No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Transforming urban democracy through social movements: the experience of Ahora Madrid
Social Movement Studies
Abstract
Between 2015 and 2019, the Spanish capital, Madrid, was governed by the movement party Ahora Madrid, a novel political actor strongly connected to anti-austerity and pro-democracy movements gathered under the umbrella of the Indignados, or ‘15 M’, movement. Against the background of the party’s abundant hopes for regenerating urban democracy at the beginning of its term, our research asks how and to what extent Ahora Madrid translated the movement’s democratizing practices and expectations into concrete policies. Based on our own qualitative research involving government actors and social movements, our empirical findings demonstrate that the democratic innovations implemented responded to diverging visions of how to achieve ‘real democracy’, defined by different imaginaries and traditions of collective action within 15 M. While demonstrating the steady interaction between Ahora Madrid policy makers and the social movements they came from, the findings also reveal the policy agenda divisions that posed a challenge for the broadening and deepening of urban democracy. These divisions concerned vertical versus horizontal political logics, the individual versus collective nature of political subjects, and digital versus on-site political participation and deliberation. In addition to the tensions emerging among the various ideational frameworks for collective action (i.e. the autonomous tradition, technopolitics, and the institutional left), this study identifies an apparent divorce between the two intertwined goals of the 15 M: to fight neoliberal austerity and to seek participatory democracy. The empirical findings lead to highlight the internal accounts of the consequences of social movements, especially concerning the conditions for institutionalization.
... At the global level, various well-being improvement initiatives (e.g. financial, education, and health, just a few to mention) have been in place through co-operatives targeting members (Consejero and Janoschka 2022;Liu et al. 2022;van Rijn 2022;Sarker et al. 2016). Within this context, one of the well-being initiatives through co-operatives is health insurance (Ma 2022a). ...
... It has been shown that when individuals participate in health insurance, they are expected to improve their well-being in such aspects as health status (Manchanda and Rahut 2021;Kipo-Sunyehzi 2020), education and skills (Gaudette et al. 2018;Cohodes et al. 2016), securing jobs, stabilised life, and worklife balance (Tsolmon and Ariely 2022; Wang et al. 2022), housing and related facilities (Jaramillo and Willging 2021;Lee et al. 2020), and income-generating activities (Batty et al. 2022;Ma 2022b;Wang et al. 2022). Also, participation in health insurance exposes individuals to effective participation in civic and governance duties (Consejero and Janoschka 2022;Kaswan 2021), increases a sense of personal security (Gaudette et al. 2018), and enables them to create and maintain quality environments (Wang et al. 2022;Bamanyisa 2019). The suggestion is that participation in health insurance (PHI) relates to changes in well-being status (CWBS) in specific dimensions, as mentioned above. ...
... These findings are somewhat surprising to the context of co-operative members given that other studies (e.g. Batty et al. 2022;Consejero and Janoschka 2022;Wang et al. 2022;Kennelly and Odekon 2016) found that participation in health insurance has a significant positive relationship in such above stated dimensions of well-being. These relatively contradicting findings could be due to the differences in the context and nature of activities that co-operatives members engage in, which differentiates priorities placed on each dimension of well-being. ...
This paper analyses the association between participating in health insurance and improvements in the well-being status of co-operative members. It is expected that individuals, co-operative members, in particular, participate in health insurance schemes with expectations of changing and improving various dimensions of well-being. The analyses using partial least squire structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) revealed that participation in health insurance significantly positively impacts change in the well-being status of co-operative members. Further, confirming the Theory of Dispositional Optimism co-operative members’ expectations mediate the relationship between participation in health insurance and changes in their well-being status. The study also found that expectations levels positively moderate the relationship between health insurance participation and changes in co-operative members’ well-being status. These findings imply that co-operative members with higher positive expectations out of health insurance participation are in an advantageous position to make and allow positive decisions that positively impact their well-being.
