La participación como respuesta a la crisis de la representación: el rol de la democracia participativa

The recurring debate on representation crisis, possibly as old as representation itself, has in the present special relevance around the critic of the political parties and its role on democracy. Although the debate and the critic are not new, it is indeed the virulence with which the parties are blamed of a big part of the problems of the democratic system if not of all of them, particularly of being an obstacle to the democratic development, or even a tool for its degeneration. With the finality of an hypothetical regeneration of the democratic system, one of the most typical demands is a bigger political participation of the citizens on public affairs as well as a better and more developed auditing and control of their governors action. In this sense, to know participatory democracy, understood as the set of participatory tools that allow that bigger participation of citizens on public affairs, its most characteristic elements, its possibilities, but also its lacks, as well as its potential utilities for, where appropriate, to contribute not only to the democratic regeneration but also to the improvement of the democracy, has an special interest in the present scenario of intense critic to the representative democracy. Can participatory democracy be a really useful tool for democracy ́s deepening? And, if that is true, must be understood as a complement to representative democracy or could be seen even as a real transformation of the democratic model? Can, in the end, participatory democracy, as is understood in the present, be an answer to the representation crisis or it is nothing but an actualization of the direct democracy or semi-direct democracy formulas typical of old times and so normally accused of being susceptible of populist uses? To contribute to answer these questions giving possible answers to them is the object of this paper.