Please find below the call for papers for the conference on Democracy and Participation in the 21st Century organised at the University of Lisbon 12-15 July 2017 (http://pascal.iseg.utl.pt/~socius/eventos/ISA-RC10/index.shtml). In order to send an abstract, please contact the session organisers via email before the 12 March 2017.
Session 6.4. Mandate type, participation as democratisation or deliberation as a limit?
Session Organized by: Cristiano Gianolla, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal; cgianolla@gmail.com and Ryan Jepson, University of Vienna, Austria; ryan.jepson@uni.vie.ac
Imperative mandates are generally considered contrary to the spirit of liberal representative democracy in which elected representatives must be free to speak and make decisions in the best interest of the whole political community, as opposed to a specific section of society. This session aims to engage with research on the relationship between mandate type (free or imperative) and the implications for participation, deliberation, political patronage, populism and other consequences for the political system. Is it possible to consider that a free mandate expands the distance between the representative and the represented, thereby contributing to the political crisis experienced by liberal democratic regimes? How do people perceive and react to the decision of elected representatives to share their ‘mandate freedom’ with the community, adopting participatory exercises to enable the co-creation and negotiation of political decisions within political constituencies or the electorate? The session especially welcomes papers from political science and sociology researchers in order to investigate the relationship between the mandate, the political system and the political commitment of the political community. Papers may address one or more of the following or similar topics:
- Implications of mandate type in the level of political participation;
- Relation between mandate type and political patronage;
- Relation between mandate type and the commons;
- Relation between mandate type and political responsibility;
- Implications of mandate type in the relationship between representative and represented;
- Implications of mandate type in political satisfaction and accountability;
- Implications of mandate type in the raise of populist phenomena;
- Enhancement of interconnection between representative and represented through e-democracy;
- Mandate type and ideological position;
- Relation between mandate type and party system;
- Relation between mandate type and party organisation;
- Relation between mandate type and social activism;
- Relation between mandate type and infrastructures;
- Mandate types in different world regions;
- Mandate types and social movements.