... Hard hit economically by the global financial crisis, as we will see Spain has been one of the countries where these popular protests have also had significant electoral effects. The 15M movement here provided a platform to bring "municipalist" councilors in office in seven cities, including Madrid and Barcelona (Martínez & Wissink, 2021;Mota & Janoschka, 2022). Reflecting the central role of housing activism in the 15M movement, housing issues were amongst the core concerns of activistcouncilors, who were part of the governing municipalist coalitions between 2015 and 2019. ...
... In 2011, grievances about this capitalist restructuring triggered widespread public protests. The 15M movement started to occupy public squares in cities around Spain, where protesters called out for true democracy, while criticizing austerity policies (Flesher, 2020;Martínez & Wissink, 2021;Mota & Janoschka, 2022). While these mobilizations died down after 2014, its spirit lived on in various local electoral platforms that were created by former 15M activists in the run-up to the 2015 municipal elections. ...
This paper discusses the impact of the Spanish housing movement on policies regarding residential squatting of municipalist coalitions in Madrid and Barcelona. Combining literatures on social movement outcomes, new municipalism, and the importance of capitalism for social movement studies, we address the following research questions: How has the Spanish housing movement framed its claims regarding residential squatting? How have these claims impacted policies in Madrid and Barcelona between 2015 and 2019? What explains the differences—if any—in these outcomes? We conclude that—following the 2008 global financial crisis—activists have reframed squatting as a legitimate response to unjust evictions and foreclosuresin neoliberal political economies. While this has prompted support from municipalist councilors in both cities, gains have been more substantial in Barcelona. We explain this from variations in political alliances and urban political economies. Our analysis underscores the importance of capitalism in urban and housing movement studies.
... Studies on municipalism in Spain have focused on the cases of Ahora Madrid (García-Espín, 2023;Mota Consejero and Janoschka, 2022;Nez and Ganuza, 2020), Barcelona en Comú (Bianchi, 2022(Bianchi, , 2024Blanco et al., 2020;Pera and Bussu, 2024) or both (Feenstra and Tormey, 2023;Fernández-Martínez et al., 2023). However, only a few authors have analysed other experiences, such as Marea Atlántica (A Coruña) and Compostela Oberta (Bua and Davies, 2023), or Zaragoza en Común, Valladolid Toma La Palabra, Marea Atlántica and Aranzadi (Pamplona) (Mérida, 2024;Mérida and Tellería, 2021), all of them during the period 2015-2019. ...
In 2014 and 2015, dozens of ‘municipalist’ candidates gained huge success in the Spanish local elections. These movement parties, intrinsically linked to the intense mobilisations of the previous electoral cycle, adopted a horizontal organisational model in contrast to the traditional oligarchic structure. In the wake of the 2015–2023 electoral cycles, however, there has been little analysis of these experiences and the processes they adopted. This study examines four such experiences in Zaragoza, Valladolid, A Coruña and Castellón through 72 interviews and documentary analysis. The study contributes to the debate on internal democracy in political parties in three ways, demonstrating: (1) a certain inevitable distancing between movement and party with power concentrated in the latter; (2) imposition of the institutional pace and the difficulty of combining it with the logic of direct democracy; and (3) demystification of certain forms of direct democracy and the need to combine vertical and professional logics with horizontal and participatory ones.
... It is also here where technopolitics played a crucial role in devising collaborative electoral programmes or in promoting open processes to select representatives. The successful electoral results of 2015 in some towns and cities (e.g.such as Barcelona, Madrid, Zaragoza, Cádiz, Coruña, among many others) also allowed experimentation to directly shift to representative institutions since many activists were involved in parties, such as Barcelona en Comú, Ahora Madrid, Zaragoza en Común, Cádiz Sí Se Puede or Marea Atlántica (Lobera & Parejo, 2019;Font & García-Espín, 2020;Martínez & San Juan, 2020;Mota Consejero & Janoschka, 2022;Smith & Prieto Martín, 2021). ...
