanish state, the Comunidad Autónoma del País Vasco comprises the provinces of Biscay, Gipuzkoa and Araba, the most densely populated; in the centre, the Comunidad Foral de Navarra, direct successor of the Kingdom of Navarra, independent until the sixteenth century; and to the north of Navarra, within the French state, the Comunidad de Aglomeración del País Vasco, with the provinces of Lapurdi, Baja Navarra and Zuberoa. A country named after its own language, Basque, a non-Indo-European tongue, completely unique in Europe, today coexists with Castilian and French.

In more relative terms, the location of the Basque Country is particularly interesting. It is part of Western Europe but in a southern state, of which it is an economic and political motor. However, its interest as a watchtower from which to observe the emerging forms and scales of contemporary Western democracy does not arise from these characteristics, but from the fact that Basque society has been and is a genuine social and political laboratory. The question of identity is, perhaps, the one that has attracted the most attention, given its repercussions beyond Basque borders. This is, therefore, one of the prime examples in Europe of cultures that lacked state expression during the nineteenth century, resulting in sometimes tragic consequences, with repeated confrontation, both internal (more than once in the form of war) and external. In the case of the Basque Country, a significant part of the population continues to question its belonging to Spain or, to a lesser extent, to France, as is demonstrated by the high degree of adhesion to a sentiment exclusively Basque identity. And without going so far, only a minority accept solely French or Spanish national identity, in its most traditional sense, while there is frequent expression of dual identities that reject other exclusive and exclusionary interpretations.

Less well-known is the Basque Country’s endless search for its own institutional and democratic model. This search for its own model, one that adapts to the region’s social needs and resolves its problems, is only a particular expression of a general question: democracy only works if it is adapted to each specific scenario. Although inspired by values and principles considered being universal, it cannot be exported from other realities or imposed from outside. Democracy, giving the people a voice, must respect their particular characteristics and even their capacity to make mistakes, as one only learns from one’s own errors. When errors are made as a consequence of external factors, there is a danger of the population considering that the flaw lies not in that particular model, but in the very concept of democracy itself.

Basque society has learned the hardest way that democracy is the art of living together, aware of the significance of recognising diversity and difference and finding means of respectful coexistence with difference. In this sense, one could say that respect for others is one of the best and most necessary civic virtues that make democracy possible. Democracy makes it possible, in the deliberative process, to perceive that the points of view of social groups, however deep-rooted they may be, do not necessarily have to be shared, and this realisation endows the population with a certain civic humility. Democracy is, for this very reason, a school of democracy, which is why it is so important to experiment with and test innovations, which may prove empowering in other places.

There is also heated discussion over how to distribute power among the different political and institutional scales, which have gradually evolved in parallel with European supranational integration. In the case of the western Basque Country (the Comunidad Autónoma Vasca), the internal institutional system accords ample autonomy to its three regions, and in turn, this regional structure is included within the regional system of the Spanish state, creating a complex system that, moreover, is understood by most of the population still to be in the process of construction. This constant revision and discussion of the basic categories of the liberal order is also, of course, discussion about the central aspects of democracy. In other words, for decades in the Basque Country, there has been an intense process of reflection upon the very presupposition of democracy, the national demos, and upon the way of democratically articulating diverse political scales, questions of legality and legitimacy, as well as debate over the various forms of democracy: representative, participative, deliberative, etc.

The result of all these factors is that in the Basque Country, these debates are held in different terms from elsewhere, and that in addition, these questions are not restricted to academic reflection, but are widely socialised; they form part of the public debate. This singular situation means that it is worthwhile adopting a different vision of what is a global subject. The goal of this book is, therefore, to offer some visions of democracy from the perspective of Basque society, by analysing emerging strategies of participation along with academic approaches to democratic participation. The project is led by Parte Hartuz, a research group within the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), with a special interest in democracy. Since 2002, this group has brought together dozens of researchers from different areas of knowledge, always within the social sciences, and has channelled their investigations in both the academic and educational fields, as well as collaborating with other popular movements. The volume also incorporates contributions by other established authors, which complement and enrich the work structured into four blocks.

