{"id":17055,"date":"2016-06-15T08:33:26","date_gmt":"2016-06-15T12:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17055"},"modified":"2016-06-15T09:54:42","modified_gmt":"2016-06-15T13:54:42","slug":"saving-relational-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17055","title":{"rendered":"saving relational politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the June edition of Perspectives on Politics<\/a>, I have an article entitled “Saving Relational Politics<\/a>“* I review Caroline W. Lee’s\u00a0Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry <\/em>and Josh Lerner’s Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics <\/em>and\u00a0I advance an argument of my own.<\/p>\n

I argue that what’s most valuable\u00a0about activities like\u00a0public deliberations, planning exercises, and Participatory Budgeting is not actually “deliberative democracy.” Neither political equality (democracy) nor reasonable discussion about\u00a0decisions (deliberation) are essential to these activities. Instead, they are forms of\u00a0relational politics<\/em>, in which\u00a0people “make decisions or take actions knowing something about one another\u2019s ideas, preferences, and interests.” That makes them akin to practices like one-on-one interviews in community organizing–or\u00a0Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed.<\/p>\n

Relational politics has disadvantages and limitations–it’s not<\/em> all that we need–but it is an essential complement to well-designed impersonal forms of politics (bureaucracies, legal systems, and markets). And it’s endangered, because genuine forms of relational politics are not valuable to\u00a0governments or companies. Relational politics still occurs at small scales, but we need strategies for increasing its\u00a0prevalence and impact\u00a0against powerful opposition.<\/p>\n

Lee’s book is a useful critique of typical strategies for expanding relational politics,\u00a0which involve developing small\u00a0models and trying to get powerful organizations to adopt them. Lerner contributes a strategy, which is to make\u00a0processes more fun so that they are desirable to both citizens and institutions. I review both books positively but argue that they leave us without a persuasive strategy for saving relational politics. After considering\u00a0some alternatives, I argue\u00a0that relational politics is\u00a0most likely to spread\u00a0as a by-product of mass movements that have political agendas. However, we need some\u00a0people to pay explicit attention to the quality of the participatory processes.<\/p>\n

*Per the copyright agreement, I am posting the “version of record<\/a>” on my\u00a0personal web page after its appearance at Cambridge Journals Online, along with the following bibliographical details, a notice that the copyright belongs to Cambridge University Press, and a link to the online edition of the journal:<\/p>\n

\n
Saving Relational Politics<\/div>\n
Peter Levine (2016). <\/b>
\nPerspectives on Politics<\/a>, Volume 14<\/a>, Issue02<\/a>, June 2016, pp 468-473
\nhttp:\/\/journals.cambridge.org\/action\/displayAbstract?aid=10356927<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the June edition of Perspectives on Politics, I have an article entitled “Saving Relational Politics“* I review Caroline W. Lee’s\u00a0Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry and Josh Lerner’s Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics and\u00a0I advance an argument of my own. I argue that what’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deliberation","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17055"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17068,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17055\/revisions\/17068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}