Trends and developments

Courants et tendances
Alberto Melucci and Leonardo Avritzer

Complexity, cultural pluralism and democracy:

collective action in the public space
Abstract. This article is an attempt to show the political consequences of the forms
of collective action introduced by social movements and their contribution to the
formulation of a new conception of democratic practice. It is our contention that the
current crisis faced by democracy is linked to the lack of a space capable of dealing
with both social complexity and cultural pluralism. We argue that a public space for
face-to-face interaction among citizens differentiated from the state allows us to
consider this issue in a different light. Publicity allows the incorporation into
democratic politics of demands for cultural integration by preserving a space for their
direct presentation. Publicity also avoids a reductionist conception of political claims
in which, in order for representation to take place, there is the need to reduce the
plurality of the cultural demands through the aggregation of political majorities.
In this article we show the tension between the public space and political
representation, and argue that the denition of democracy in complex societies should
include two further freedoms: the freedom not to belong as the right to withdraw from
one's constituted identity in order to form a new one, and the freedom not to be
represented. Such acts, which are non-aggregative par excellence, cannot be managed by
the system of representation, but only through mechanisms of public presentation and
acknowledgement of difference. In our view the tension between the political and the
public should become part of the denition of democracy.
Key words. Belonging Complexity Cultural pluralism Public space
Representation Social movements

Social Science Information & 2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New
Delhi), 39(4), pp. 507527.
0539-0184[200012]39:4;507527;015180

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Introduction: dilemmas of complexity and cultural pluralism
Democracy in contemporary complex societies is still understood as
a system of regulated competition for material resources and representation. On its political side, different offers are made for the distribution of material resources in the form of public goods provided
by health, education and other social policies. On its electoral side,
societal cleavages are aggregated through the formation of feasible
majorities (Downs, 1956; Bobbio, 1984; Sartori, 1987). This system,
which has worked for most of the post-war period, is now in deep
crisis. Contemporary democracies are being paralysed by the reaction to their promises for political inclusion. They are also being
challenged by the fact that more and more citizens do not see the
plurality of moral values growing out of complexity adequately
represented through the available system of aggregation of majorities. Institutions designed to deliberate on behalf of majorities
become completely out of tune with the plural moral conceptions
of a signicant part of the population. As a consequence, the
decision-making capacity of political institutions decreases due to
their inability to channel new moral issues and non-economic
needs through the decision-making process. Democracy is in crisis
because, on the one hand, the requirements of cultural pluralism
proper to complexity are seldom met in the process of political
aggregation while, on the other, there is a growing feeling that political decision interferes with the autonomy of people's qualitative
needs and life projects.
The growing consensus among social and political scientists on
this legitimization crisis and the decreased decision-making capacity
of political institutions coincides with the inability of the bestestablished theories in political science and sociology democratic
elitism within political science and resource mobilization theory in
sociology to incorporate the public forms of action introduced
by contemporary social movements (Melucci, 1980, 1985, 1989,
1996a; Cohen, 1985; Offe, 1985). The type of collective action that
started emerging in the late 1960s in complex societies represents
the most important response to the dilemmas of complexity and
cultural pluralism because it provided the possibility of addressing
both of them through a redenition of the form of the political
itself: instead of following the aggregation logic proper to the
political system, social movements introduced, at the political level,
the dimension of the direct and public presentation of moral and