Professor Argimiro Rojo opens the work with the text “The Challenge of Finding a Cosmopolitan Democratic Model”. The author proposes a reflection upon the importance of international political scales and, increasingly so, the global scale. Processes of globalisation and diverse political and technological developments suggest the need to reconfigure political frameworks and create an effective political and institutional scale at a global level, a cosmopolitan democratic model. This is followed by the first part, which addresses, with projections on different scales of governance, the tensions between the liberal visions of democracy and the voices that question the latter. There is then a block focused on emerging frameworks and scales (Part II), another of analysis of new forms of citizen participation (Part III) and a block specifically dedicated to the relevance of revisiting the methodological and epistemological frameworks that generate knowledge about democracy and mechanisms of citizen participation (Part IV).

2 Question of Scales: The Tensions Generated by the Neoliberal Attempt to Domesticate Democracy (Part I) and New Practices of Citizenship in Emerging Scales and Frameworks of Western Democracy (Part II)

In her book The Moral Basis of Democracy, Eleanor Roosevelt (1940) said that when hundreds of people are homeless and hungry, it is time for us to stop and reflect upon how much democracy we have and how much we would like to have. Decades later, we are asking ourselves about not only the quantity or quality of democracy to which we aspire but also what is meant by the proposal for more democracy. So much use has been made of the expression that the concept of democracy appears to have become blurred at the edges and offered its services to forms of oppression that, being somewhat nicer than those of the past, run the risk of going unnoticed. Guilluy believes that Margaret Thatcher’s old claim that “There is no such thing as society”, has finally come true (Guilluy, 2019).

It is probable that never before in history has there been simultaneous use of so many and such diverse interpretations of democracy and citizen participation. It is true that when there is talk of democracy, we are faced with a competitive exegesis with regard to the meaning of the term (Mouffe, 1993), and to a certain extent, this has resulted in the idea of democracy fluctuating and always being a matter of degree. During the last decade, however, we seem to be witnessing the height of the struggle to appropriate the term democracy, regardless of content. It has become one of those multivocal symbols that can be employed with opposite meanings.

Among the most noteworthy phenomena are those practices that are arbitrarily labelled as participatory or real democracy, and in which the demos upon which they are based and, even more so, the kratos really exercised by those who take part, are very debateable. Demo-fiction easily disguises itself as “real” democracy, an expression that makes it possible to label as unreal or false other formulae of participation.

The chapters in this first block analyse how domesticated versions of democracy are dissipating the democratic paradigm and making people lose sight of the obvious: “Society is made up of people, and the strength, resilience and adaptability of a society depends wholly on those traits in its people” (Shah, 2016: 10). Every level, from the local to – in particular – the global, has major economic deficits. Structural inequality precludes citizen participation that could be interpreted as deliberative; emphasis on individual liberty makes it impossible to adopt shared decisions with regard to the well-being of all.

In this scenario, it is essential to recover, reinforce and, when necessary, reinvent both mechanisms of participation and pillars of well-being, including the redistribution of wealth and the guarantee of minimum living standards. With a structuralist and intersectional reflection, Martínez-Palacios and Ahedo present the contribution “The neoliberal commercialisation of citizen participation in Spain”. They provide empirical material in relation to instruments of participation and reflect an institutional tendency that, although it is the object of analysis in Spain in particular, is symptomatic of a trend that can also be seen in other Western democracies.

In a dialogue with the aforementioned chapter, Azkune, Goikoetxea and Romero address “The Basque union majority in the face of systemic exclusion”, focusing on the role of trade unionism in a context of neoliberal hegemony. Via reference to Jessop’s strategic-relational approach and Foucault’s governmentality, attention is drawn to the tensions of democracy, and there is emphasis on the positive contribution made by Basque trade unionism. Thirdly, and with projection on a global scale, Lekue and Tellería explore “Responses from urban democratization to global neoliberalism”. On the basis of urban critical theory, the chapter presents participatory experiences that local governments and urban movements have been promoting in recent years with the view to intensifying democracy.

The second part reflects upon how democracy is evolving, in order to adapt to emerging scales and forms and new frameworks of action. Modern democracy emerged within the state, giving way to the nation-state, and on the whole, democracies in recent centuries have mostly been national. But this state-national scale has gradually been relativized, affected by increasing processes of interdependence and globalisation, promoted by corporate capitalism. The emergence of supranational and global scales, as well as phenomena on local and regional scales, has given way to a complex multiscale framework. The infrastructure of modern democracy, beginning with state sovereignty, and the ability of nations to provide solid foundations for societies and national markets have been called into question.

