If this column in the New York Times is to be believed, in democratic countries across the world amongst people taking to the streets in protest at social ills of one kind and another - unemployment, cuts in social spending, growing inequalities, corruption, etc - there is a contempt for 'traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over'. The protesters have lost faith in the ballot box and the standard political routes through parties and unions, favouring a 'more participatory system modeled in many ways on the culture of the Web'. Assuming this diagnosis is right (as I will for the purpose of having something to blog about today), we can ask what the models of political legitimacy are that these protests and the attitudes reported by the NYT's columnist might presuppose. I shall suggest four possibilities.
(1) The traditional structures remain central to the democratic process and the street protests are seen as, when push comes to shove, supplementary. So democracy through the ballot box and representative assemblies, parties, pressure groups, a free press and all the rest of it are not put in question, but mass protest is regarded as one extra and legitimate way of influencing democratic outcomes.
(2) The protest movements aim for a transformative effect, but one well within the existing institutional framework: by seeking, for example, to 'capture' a major political organization already in place and determine its political programme; or by hoping to create and shape a new organization on the same terrain, to speak for the concerns of the protesters.
(3) Or those same movements hope for a more far-reaching transformative effect, aiming to change the very structures of democratic representation in such a way as to build into them a much more participatory component. (What exactly this would look like I leave to one side, as I am only sketching the alternatives in the most abstract way.)
(4) The street protests see themselves neither as supplementing the existing forms of democratic legitimacy, nor as seeking change within its existing framework or change which builds on that legitimacy but by altering its structures in a significant way. Rather, they claim to set up a competing, alternative legitimacy to that of the representative democracy already in place.
Only the last of these four construals poses a problem of justification; the first three are perfectly compatible with the normative assumptions widely shared as underlying modern liberal democracies. The fourth, however, does pose such a problem. For if there is indeed an 'urge to bypass representative institutions' at work amongst any large number of the protesters, it needs to be explained by them what claim they can realistically make to carrying a majority of people with them if they are unable to mobilize this majority towards the winning of an election. If they can't do this - either win an election or explain why they shouldn't have to (take your pick) - then their claim to represent an alternative democractic legitimacy is spurious.