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Trends and developments 509

non-material claims. Many contemporary forms of collective action

do not demand to have their claims incorporated into the political
system but instead propose new values and moral concerns and
introduce these into the public culture. Social movements address
the challenge of complexity and its two-sided nature (integration
vs participation, quantity vs quality) by showing that contemporary
society is governed by both a systemic logic of integration and what
we could call a logic of cognitive mobilization (Eyerman, 1991).
Contemporary social movements show individuals' capacity to act
collectively as a response to systemic interference with the environment, to scientic developments leading to the inner control of
their bodies, to the expansion of informational systems that interfere
with privacy. Thus social movements offer a different way of
bridging the gap between complexity and democracy by utilizing
the new qualitative needs created by complexity to expand the
boundaries of the political. But social movements also represent
the most adequate answer to the challenge of cultural pluralism,
which exposes democracy to the risk of paralysis (see the postmodernist charge that democracy is subjected to conicts caused
by competing cultural principles). Social movements introduce a
complementary form of dealing with politics: they supplement the
principle of representation with the principle of belonging. By transforming the fact of belonging to different cultural groups into a
political issue, social movements offer a different solution to the
way cultural pluralism and democracy can be bridged. Belonging
differs from representation in so far as it is direct, whereas representation is indirect. Belonging tends to present itself in public as that
aspect of social life which is irreducible to representation. Because
of the tension between representation and belonging, social movements suggest that democracy in complex societies should nd
new channels for directly presenting moral forms of life which are
not in the majority and yet demand acknowledgement.
This article has one main contention, namely, that the public
sphere constitutes an alternative political space for direct presentation of plural identities and claims. The concept of a public space
involves the idea of a space for face-to-face interaction among
citizens that is differentiated from the state. In this space, individuals
and groups interact with one another, debate the actions taken by
the political authority, argue about the moral adequacy of private
conditions of domination, make demands to the political authority
and present identities in public. We will argue that the public

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space conceived in this way becomes a second form of political
space, which is occupied by actors who choose not to have their
identities represented. We believe that the concept of publicization
helps to establish a distinction between two dimensions within
such democracies, which are intimately related but also in constant
tension. The rst, the public sphere, we consider as the space that
allows the formation of solidarities, the public presentation of
identities and new issues and the formation of informal networks
of communication (Habermas, 1994; Melucci, 1996a). The other,
the political system, we understand as that level of the social structure where decisions are made. The political system has four main
activities: the reduction of demands; the competition and negotiation among different demands; the articulation of solutions; and
the decision itself. The form of differentiation between the public
and the political proposed in this article leads to a different way of
conceiving the growing complexity of the political. Instead of proposing to cope with complexity by reduction of demands and identities made by political representation, we will suggest a different
response: the direct presentation of demands and identities in the
public by those actors who choose not to have their identities
processed by the system of representation.
In the rst of our four sections, we elaborate on the insufciency
of the response made by the best-established theory within political
science the democratic elitist tradition to the challenge of complexity. We argue that the attempt to narrow the scope of participation does not provide an adequate response to the growing
complexity of modern political issues because it cannot address
the new forms of social exclusion based on the unequal access to
symbolic goods. It leaves the political realm unable to tackle symbolic and cultural issues. In the second section, we show how
resource mobilization theory (RMT) the best-established theory
on social movements is unable to break with the general framework proposed by democratic elitism. RMT reconciles rationality
with collective action by explaining how the claims advanced by
social movements can be understood as demands for political inclusion and therefore should be considered to be a rational way to
pursue social integration. In the third section, we analyse the relationship between social complexity, cultural pluralism and politics
based on the form of public action adopted by social movements.
We contend that a conception of collective action associated with
the idea of publicization has the capacity to deal with both issues.

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Trends and developments 511

Publicity allows the direct presentation of claims. It also avoids a

reductionist conception of political claims: issues such as free time,
leisure space, free speech, free participation and identity formation
constitute the centre of the public space. In the nal section of the
article, we argue for the necessity of a leap in democratic systems
and we sketch the possibility of bridging the gap between the
political system and the public sphere through the capacity of
democracy to turn new identities and themes from private into
public issues.
Democratic elitist tradition and participation
The post-war consensus on democratic participation was the result
of the displacement of the social science centre from Europe to
North America. Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and
Democracy (1942) is in this respect paradigmatic, since the author
himself substituted the United States for Europe both as a place
to live and as an object of reection. From the inter-war European
context, Schumpeter brought the concern of how to make democracy compatible with rationality. His diagnosis of the problems
faced by contemporary democracies was based on their inability
to respond to two problems. The rst was the contradiction between
sovereignty and cultural pluralism. Schumpeter regarded as a ction
the understanding of popular sovereignty as
every member of the community, conscious of that goal, knowing his or her mind,
discerning what is good or what is bad, taking part actively and responsibly in
furthering the former and ghting the latter and all members taking together
control of their affairs. (Schumpeter, 1942: 250)