Thus, with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, Igor Calzada explains how it has prompted a re-emergence of the historical debate between the state as provider, the guarantor of public safety, and the civil liberties that citizens should enjoy. The article points to the need to study the new ways and possibilities of developing democracy and participation, in what he terms “postpandemic technopolitical democracy”. Comparing the urban and the global scale, Jordi Borja analyses the inability of states to address the numerous problems posed by today’s world, which results in growing inequality, and proposes a reappropriation of urban public space. For their part, Filibi and Uncetabarrena analyse from the Basque watchtower the evolution and current situation of European democracy, suggesting that the construction of a European democracy should serve to improve the model of the nation-state, and not only to construct the same system on a larger scale.

From a different angle, Azkargorta, Vazquez and Albizu choose the global scale, because this provides the opportunity to analyse society’s structural problems as a whole and offers a perspective of emancipation based on the construction of unity, solidarity and cooperation between the different responses and alternatives to the current capitalist and neoliberal world system. With the study of the case of the International People’s Assembly (IPA), the authors explore the project to build a global democracy. Finally, Curto and Huarte discuss popular power as the subject of democratic transformation. They analyse the emergence of community dynamics in which collective subjects create new forms of power and new political logics to organise and develop society, thereby questioning both the neoliberal subject and the project of liberal democracy in crisis.

3 Deepening Democracy: Analysing Practical Strategies of Participation (Part III) and Research Methodologies (Part IV)

It has long been suspected that the way in which elites formulate political questions hinders the participation of those who lack the necessary social or cultural resources. The consequence of this would be a hidden census, which filters the official version and restricts the participation of a growing sector of the population (Gaxie, 1978). This tendency has been reinforced by the neoliberal participatory shift that, far from organising interest in participation, appears to be designed to maintain the political disinterest that guarantees that there is no increase in the number of competitors in the field of power (Martínez-Palacios, 2021: 366).

But what do we understand by “participate”? In recent decades, there has clearly been an evolution in the way of understanding the concept, as there has been in the way of understanding democracy and citizenship itself. On the basis of those restrictive forms of participation (channelled institutionally and directed at the government, the state or political elites), Norris’s proposals (2002) represent an advance in the extension of the concept, in its affirmation that the activities that seek civil or social impact or strive to change systematic patterns of social behaviour may be considered types of political participation. In an attempt to develop the concept, van Deth (2014) proposes four types of political participation: a first type of institutional, conventional or formal participation; a second type of non-conventional, non-institutional, or contentious political participation; a third, which includes types of civic, social or community compromise; and lastly a type of individualised and expressive political participation. Although this classification has been the object of discussion (Hooghe, 2014; Hosch-Dayican, 2014; de Moor, 2016), it illustrates the current need to redefine the concept of political participation in order to interpret the increase in emerging and changing participatory practices, which flow between different private and public, political and economic spheres.

It is perhaps youth that best reflects these changes. Thus, the political participation of young people in Europe and other parts of the world is increasingly defined by the development of practices that are not contemplated in institutionalised forms of participation, and of hybrid or mixed repertoires (Hustinx et al., 2012; Sloam, 2016; Monticelli & Bassoli, 2016).

The need to reformulate and extend citizen political participation is related to processes of neoliberal globalisation and the repositioning of states in complex fields of political power. These processes have intensified the construction of practices of citizenship that are increasingly removed from the formal citizenship defined by the state (Sassen, 2003). In the liberal paradigm, citizenship has been conceived as a set of elements that connect individual agency and state political order. This model has now been surpassed. Indeed, as the formal rights of citizenship have been undermined, greater significance has been acquired by a multiplicity of processes and actors of citizenship that are not formalised in political systems, which develop alternative forms and practices of participation.

This leads us to the major theme of representation. Andrea Greppi has suggested that what has been deeply eroded is the very idea that a subject is authorised to act in the name of and on behalf of others (Sermeño & Aragón, 2017: 32), something that social movements had already proposed, but which is now generalised. The rich and powerful avoid contact with the masses, are neither worried about public issues nor feel obliged to contribute to community services, but strive not to lose control of power. The middle classes, until recently the bastion of liberal democracies, contemplate their present and their future, with concern, and have begun to question their support for a system that seems to have turned its back on them. The popular classes are beginning to say out loud that those who are governing in their name do not in fact represent them.

