Reflections on the Representativeness of Civil Society Organizations. An analysis of recent Latin American trends

ENRIQUE PERUZZOTTI

New Orleans

Conferencia; Representativeness and Effectiveness in Latin American Institutions and Democracy; 2011

University of Tulane

Since the return to democracy, the field of civil society in Latin America has been a very active one, promoting new forms of organizations, of politics, and of civic forms of engagement. Processes of social innovation contributed to renew and expand the practice of democratic representation in various and original ways, from the emergence of rights and accountability politics to the establishment of different forms of policy councils that promote the active participation of civil society organizations (CSOs) in policy making.  Traditional ways of understanding civil society’s contribution to democratic politics were challenged by the rise of those novel forms of citizen participation, forcing political scientists and sociologists to reflect on the particular contribution that new forms of collective action made to the political process. In several occasions, innovative forms of intervention have put into question the standard frame for analyzing the role of civil society under democracy and call for an expansion of the conceptual tool box for thinking the role of CSOs in contemporary Latin America.   The growing role played by civil society in areas that in the past seemed to be the monopoly of state institutions or of political parties have spawned a wave of questioning over the alleged legitimacy of new developments and the way they seem to be redefining traditional understandings of the democratic political process. As civic actors all over the region gain greater visibility and assume new responsibilities, concerns have been raised around the contribution of civil society organizations to the practice of democratic representation. It is common to hear objections from elected officials concerning the unrepresentative and unaccountable status of CSOs as well as skepticism about the alleged contributions that civil society actors truly make to the agenda of democratization.   The goal of this chapter is to address some of the criticism that civil society actors are confronting by focusing on one specific set of arguments: those that question the legitimacy of CSOs by raising doubts about their representative status. Elected officials usually challenge the claims of CSOs to represent the interest of the poor, women, indigenous populations, etc. by arguing that they were chosen in free and competitive elections in which all citizens were able to participate under the equalitarian principle of one citizen, one vote, while CSOs lack such democratic credentials; in many instances representing a cadre of self-appointed leaders and activists.   The issue of the “representativeness” of non-elected organizations has become a thorny issue in recent debates on democratic representation.  The increased role played by civil society in different sort of political processes –from acting as an informal mechanism of oversight to directly participating in the formulation of public policies—has fomented a series of questions regarding the proper role of civil society under representative democracy. What are the representative claims of civil society organizations? Why should legislatures and elected administrations that were appointed in competitive elections and are accountable to voters take into account the claims of self-organized and self-appointed organizations?    To properly tackle the representativeness issue of civil society organizations it is necessary first to establish some analytical distinctions between various forms of civil society politics and their contribution to the practice of democratic representation. Civil society plays diverse roles in the democratic process so it is important to specifically analyze the particular problems that each form of intervention opens up for a theory of democratic representation. While there is a plurality of different forms of civil society participation, this chapter will largely focus on three distinctive types of civic politics. Each of the types of citizen politics that will be analyzed illustrates particular ways in which civil society contributes to the practice of democratic representation in contemporary Latin America. Each of them also poses a different set of challenges to the “representativeness” argument.  The three forms of civil society participation that will be the subject of analysis of this chapter are a) the politics of influence and identity, b) of social accountability, and c) the role of civil society organizations in arenas of institutionalized participation. Each form of politicization serves to illustrate alternative ways in which different forms of civic participation confront the different accountability deficits that had been highlighted by the ‘quality of democracy’ literature. In recent years, there has been a very interesting debate in Latin America over the need to democratize existing democracies by promoting processes of political innovation that could strengthen the different dimensions of democratic accountability.  Each particular form of civil engagement is guided by specific goals and poses quite distinctive set of challenges to the theory of democratic representation, illustrating original ways in which civil society actors can contribute to the agenda of legal and political accountability in contemporary Latin American democracies. Social accountability initiatives are fundamentally concerned in strengthening the legal dimension of the concept of accountability while the politics of influence and mechanisms of institutionalized participation aimed at improving the political receptiveness of representative institutions. [