For him, this idea is a ction because of the plurality of conceptions

of the common good present in a given population. Already in 1942
the author of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy was aware of the
cultural particularities involved in different conceptions of the
common good and thought that they should be left out of the democratic debate, thereby excluding substantive issues from the political
realm.
The second problem addressed by Schumpeter was the relationship between participation and rationality. He approached this
problem by pointing out the inuence of mass society on the formation of rational individual attitudes about politics. He maintained

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that communication media transform the rational collective discussion characteristic of modern politics into crowd behaviour.
Newspaper readers, radio audiences, members of a party even if not physically
gathered together are terribly easy to work up into a psychological crowd and
into a state of frenzy in which attempt at rational argument only spurs the
animal spirit. (Schumpeter, 1942: 257)

In other words, the collective forms characteristic of modern politics

are susceptible to a potentially dangerous degeneration (an argument common to Freud, crowd psychology and Kornhauser's
[1959] theory of mass society).
On the basis of these two diagnoses, Schumpeter proposed to
narrow the scope of democratic systems. Democracy should not
seek to be rational discussion of the common good, because society
is too divided and because discussion can easily lead to mass manipulation. In an attempt to avoid these dangers, Schumpeter looked
for an alternative form of democratic government, and proposed the
transformation of sovereignty into a method for the selection of
elites: ``the role of the people is to produce a government or else
an intermediate body which in turn will produce a rational executive
or government'' (Schumpeter, 1942: 269). Schumpeter's intention
was clear: to narrow the scope of democracy in order to save it
from the irrationality of mass politics and the unavoidable conicts
over cultural values and moral rules.
Schumpeter's proposal for democratic organization became
widely accepted in the post-war period, even in Europe.1 One Italian
thinker, Norberto Bobbio, reconnected the democratic elitist
tradition with the debates on the meaning of sovereignty and the
forms of management of the economy as they were approached by
both the left and the liberals in Europe. Bobbio approached the
gap between democracy as popular sovereignty and democracy as
a rule for the selection of government in terms of ``unfullled promises'', that is to say, with ideas proper to the democratic tradition
and yet impossible to full in complex societies. Like Schumpeter
and Weber, he claimed that ``the project of political democracy
was conceived for a society much less complex than the one that
exists today'', which faces unforeseen obstacles arising from the
increasing complexity of both the economy and the administrative
state (Bobbio, 1984: 37). Bobbio's approach to unfullled promises
is clearly linked to the problem of complexity. For him, the growth
in administrative complexity and technical education contradicts

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the pursuit of participatory democracy. These processes expand the

domain of technocrats instead of the autonomy of the common
citizen: ``Technocracy and democracy are antithetical: if the expert
plays a leading role in the industrial society he cannot be considered
as just any citizen. The hypothesis which underlies democracy is that
all are in a position to make decisions about everything'' (Bobbio,
1984: 37). Hence Bobbio, in the same fashion as Schumpeter, proposes reduction of the scope for decision-making in order to make
democracy compatible with the growing complexity of modern
societies. There is a common strain in Schumpeter's and Bobbio's
arguments: both authors acknowledge that the transition to a
modern and highly differentiated society implies many gains but
also a sharp political loss, expressed in the inevitable necessity of
narrowing the scope of political participation. The trend established
by Schumpeter in the United States and Bobbio in Europe set a
standard for democratic theory. Contemporary authors such as
Sartori and Dahl operate within this framework either by conceiving
democracy as the government of the ``active minorities'' (Sartori,
1987: I. 147) or by assuming that political incorporation can take
place by the inclusion of new groups into the representation system
(Dahl, 1990).
Democratic elitism centres its case for narrowing democratic
participation on the necessity of lowering the risks tied to the growing complexity and cultural pluralism of modern societies. It
assumes that the proliferation of elements which follows from
cultural pluralism cannot be dealt with by an increase in participation, but only through a reduction of the variables involved
(Luhmann, 1982). Thus in order to deal with social complexity the
political sub-system needs to reduce its capacity to respond to the
outside environment by narrowing its responses to a less than
one-to-one relation. Representation through the aggregation of
majorities appears to be the most feasible solution. Representation
reduces the complexity of the political decision-making process,
ensuring that decisions will continue to be made in spite of the
increase in the number of elements to be coped with. Thus the
responses that democratic elitism has been able to give to the problems of complexity and cultural pluralism are based on the assumption that the replacement of direct participation by representation
constitutes an adequate answer to both problems. Yet both answers
draw on a one-sided conception of complexity and cultural
pluralism. On the one hand, complexity cannot be dealt with simply