Various authors have been speaking for some time of a crisis of representation, frequently contrasting the oft-criticised representation with the promising and supposedly more democratic participation. However, when these arguments have appeared to be more convincing in academic circles and more powerful within public opinion, dissenting voices have been heard. Nadia Urbinati dedicated a book to the defence of “the arguments of the minority that believes democracy and representation are complementary rather than antithetical”. Her goal, she added, was “to inquire into the conditions under which representation is democratic”, arguing that “representative democracy is an original form of government that is not identifiable with electoral democracy.” (Urbinati, 2006: 4)

Within this democratic rediscovery of representation (Urbinati, 2006: 5) we can include Andrea Greppi, who, far from contrasting representation and participation, claims that “they are different moments within the same process, a return journey from deliberation to decision and vice versa” (Sermeño & Aragón, 2017: 22–23). This author warns of the risk of disqualifying and eliminating representation, since “the alternative to (representative) democracy is not to be found in (supposed) democracy without representation, but in the administration of huge doses of repression and political violence (…)” (Sermeño & Aragón, 2017: 18).

Are elections a valid form nowadays of representing a society’s views? Not really, as Mair (2013) has already observed. With the disappearance of the type of voter loyal to ideas represented by a specific party, a voluble electorate emerges, which does not identify with a party’s ideology, but more with a form of political consumption. Greppi also points out these insufficiencies, but this cannot mean totally abandoning the concept of representation, since, according to the author, democracy and representation are necessarily connected, and eliminating the latter would not result in a revitalisation of the former. Moreover, in his opinion, “human beings are representative beings” (Sermeño & Aragón, 2017: 11 & 12). For this reason, some kind of representation has to exist.

If Greppi warned of the erosion of the very capacity to speak with authority on behalf of society, Urbinati indicates the need for a democratic theory of representative democracy to involve “a revision of the modern conception of popular sovereignty that challenges the monopoly of the will in the definition and practice of political liberty. It marks the end of a yes/no politics and the beginning of politics as an open arena of contestable opinions and ever-revisable decisions” (Urbinati, 2006: 224–225).

As we commented at the beginning, Basque society is an interesting laboratory with regard to the search for institutional and political models that adjust to its social and community needs, and the contributions in block III focus on four very diverse elements.

Firstly, links are established between social movements, with their criticism of the simplistic vision that identifies electoral participation with participation in democracy, the right to self-determination, and, specifically, one of the major innovations in relation to this concept, which is the right to decide, based on the principle of democratic radicalism (López, 2011). The chapter by Vizán-Amorós, Zabalo and Álvarez approaches this theme in the Basque context, and analyses the discursive evolution of sovereigntist social movements with regard to self-determination and the right to decide.

It is among the young that significant changes are perceived in terms of understanding participation. Larrinaga, Odriozola, Amurrio and Iraola’s study on Basque youth reveals that an interest in politics can follow paths other than those heretofore regarded as traditional. The authors analyse the process of political socialisation of Basque youth today and its repertoires of political participation, and their conclusions reinforce the extended redefinition of the political.

If we speak of participation and citizenship, it is interesting to link these with migrants, as the latter are often seen as temporary guests in host societies, and not as potential citizens. The chapter by Fullaondo and Moreno enters this debate, and contributes a wealth of data in relation to the Basque Autonomous Community. The analysis shows the relationship that exists between the social and political participation of immigrants and their perception of immigration. The block ends with another vulnerable sector, larger now, that of people who use social services. However, few works address in theoretical or empirical fashion the role of the social services as key agent in processes of democratic intensification (Pastor, 2017). The chapter by Zubillaga and Bergantiños analyses social services from a democratic perspective and underlines the importance of participation as a core element for social services committed to a strategic community perspective.

In the fourth and final part, we have sought to pay particular attention to a question often ignored by the literature: the need to reflect upon the instruments and methods via which knowledge of democracy is generated, as each form of understanding it, with its theoretical tenets – explicit and implicit – conditions the way in which it is investigated, measured and analysed. This leads us to the need to tailor methodologies and techniques of research to different conception of values, priorities, subjects, etc. First of all, however, Rodriguez Villasante provides an extensive review of the discussion of participatory methodologies over the last 50 years.