... It is also here where technopolitics played a crucial role in devising collaborative electoral programmes or in promoting open processes to select representatives. The successful electoral results of 2015 in some towns and cities (e.g.such as Barcelona, Madrid, Zaragoza, Cádiz, Coruña, among many others) also allowed experimentation to directly shift to representative institutions since many activists were involved in parties, such as Barcelona en Comú, Ahora Madrid, Zaragoza en Común, Cádiz Sí Se Puede or Marea Atlántica (Lobera & Parejo, 2019;Font & García-Espín, 2020;Martínez & San Juan, 2020;Mota Consejero & Janoschka, 2022;Smith & Prieto Martín, 2021). ...
Social movement impact on democracy has primarily been treated in two ways in the literature: the role of social movements in promoting democratization in the form of regime change; and a more recent literature on the ways social movements initiate democratic innovation in governing institutions and norm diffusion in already existing democracy. In this article, we argue that to fully understand social movement impact on democracy, we need to look beyond these two main approaches, as important as they are. Using the emblematic case of Spain’s 15-M pro-democracy movement to illustrate our conceptual proposal, we draw on existing literature to argue that social movements can impact democracy in several key arenas currently not sufficiently considered in the literature. We provide examples of democratic impact emerging from the experimentation around the central problematic of ‘real democracy’ in the ‘occupied squares’ to highlight several ways social movements’ democratic impact might be explored. We develop the concepts of hybridity and democratic laboratory to analyze these impacts and discuss their relation to contemporary theorizing about democracy and movement outcomes. We argue that adopting this broader approach to the democratic impact of social movements leads to a more nuanced understanding of movement outcomes and ‘success’.
Scaling up agroecology raises the question of how to relate to institutions. While the institutionalization of agroecology at national and international scales has raised concerns among activists and researchers, municipalities are increasingly envisioned as potential entry points for thinking about the reorganization of food systems. Using participatory and non-participatory observation, semi-directed interviews and documentary research, we explore the encounter between the agroecological movement and new municipalism in Madrid and interrogate the institutionalization of agroecology under the government of Ahora Madrid (2015–2019). The analysis of various arrangements through which agroecology has been operationalized highlights the fragile nature of the advances made as well as the constraints to the full integration of the agroecological project within the local government. These constraints, linked to how people relate to food and agriculture, to the forms of nature promoted by agroecology, and to collaborative approaches, suggest a need to consider the way experiments are lived and embedded in everyday life in order to promote learning and subjectivation processes.
In dialogue with Della Porta’s work on protests as critical junctures
and drawing on the comparative analysis of four case studies in
Europe (Barcelona and Dublin) and North America (Baltimore and
Montréal), the paper develops a neo-Gramscian perspective on the
impact and legacies of urban resistance to austere neoliberalism
after the Global Economic Crisis (GEC) of 2008–9. Framed by the
postulated ‘interregnum’ in the hegemony of neoliberalism, it
argues that the conjunctural politics of the period are defined by
a continuing conflict between passive revolutionary subsumption
and generative anti-systemic politics, which plays out in acute form
in the international urban arena. The paper accordingly contributes
to the journal’s work on the relationship between protests and
social structures, situating urban movements in multi-scalar socioeconomic,
political and cultural contexts and developing reflections
on the conjunctural significance of anti-systemic struggles.