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by reducing the number of variables involved in order to process
them through the system of representation. While the number of
material demands can be narrowed with only partial losses (some
actors may of course lose more than others), the reduction of the
number of cultural claims or claims for identity leads to the exclusion or even the cancellation of one actor's social existence. On
the other hand, cultural pluralism cannot be dealt with merely by
dissociating democracy from substantive considerations and attaching it to formal procedures for the selection of leadership (Taylor,
1994) because the aggregation of majorities might itself become a
source of profound inequality as far as people's identity is concerned
(Young, 1990).
Democratic elitism espouses a one-sided conception of complexity
and cultural pluralism by advocating an ad hoc reduction of participation. Social movements show that increased participation could
provide a different answer to both issues (Avritzer, 1996). The
environmental movement, for instance, provides a good example
of how the multiplication of actors involved in dealing with
endangered species and land-cleaning provided solutions to the
complexity issue through the multiplication of actors involved. In
the case of Chesapeake Bay, the involvement of a broad range of
actors such as residents, farmers and business people led to the introduction of multiple environmental designs involving social actors
showing a greater capacity to deal with complex issues such as
reduction of nutrient loadings. At the same time, bureaucratic
forms of dealing with the same issues through the administrative
system could propose only one standard organizational solution
to all kinds of environmental problems and were unable to revise
problematic targets (Sabel et al., 1999). Thus reduction of social
complexity to technocratic administration reduces the capacity of
the political system to cope with the multiplicity of situations
involved in dealing with the environment. In this case, social
action has one main characteristic: the increase in a form of participation which entails direct involvement in decision-making. Such
characteristics, which are also shared by the anti-AIDS movement
(Gamson, 1989) and by third-world urban social movements
(Olvera, 1997), have led social theorists to look at the relationship
between growing complexity and political representation in a new
way. Yet the next section of the article will show how the contemporary leading approach to the study of collective action, RMT,
in its attempt to reconnect complexity and participation, does not

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Trends and developments 515

break with the democratic elitist tradition and is therefore unable to

provide an adequate solution to both issues.
Rationality, participation and social aggregation: RMT and the
political realm
Resource mobilization theory represents the denitive attempt
within sociological theory to overcome psychological assumptions
about the irrationality of collective action. RMT emerged with the
clear intention of putting aside grievances and deprivations the
main elements of the post-war theoretical consensus in the analysis
of collective action. Its manifest aim was to remove social movements theory from the rationality/irrationality debate by pointing
out that social movements emerge and develop through a structure
of various kinds of incentives (Zald and Ash, 1966). Strains and
grievances are ruled out because ``there is always enough discontent
in any society to supply the grassroots support for a movement''
(Turner and Killian, 1972; McCarthy and Zald, 1977). The problem
is how effectively to organize this discontent as an act of social
aggregation performed by rational actors. For RMT, the aggregation of individual actors into some form of collective action is a
task whose success or failure depends upon two variables: the cost
or benet of acting and the resources available for doing so.
RMT's point of departure is Mancur Olson's argument that only
``a tied sale of collective and non-collective goods . . . could stimulate
a rational individual in a large group to bear part of the cost of
obtaining a collective good'' (Olson, 1965: 134). RMT presents
social action as a dispute oriented towards the distribution of
public goods whose value can be calculated. This leads it to show
how resources and opportunities are central to understanding collective action and to specify in structural terms the conditions under
which mobilization takes place (Tilly, 1986, 1997). In short, resource
mobilization tries to transform Homo sociologicus into Homo
economicus in order to reduce the problem of collective action to
``how people organise, pool resources and wield them effectively''
(Fireman and Gamson, 1979: 9). By turning Olson's argument
into a broad framework for linking collective action and the utilization of resources, modern and non-modern forms of collective
action are made equivalent: prophets, politicians, businesses and
voluntary associations are reduced to a common denominator of

