Transforming urban democracy through social movements: the experience of Ahora Madrid

ABSTRACT

Between 2015 and 2019, the Spanish capital, Madrid, was governed by the movement party Ahora Madrid, a novel political actor strongly connected to anti-austerity and pro-democracy movements gathered under the umbrella of the Indignados, or ‘15 M’, movement. Against the background of the party’s abundant hopes for regenerating urban democracy at the beginning of its term, our research asks how and to what extent Ahora Madrid translated the movement’s democratizing practices and expectations into concrete policies. Based on our own qualitative research involving government actors and social movements, our empirical findings demonstrate that the democratic innovations implemented responded to diverging visions of how to achieve ‘real democracy’, defined by different imaginaries and traditions of collective action within 15 M. While demonstrating the steady interaction between Ahora Madrid policy makers and the social movements they came from, the findings also reveal the policy agenda divisions that posed a challenge for the broadening and deepening of urban democracy. These divisions concerned vertical versus horizontal political logics, the individual versus collective nature of political subjects, and digital versus on-site political participation and deliberation. In addition to the tensions emerging among the various ideational frameworks for collective action (i.e. the autonomous tradition, technopolitics, and the institutional left), this study identifies an apparent divorce between the two intertwined goals of the 15 M: to fight neoliberal austerity and to seek participatory democracy. The empirical findings lead to highlight the internal accounts of the consequences of social movements, especially concerning the conditions for institutionalization.

KEYWORDS:

• 15-M movement
• Ahora Madrid
• social movements outcomes
• participatory democracy
• new municipalism
• Urban governance

Acknowledgments

The authors thank all informants who kindly collaborated with our fieldwork. We thank the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped improve and clarify this manuscript. Likewise, we are grateful to our research project colleagues for their inspiring collaboration in the research design and strategy, and we also acknowledge the helpful assistance of the two UAM’s PhD candidates Tania Andreeva and Jacobo Abellán in defining respondent profiles and partially collecting data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Over the course of several years, we attended public events organised by different municipal departments in charge of citizen participation and other civic initiatives (e.g. ParticipaLab and Observatorio de la Participación [Observatory of Participation in English]). We also engaged in participant observation at dozens of events in different venues across the city, such as MediaLab Prado, Cultural Centre of Casa del Reloj in Arganzuela district, Cultural Center of Daoiz y Velarde in Retiro district, and the City Hall in Palacio de Cibeles.

2. The web platform for a collaborative program received 1,240 citizen propositions between March 12 and March 21 of 2015. https://www.ahoramadrid.org/programa_subdomain/index/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Grant CSO2015-68314-P.

Notes on contributors

Fabiola Mota Consejero

Fabiola Mota Consejero is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). Her research interests include social capital, political participation and civil society, territorial politics and devolution. She has authored over two dozen of works on social capital, citizen engagement, public opinion, multilevel governance, and political representation is Spain.

Michael Janoschka

Michael Janoschka has been teaching and researching at the Institute of Geography, Universität Leipzig (Germany) since autumn 2019. His research focuses on: Processes of gentrification, displacement and dispossession in the neoliberal city; Mechanisms and effects of the financialization of housing markets; Urban conflicts, collective action and the establishment of new urban governance approaches.