New municipalism in Spain arose from a major political wave, now in a period of crisis and electoral retreat. This paper applies a regime-theoretic framework to analyse new municipalist governance in two smaller city cases: A Coruña and Santiago de Compostela. It argues that whilst new municipalist electoral victories inaugurated a crisis for established regimes, the crucial weakness was that they did not consolidate new urban regimes. Municipalists faced severe governability challenges linked to the enduring power of older urban regimes. The paper suggests that this is explained by problems in establishing regime incumbency, the consolidation of the necessary governing capacity by a resource coalition to deliver its agenda and succeed politically. Although established regimes were weakened enough to lose elections, they maintained considerable capacity to constrain the municipalist project and shape urban governance, a significant degree of incumbency. This ultimately enabled them to recover office in 2019. We argue that a critical regime-theoretical perspective assists in understanding the wider crisis of Spanish municipalism and the multi-scalar struggle for hegemony as it plays out in the local state arena. 2
In 2011 the 15 M movement occupied squares across Spain demanding true democracy. Four years later, bottom-up municipalist initiatives won the 2015 local elections in seven medium-size and large cities. In coalition with traditional parties, these initiatives formed new left-wing governments that incorporated former activists as mayors and councilors. This history has sparked debates about the consequences of co-optation, institutional alliances, and state openness to social movements. In this article we aim to contribute to that debate with a discussion of the outcomes of municipalist governments in four cities (Madrid, Barcelona, A Coruña, and Cádiz) during the 2015–2019 mandate. Theoretically, we argue for the necessity to interpret these outcomes against the background of the political and economic contexts that constrain (and enable) a progressive urban agenda. Empirically, our results reveal that municipalist governments only to a certain extent performed as instruments of grassroots movements. Despite favorable alliances and partial achievements, we identify various constraints to the responsiveness of municipalist governments to activist demands. Especially, we conclude that supra-local neoliberal policies, various concerned capitalist interests, and the relative waning of the 15 M protest movement limited the potential benefits of those alliances.
Scholars of participatory democracy have long noted dynamic interactions and transformations within and between political spaces that can foster (de)democratisation. At the heart of this dynamism lie (a) the processes through which top‐down “closed” spaces can create opportunities for rupture and democratic challenges and (b) vice‐versa, the mechanisms through which bottom‐up, open spaces can be co‐opted through institutionalisation. This paper seeks to unpick dynamic interactions between different spaces of participation by looking specifically at two forms of participatory governance, or participatory forms of political decision making used to improve the quality of democracy. First, Mark Warren's concept of ‘governance‐driven democratization’ describes top‐down and technocratic participatory governance aiming to produce better policies in response to bureaucratic rationales. Second, we introduce a new concept, democracy‐driven governance, to refer to efforts by social movements to invent new, and reclaim and transform existing, spaces of participatory governance and shape them to respond to citizens’ demands. The paper defines these concepts and argues that they co‐exist and interact in dynamic fashion; it draws on an analysis of case study literature on participatory governance in Barcelona to illuminate this relationship. Finally, the paper relates the theoretical framework to the case study by making propositions as to the structural and agential drivers of shifts in participatory governance.
Local politics in Spain has triggered iconic shifts over the last few years, and the electoral success of new ‘movement parties’ in particular has dramatically challenged the political establishment. Between 2015 and 2019, many municipalities – including, crucially, the two biggest cities, Madrid and Barcelona – were governed by coalitions originating from anti-austerity, anti-eviction and pro-democracy struggles. This has significantly affected hegemonic and widely normalised discourses supporting the neoliberalisation of urban politics, and to some extent has also prompted novel governance approaches. Based on empirical research undertaken with local councillors, officials, consultants and activists, the article develops an in-depth analysis of governance transformations in the Spanish capital of Madrid. By doing so, it evaluates the ambiguities and contradictions that the government coalition Ahora Madrid was facing during the 2015–2019 legislative term. The debate stimulates critical reflections for academics, practitioners and movements on the transformative capacities that new municipalisms may enact, as well as the constraints faced by established multi-level urban governance regimes.