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resourceful actors whose skills and connections can be used to
deliver incentives and aggregate actors (Fireman and Gamson,
1979). Collective action occurs whenever actors nd themselves
entering a political system or exiting from it. Those already located
within a political system dene its rules of membership, wielding
the power at their disposal to keep outsiders out. This exclusionary
action provokes processes of mobilization and even violence on
the part of those seeking to penetrate the system. The attempt of
resource mobilization to remove collective action from the
rationality/irrationality debate leads to a denition of social actors
based on their relation to the political system: they are either
resourceful or resourceless, included or excluded. Thus collective
actors' drive for inclusion can be considered a rational collective act.
RMT also involves an attempt to set the structural conditions for
collective action by making modern politics a sort of invariant point
of reference. The forms of national politics which emerged in the
modern era, the proactive movements for rights and political
inclusion are all considered to be the result of structural changes
in the market and the state. A structural explanation is intertwined
with a utilitarian account of rationality according to which ``the
creation of a bureaucratic, capitalist, specialised world dominated
by powerful governments, large organisations and big cities . . .
amounts to fundamental changes in the interests, organisations
and opportunities that together govern the intensity and character
of collective action'' (Tilly, 1986: 77). Tilly's remarks introduce a
structural component necessary for the cost/benet evaluation of
collective action. Both the modern capitalist economy and the
modern state create exclusion and at the same time conditions for
membership, making the collective act of challenging such conditions a rational act.
The basic analytical elements proper to the democratic elitist
tradition are imported by RMT in order to evaluate the rationality
of the forms of collective action adopted by social movements.
Social actors are rational because they mobilize not because of
grievances or psychological drives but according to a cost/benet
calculation. Thus the elements introduced by the democratic elitist
tradition to postulate individual rationality are not denied
(Downs, 1956; Olson, 1965; Morris and Mueller, 1992); instead,
their scope is broadened to show that acting collectively might
also be rational.

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Trends and developments 517

Since social movements deliver collective goods, few individuals will on their own
bear the costs of working to obtain them. Explaining collective behavior requires
detailed attention to the selection of incentives, cost-reducing mechanisms or
structures, and carrier benets that lead to collective behavior. (McCarthy and
Zald, 1977: 1218)

The same argument holds for political inclusion. Thus, for Tilly,
``every polity . . . collectively develops tests of membership.
Challengers acquire membership in the polity by meeting the test
despite the fact that members characteristically resist new admissions and employ the government resources to make admissions
more difcult'' (Tilly, 1997: 121). Here RMT tends to transform
modern political systems into an invariant structure which is
assumed to explain all collective attempts of political incorporation
as rational collective acts.
The cost/benet calculation utilized by the democratic elitist
tradition is extended by RMT to the arena of collective action in
order to narrow the risks of ``irrational'' political participation.
This attempt faces a major problem: the reduction of rationality
to the struggle for a better distribution of material benets
(wealth, income, etc.).2 RMT overlooks the fact that many of the
issues around which contemporary social movements have been
organized involve not the extension of material resources to the
resourceless but rather the acknowledgement of one's condition.
Politics involves a struggle for self-naming as well as for the
change in the way social actors are portrayed (Jenson, 1995). In
many recent social movements, one can see the central role of
this kind of action. Gamson (1992) showed how the way previous
injustice was portrayed by the media became an issue of central
importance to the civil rights movement. Social movements establish
a relationship with collective action that cannot be explained in
terms of pure cost/benet calculation. This poses a fundamental
challenge to the way democratic elitism and RMT understand
collective rationality. Both approach the rationality of collective
action in terms of its capacity or incapacity to acquire public
goods and representation. Yet the central political characteristic of
many recent movements is the fact that their economic and political
demands are mixed with the challenge to the very code of political
incorporation through representation. Social movements such as
the peace movement or movements for the democratization of the
political system in Latin America (Avritzer, 1996; Olvera, 1997;
Peruzzotti, 1997) root their political action in a novel relation with