An important question in all this is the function that the university should fulfil in processes of citizen participation and deepening of democracy: get involved, remain neutral and keep a distance, seek consensus or mediation between opposing opinions and sectors…. The book provides good examples of reflection on the basis of specific experiences. On the one hand, professional-university collaboration, with the chapter by Berasaluze, Epelde, Ariño and Ovejas, who present the development and results of recent research undertaken in the academic field of social work.

On the other hand, collaboration between universities and popular movements is possible. The chapter by Gorostidi, Martinez and Ormazabal indicates the type of contribution that the university, in its social responsibility and when it works in collaboration with the general public and their networks of collectives, can make to processes of democratic experimentation and reinforcement of community initiatives. All of this is based on two specific experiences of community participation in which power relations between those governing and the governed have been transformed.

In a final reflection, Zugaza, del Hoyo and Ureta explore the possibility of an important contribution by feminism, intersectionality. This is an excellent tool with which to make visible the relationality of oppression on grounds of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, origin, age or functionality, and it is therefore totally consistent with the overall theme of the book, the deepening of democracy. The assumption is that projects of emancipation and social transformation require interpretative frameworks that make it possible to complicate and problematize one-dimensional and disempowering approaches to oppression.

4 The Challenge Caused by the Erosion of Democratic Values

With the end of the Cold War, self-satisfied voices were heard that announced the end of history and the universal triumph of liberal values (Fukuyama, 1989, 1992). Western academia rushed to theorise the problems of democracies in the process of consolidation and to find the best way of exporting the model to new countries. Robert Dahl stated in 1998 that “The twentieth century was a time of frequent democratic failure (…). Yet it was also a time of extraordinary democratic success. Before it ended, the twentieth century had turned into an age of democratic triumph. The global range and influence of democratic ideas, institutions, and practices had made that century far and away the most flourishing period for democracy in human history” (Dahl, 1998: 145). The traditional problems of liberal democracy, exacerbated by the discontent caused by neoliberal policies and the crisis of 2008, were not seriously addressed. This represented a major loss of legitimacy of the system itself in central countries. Thus, studies of democracy began to focus on the problems of young democracies or those in the process of consolidation, to consider the decline of the very idea of democracy and the policies required to correct that decline (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018).

However, in spite of this triumphalism, Western democratic systems in fact suffered from a number of serious problems in terms of both their functioning and their legitimacy (Habermas, 1973, 1976; Offe, 1984). In parallel, the elites began to repudiate the social pact, arguing that there was now an excess of democracy. The Trilateral Commission Report detected a series of problems, such as the government’s loss of authority, fuelled by some intellectuals and the mass media, the constant growth in demands on the part of citizens, which extended the public sector and incessantly increased public debt, as nobody dared to raise taxes for fear of upsetting the electorate (Crozier et al., 1975).

In line with this diagnosis – which omits the vast military expenditure during the Cold War –, Samuel Huntington, one of the authors of the report, concluded by saying that “some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy (…). Needed, instead, is a greater degree of moderation in democracy”. This moderation should be applied in two areas. On the one hand, “In many situations, the claims of expertise, seniority, experience, and special talents may override the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority. (…) Second, the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups” (Crozier et al., 1975: 113–114).

During the first decade of the twentieth century, the main transnational corporations were all financial, but more spectacular still was the expansion of the financial dimension of the economy. This offshore economy, dominated by finances and structured around London-New York, is not only economically powerful, but also, even more so, socially and politically (Wójcik, 2011: 2). Apparently at least, the economic and political elites did not learn any meaningful lessons, and their insistence on maintaining policies of deregulation and austerity aggravated the problems and increased social inequality, as has been evidenced by numerous reports and studies (Oxfam International, 2014; OECD, 2008, 2011, 2018, 2019; United Nations, 2020). This means that the legitimacy deficits inherent to our social system continue to be neglected (Gonnet, 2020).

Social discontent became growing political discontent, which was expressed in support for anti-system discourse and movements and via the creation of new political options (Castells, 2017). There is evidence of a general trend in democratic systems, characterised by the erosion of democratic values, the loss of hegemony on the part of traditional parties in numerous countries, huge ideological and political polarisation and the emergence of political options that have attempted to serve as an alternative to the traditional democratic system. Ensuring the suitability of the epistemological and methodological frameworks employed when reflecting upon the future of democracy is strategically crucial.