In early 2019 Madrid launched the first permanent citizen participation scheme in which members are chosen by lot: the Observatory of the City. Although the scheme was abandoned by the new government after the May 2019 elections, the Madrid experiment raises important questions about democracy. The project is another example of the growing prominence that the draw has acquired in many countries, as an ideal element to organise and order the participation of people in political affairs. In this paper we describe the first steps of this scheme and also highlight the features that make the draw in Madrid a unique experience both because of the implications of the use of the draw, and from the point of view of similar schemes that are being carried out in other parts of the world
New municipalism is a nascent global social movement aiming to democratically transform the local state and economy – but what, precisely, is so new about it? I situate new municipalism in its geographical, political-economic and historical contexts, by comparison with earlier waves of municipal socialism and international municipalism, arguing that it re-politicises traditions of transnationalism, based not on post-political policy mobilities but on urban solidarities in contesting neoliberal austerity urbanism and platform capitalism. This article identifies three new municipalisms – platform, autonomist, managed – whose characteristics, contradictions, interconnections and potentials are explored in terms of state-space restructuring, urban-capitalist crisis and cycles of contention.
Local elections in May 2015 represented a major shift in the political history of Barcelona (Spain). The Barcelona en Comú candidacy, born in January 2015 under the impetus of a set of progressive social and political organizations, became the first municipal political force in the city. This article analyzes the cycle of creation, electoral victory, and government action of Barcelona en Comú during the current legislature (2015–2019). In so doing, the article focuses its attention on the emancipatory urban political practices emerged in recent years in response to the fractures and contradictions generated by neoliberal austerity. In dialogue with the literature on social movements and urban neoliberalism, the article focuses its attention on the challenges and opportunities that the local institutionalization of these forms of counterpolitics entails.
The Fearless Cities summit, coordinated by Barcelona en Comú in June 2017, marked the first global gathering of the nascent “new municipalist” movement. Responding to the “imperative that geographers engage critically and creatively with the way localism is being articulated”, this paper argues that the new municipalist initiatives are developing urban political strategies that successfully avoid the Local Trap. Rather than essentialising cities as inherently progressive or democratic, the municipal is instead becoming framed as a “strategic front” for developing a transformative politics of scale. Given this critical awareness, this nascent movement demonstrates how local loyalties can be mobilised as part of a progressive scalar strategy without falling into the trap of a “particular localism”. What remains to be seen is whether these initiatives are able to develop a variegated scalar strategy of transformation that retains the democratic essence that underpins them. © 2019 The Author. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.
The eruption of the Spanish 15M movement in 2011 was marked by a high degree of political participation and creative experimentation. The political repertoire has constantly been re-evaluated, with methods revised and evolving, from the occupation of public spaces to the recent creation of new constitutional parties. One of the key aspects of these tactical revisions has been the involvement of anarchist actors in an experimental process of engagement in electoral processes, a method of political engagement anarchists standardly oppose. Our study identifies the motivations and theoretical justifications that have recently led libertarian activists to take the electoral path. This paper stands in the small but growing tradition of works that examine the recent phenomenon of new parties built by ‘street’ activists, but uniquely concentrates on a detailed case study of the anarchist actors linked to the platform Castelló en Moviment (CsM). It thus describes the anarchist influence in recent electoral developments, identifies proponents’ justifications for engaging in these previously rejected methods and highlights some of the doubts raised about the electoral experiment.
No podemos entender quiénes somos sin entender de dónde venimos. Ocurre con las personas pero también con las políticas locales de participación ciudadana. Por ello, el objetivo de esta breve reflexión será doble. En primer lugar, argumentaremos que las nuevas políticas de participación desarrolladas por los ayuntamientos españoles elegidos en las elecciones municipales de 2015 se han movido por sendas considerablemente diversas. En segundo lugar, sugeriremos que estos caminos diferentes tienen que ver con las coaliciones socio-políticas dominantes en cada uno de los casos y en la interpretación que cada uno de los socios de las mismas realiza sobre cuáles fueron los aciertos y los errores de prácticas participativas previas (Navarro, 2001).