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political rules and procedures, thus affecting their very form. This
new relation to the political system connects such movements for
political renewal to a type of action aiming at forms of accountability and openness proper to the public space. Through their
action, they suggest the need to make the political system compatible
with the process of presentation of difference in public. Hence, the
postulation of rationality attributed solely to actions seeking representation falls short of addressing the need of a sphere for the
presentation of difference (Pizzorno, 1979). In the next section, we
present a framework for understanding this specic dimension of
social movements.
The two-sided nature of complexity and cultural pluralism: social
movements and politics
Our denition of social movements is entirely analytical and aims to
conceptually separate specic forms of collective action from
phenomena that are empirically contiguous and mixed with the
former. We conceive of collective action in terms of the orientations
of action and the specic system of social relationships affected by
the action itself (Melucci, 1989, 1996a). We reserve the term
``social movements'' to designate a form of collective action which
has three characteristics: (1) the formation of solidarity; (2) the
public presentation of an existing conict; (3) the breach of the
limits of compatibility of the system within which the action takes
place. Each of these characteristics, when applied to contemporary
forms of collective action, allows a new way of dealing with cultural
pluralism and social complexity, which in our view overcomes some
of the difculties encountered by the democratic elitist tradition or
by RMT.
Solidarity
Solidarity as an objective of action is a feature shared by many contemporary movements. Social movements reinterpret the meaning
of social solidarity by transferring its formation from the private
to the public realm. Primeval solidarity meant the capacity to deal
with issues such as ethnicity, locality and age, at the private level.
As social solidarity moves from the private to the public domain

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Trends and developments 519

(Hegel, 1821; Durkheim, 1986) it changes its form of operation.

Within contemporary societies, solidarity involves the self-reexive
act of identifying a common condition with a distant other
(Giddens, 1994; Beck, 1997). The nature of such an act is essentially
public and challenges the attempt by the ruling groups who
elaborate political codes to reduce complexity and impose names.
Solidarity entails maintaining the plurality of social action against
the system's homogenizing effect. Social movements provide us
with good examples of such attempts. Urban social movements in
Latin America, such as the shantytown movements in Santiago or
Sao Paulo, changed the identity associated with being an inhabitant
of a poor neighbourhood in a Latin American city. They built a new
identity of a citizen entitled to rights and social services (Oxhorn,
1995; Doimo, 1995). Such an identity involved the encouragement
of participation and the pursuit of organizational autonomy from
the state and political mediators (Doimo, 1995). In the United
States, the anti-AIDS movement operated with a similar logic,
trying to produce a new meaning for the notion of patient.
Gamson (1989) showed how movements such as the Aids Coalition
to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) challenged the technical decision on
AIDS treatment. ACT-UP pushed for greater access to treatment
and drugs and challenged decision-making on who should be
included in new drug trials. It assigned a new meaning to the idea
of patient, linking it to an active connotation. Acts of publicization
by social movements are an attempt to stress the cognitive side of
complexity, that is to say they involve the afrmative act of
naming in a different way, an act not prone to be processed through
complexity-reduction strategies. Publicization is the demonstration
of a different political answer to the unwillingness of social movements to present their demands to the system of representation.
Public presentation of conictual issues
With the increase in contemporary societies' information resources,
the capacity of individuals to intervene in the symbolic order
expands to take in the whole of society. Society acts on the system
as a whole, on individuals' symbolic capacities and on their personal
resources for dening the meaning of their actions (Melucci, 1996b).
In order for highly differentiated systems to be able to guarantee
their internal integration (Parsons and Smelser, 1956; Luhmann,

