Reconsidering social movement impact on democracy: the case of Spain’s 15-M movement

ABSTRACT

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’.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• innovation
• imaginaries
• technopolitics
• hybridity
• social movement outcomes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Priska Daphi and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this manuscript, which greatly improved it. We also want to thank Simon Tormey for early discussions about the special issue as a whole.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Notes.

See a wealth of references and discussion of the debate between elite driven versus populist/movement driven transitions to democracy in Tilly (1993/1994).

2. In June 2011 the acampadas were lifted by the 15 M activists who decided to move to the neighborhoods after a series of lengthy debates in the general assemblies. For more on this process in Madrid, see Flesher Fominaya (2020a).

3. Más Madrid is itself an offshoot of 15-M. It is a political party resulting from the split between the founders of Podemos, a so-called ‘movement-party’ that emerged in the wake of 15-M (see Della Porta, Fernández, et al., 2017; Flesher Fominaya, 2020a). Mónica García’s popularity and influence has increased greatly during the pandemic, where she has spoken out against abuses and corruption in health care provision and policy, as well as calling attention to working conditions and patient conditions resulting from mismanagement and underfunding. As such, she embodies participatory/deliberative, contentious, institutionalized and monitory forms of democratic innovation.

4. We are indebted to Revilla-Blanco et al. (2015) for compiling this information, which was reverified by Flesher Fominaya. The original source is from the Ministry of the Interior and the data is available at www.interior.gob.es under ‘nuarios y estadísticas’. Data from 2013 does not include Catalonia.

5. Podemos is a new political party that sought to channel 15 M support and demands and quickly rose to prominence after 2014 before declining. At the time of writing it is a minority partner in the PSOE LED government in Spain. It forms part of a coalition that is currently the fourth parliamentary party, with Podemos holding 26 seats of the 35 seats of the coalition (out of 350 total).

6. Ciudadanos is a conservative pro-Spanish unity (and anti-Catalan independence) party whose declining fortunes recovered as a result of the political space opened up by Podemos and 15-M.

7. See also their webpage: https://15mparato.wordpress.com/ 15MpaRato is also related to the Xnet project, which can be found here: https://xnet-x.net/en/.

8. You can see their respective webpages here: https://decide.madrid.es/and https://decidim.barcelona.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cristina Flesher Fominaya

Cristina Flesher Fominaya is Professor of Global Studies at Aarhus University (Denmark).

Ramón A. Feenstra

Ramón A. Feenstra is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Sociology at the Universitat Jaume I of Castellón (Spain). Currently, he is a member of the research project PID2019-109078RB-C21 financed by The Spanish State Research Agency (AEI).