The emerging postcrisis geographies in Southern Europe are intrinsically related to debt and dispossession. In Spain, mortgage homeownership and indebtedness led to housing dispossessions, while in Greece, skyrocketing private indebtedness is eventually arranged through housing foreclosures. Building upon the notion of accumulation by dispossession, i.e., on the way capital accumulates wealth in the era of neoliberal globalization, this article elaborates two novel concepts to understand the housing crises in both countries. The perception of dispossession by odious taxation describes the process of wealth extraction facilitated by financial mechanisms in Greece, and dispossession by political fraud is conceived as a characterization of fraudulent political arrangements and financial tools used for orchestrating housing stealth in Spain. This nurtures the perception that a comparative insight on the processes of dispossession in the Spanish and Greek housing markets may facilitate a nuanced understanding over the interrelated processes of contemporary housing restructuring.
This article discusses the European wave of contention catalysed by the financial market crash of 2008/9 and the subsequent imposition of austerity measures by governments across the continent. It develops two central arguments. First, it argues that we need a clearer and more sharply differentiated understanding of the operation of austerity as a social and political phenomenon than can be accounted for by reading the crisis of austerity as a solely material set of grievances. Second, it dissociates austerity into a series of interconnected regimes, which are fiscal, ideological, political and civic. In so doing, I show how the material aspects of austerity are intimately tied to the ideational, institutional and spatial enclosures they create, enabling us to see more clearly how the practice of austerity is intimately tied to the progressive dismantling of collective democratic space. The transformative potential of anti-austerity mobilizations accordingly lies in their capacity to develop an alternative moral economy grounded in new forms of solidarity and sociability, whether in workplaces or in the civic squares.
This article examines the relationship between social movements' digital democratic innovations and political parties through a case study based on the involvement of 15M activists in the creation and development of new political parties in Spain. By analyzing the impact of certain technological activist groups on the implementation of the movement's demands in terms of mechanisms of participation and deliberation in the new parties through the use of digital technologies, we aim to evaluate the activists' contribution to the transformation of formal politics and the deepening of democracy. In this sense, we explore the role of so-called 'tech activists' as mediators of political participation, and the digital repertoire of action they use. Sources used include various documents and websites as well as interviews with key informants and notes from participant observation in meetings and assemblies.
Citizen participation in Spain has significantly increased, and its repertoire has broadened as a result of the 15M Movement. From assemblies and acampadas (occupations) to the current proliferation of new political parties, there has been constant movement through a wide range of techno-political actions and experimentation with means and political tools used by civil society and activists. This article aims to reflect on this complex and novel political repertoire from a theoretical framework of civil society. This framework is complemented with the differentiation of (horizontal versus vertical) political logics used in social movement studies.
This article seeks to analyze the mobilizations that are currently taking place in Spain as a result of the multidimensional crisis unleashed in 2008. The authors study the ‘15M movement,’ or that of the Spanish indignados, by focusing on three analytical axes: the cognitive, emotional, and relational processes feeding the construction of a social movement identity. First, the article refers to the diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing tasks performed by 15M participants to define the problematic situation and attribute blame, articulate a solution to the problem and devise strategies to achieve that end, and motivate participants to sustain their engagement and remedy the situation. Second, the article concentrates on the emotions that were ‘mobilized’ by social movement organizations linked to the 15M (e.g. outrage or indignation), and those emotions that emerged spontaneously during the ‘encounters’ that took place in the public space: joy, efficacy, and empowerment. Finally, the article addresses the relational aspects entailed in the process of identity construction, that is, the activation and de-activation of both ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ ties between 15M members and previous and/or current political and social collectives within the ‘progressive field.’ In following this triple objective, the article describes the process of identity-synchronization that has allowed people with no previous political participation and with different and oftentimes opposing politico-ideological trajectories to feel part of the movement. The data come from 17 in-depth interviews and eight focus groups with key activists, ethnographic observations in camps and assemblies in both Bilbao and Madrid during the summer of 2011, and visual materials displayed in web pages and Facebook accounts associated to the 15M.
This profile discusses the organization, goals and practices of the Spanish 15M movement. I argue that it developed as a complex, multi-layered ecosystem, mobilizing a new generation of citizens through the convergence of struggles over housing and the Free Culture and Digital Commons Movement (FCM), creating a common framework for action through social networks. Primarily in and through the actions in public squares, the 15M movement also constructed further layers of mobilization, incorporating the networks and skills of previous social movements (such as those mobilizing over inter alia education, health, alternative consumption) and connecting with previous generations who had mobilized over civil liberties in transition to democracy. Furthermore, I argue that links with the Free Culture Movement had a profound effect on the genealogy of 15M—in terms of its composition, agenda, framing and organizational logic. The methodology is based on case studies of both the FCM and 15M between December 2010 and December 2011 in Spain.
Faced with an economic crisis, people took to the streets and camped in urban plazas throughout Spain in May 2011. Many people were successfully mobilized by a generalized sense of frustration, indignation and impotency in the face of coming elections where many citizens felt there were no real alternative economic and social policies offered, nor the possibility to vote for government programmes that would deal with the crisis in a way that prioritized the concerns of the population. In online discussions, concerned proactive participants called for ‘A Real Democracy Now’ that represented the concerns and priorities of regular Spanish citizens. In order to make their discontent visible, they called for people to camp and ‘occupy’ public spaces together in order to force politicians and elites to face the generalized discontent with the dire economic prospects. This paper builds on non-participant observation of the Indignados movement in Barcelona, Spain, conducted in the summer of 2011. It looks at the consolidation of the ‘occupy’ contentious performance to protest income inequality and economic policy. It argues that this movement is a direct precedent to the Occupy Wall Street movement in the USA. The 15 May movement showed that not only people in North Africa had reasons to take the streets and engage in collective action, but many citizens in the developed world also had reasons to take public squares and show their dissatisfaction with the economic and political status quo.
Why do two cognate literatures—social movements and electoral studies—travel along parallel paths with little conversation between them? And what can be done to connect them in the future? Drawing on their work with the late Charles Tilly on Dynamics of Contention (2001), Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow examine two important studies that approach (but do not effect such a linkage), propose a mechanism-based set of linkages between elections and social movements, and apply their approach in a preliminary examination of the relations between the American anti-war movement after 9/11 and the Democratic Party.
Framed in debates about the crisis of democracy, the book analyzes one of the most influential social movements of recent times: Spain’s “Indignados” or “15-M” movement. In the wake of the global financial crisis and harsh austerity policies, 15-M movement activists occupied public squares across the country, mobilized millions of Spanish citizens, gave rise to new hybrid parties such as Podemos, and inspired pro-democracy movements around the world. Based on access to key participants in the 15-M movement and Podemos, and extensive participant observation, the book tells the story of this remarkable movement, its emergence, evolution, and impact. In so doing, it challenges some of the core arguments in social movement scholarship about the factors likely to lead to movement success. Instead, the book argues that movements organized around autonomous network logics can build and sustain strong movements in the absence of formal organizations, strong professionalized leadership, and the ability to attract external resources. The key to understanding its power lies in the shared political culture and collective identity that emerged following the occupation of Spain’s central squares. These protest camps sustained the movement by forging reciprocal ties of solidarity between diverse actors, and generating a shared set of critical master frames across a diverse set of actors and issues (e.g., housing, education, pensions, privatization of public services, corruption) that enabled the movement to effectively contest hegemonic narratives about the crisis, austerity, and democracy, influencing public debate and the political agenda.
El pasado 4 de marzo el Ayuntamiento de Madrid reunió a 1000 personas, organizadas en 100 mesas de 10 personas cada una, para discutir sobre propuestas donde destinar los 100 millones de euros de los presupuestos participativos. Estas 1000 personas, además, fueron seleccionadas al azar para componer una muestra representativa de la ciudad. ¿A qué paradigma democrático responde esta experiencia? ¿Para qué se utiliza la selección de ciudadanos al azar? ¿Este ejemplo puede suponer una sustitución de la democracia representativa? Con una aproximación teórica a la iniciativa y con una conversación con Yago Bermejo, coordinador del equipo que desarrolló el proceso, este artículo trata de resolver algunas de estas preguntas y abrir nuevas reflexiones.
Spain has become a remarkable democratic laboratory in which millions of citizens are experimenting with new forms of political expression. This book examines the dynamics of this political laboratory, showing that the upheavals it is experiencing are likely in the near future to affect democracies elsewhere in the world. Examining the new means of participation that were established in fields where digital communication tools enabled the launch of novel dynamics of political action, the reader will gain access to a comprehensive analysis of the reshaping and mutation process that has affected fields such as activism, political parties and political participation. Using a case study of the Spain between 2011 and 2015, the book focuses on the changes that have taken place in politics and communication in Spain, paying particular attention to the 15M movement and its disruptive, innovative strength in all matters related to politics and communication. The chapters cover political repertoires and the hybridization of horizontal and vertical political logics; the appearance of new political parties; the establishment of monitoring mechanisms as an essential means of political expression and participation; and the subversion of rationality across media as a product of the communication strategies implemented by online political activism. Showing that Spain is not just at the forefront of democratic innovation, but that it is a political laboratory in which trials are taking place that tell us much about the future of democracy everywhere, this book will be of great use to scholars of political theory, democracy and philosophy. © 2017 Ramón A. Feenstra, Simon Tormey, Andreu Casero-Ripollés and John Keane. All rights reserved.
This article discusses the change in political vision of anti-austerity movements in southern Europe in comparison with previous protest movements. It focuses on the emergence of a discourse of citizenship at the core of the new protest wave, as seen in frequent references to ‘citizens’, ‘citizenry’ and ‘citizenship’ in movement manifestos, and the resolutions and declarations of popular assemblies. I investigate the meaning and motivations of this ‘citizenism’ and how it reflects the change in economic conditions and popular perceptions in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. The analysis draws from movement documents, and in-depth interviews with 40 protest organisers and participants from the Indignados movement in Spain and the Aganaktismenoi movement in Greece. I argue that within these movements, the idea of citizenship has acted both as a source of popular identity interpellating a diverse set of demographics, and as a central demand, organising calls for greater popular participation in decision-making, freedom of expression and against corruption. Anti-austerity movements put forward an anti-oligarchic view of citizenship, which is different from the liberal, civic-republican and social democratic approaches, in its understanding of citizenship as the power of the dispersed ‘citizenry’ against the concentrated power of economic and political elites. This grassroots re-appropriation of citizenship highlights how anti-austerity movements in southern Europe have departed from the anti-statism of autonomous movements and have developed a more positive view of the state as a basis of social cohesion and a possible means of ‘people power’.
The Spanish 15-M/Indignados have drawn global attention for the strength and longevity of their anti-austerity mobilizations. Two features have been highlighted as particularly noteworthy: (1) Their refusal to allow institutional left actors to participate in or represent the movement, framed as a movement of ‘ordinary citizens’ and (2) their insistence on the use of deliberative democratic practices in large public assemblies as a central organizing principle. As with many emergent cycles of protest, many scholars, observers and participants attribute the mobilizations with spontaneity and ‘newness’. I argue that the ability of the 15-M/Indignados to sustain mobilization based on deliberative democratic practices is not spontaneous, but the result of the evolution of an autonomous collective identity predicated on deliberative movement culture in Spain since the early 1980s. My discussion contributes to the literature on social movement continuity and highlights the need for historically grounded analyses that pay close attention to the maintenance and evolution of collective identities and movement cultures in periods of latency or abeyance in order to better understand the rapid mobilization of networks in new episodes of contention.
UC Irvine Working Papers
- D S Meyer