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1982; Zolo, 1992) it is necessary for them to extend their control over
the symbolic levels of action, so as to include in their scope the
spheres where the meaning and motives of behaviour are constituted. Thus conicts shift toward the new goals of re-appropriating
and reversing the meanings produced by distant and impersonal
apparatuses. These large organizations adopt instrumental
``rationales'' and tend to impose on individuals an identication
based on these instrumental criteria. Antagonistic and conictual
demands thematize issues such as time and space, birth and death,
health and sickness, sexual identity and the control of communicative symbols. Social movements seek to re-appropriate such
themes and assign them new meanings. The central characteristic
of this process is its public dimension. Political rulers and elites
which produce dominant codes of behaviour try to reduce complexity by processing identity claims through the logic of representation.
Social movements react by publicly exhibiting an identity or a
condition not amenable to aggregation of majorities.
A closer look at the conictual forms of action adopted by
contemporary social movements reveals the difference between our
analysis and that of RMT. Adopting a systemic view of the interchanges between the economy and society and the political system
and society, RMT introduces collective action as an intermediate
element between the production and distribution of collective
goods and the presentation and representation of political claims.
Within this framework, the action of social movements is not seen
as breaking with the dominant systemic logic, and RMT assumes
the possibility of incorporating and processing both economic and
political claims within the system. Thus, instead of accounting for
the specic forms of action proper to social movements, RMT
opts for the narrow denition of rationality, which reduces political
participation to actions seeking advantages within the political
system. This strategy overlooks the formal innovations of social
movements and thus fails to thematize their public dimension.
Instead of taking advantage of the innovations produced by movements in ways of doing politics and proposing an extension of the
participatory forms of democracy, RMT ends up reducing such
innovations to the instrumental level of action. Such a strategy is
unable, as the democratic elitist tradition, either to cope theoretically with the growing crisis of cultural legitimacy at the political
level or to recognize the potential for political innovation that has

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Trends and developments 521

been introduced by social movements. In our view, social movements are characterized by breaching the limits of compatibility of
the economic and the political systems. This breach expresses the
need to acknowledge the permanent tension between mechanisms
of systemic integration and public arenas. The former operate
through complexity reduction, whereas the latter allow the presentation in public of an identity, a condition of exclusion, a new moral
concern. It is our contention that such a tension is inherent in
contemporary democracies.
Collective action and democracy: the public role of social
movements
If democracy is to keep its legitimacy, it needs to assume a different
form in complex, pluralistic societies. It has to create a space for solidarity and public presentation within which social actors recognize
themselves and can be recognized for what they are or want to be.
Such a space should further social actors' autonomy and capacity
for deliberation on complex issues (Bohman, 1996; Cohen and
Sabel, 1997). Strengthening this kind of space implies broadening
the concept of democracy in order to link it not only with claims
for material goods and rules for representation but also with the
freedom to construct spaces for recognition, the freedom to dispute
the meaning of given identities and the freedom to innovate at the
political level.
These freedoms and rights entail a certain degree of reciprocal
tension with the system of institutional representation. In order to
reproduce itself, collective identity needs the reassurance of a
social space protected against control and free from repression.
Such a space requires the existence of a set of rights guaranteeing
free expression, free assembly and free communication. In addition
to rights, a public space for social action requires the establishment
of those processes and resources (organization, leadership, symbolic
and ideological framing processes) which ensure the continuity of
demands and allow the presentation and the confrontation of
ideas with the rest of society. It is at this level that social movements
provide an answer to the issues of complexity and cultural pluralism.
By circulating information and pressuring administrative agencies,
they challenge the process of administrative decision-making and

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throw into question the conventional answer given to social complexity. They expose the fact that the administrative system's
possession of information does not justify its exclusive access to
decision-making. Social movements cast doubts on the administrative consequences of narrowing the political participation by
publicly challenging the neutrality of decision-making in such sensitive areas as health policies, family planning and environmental
policies. They thus create a space for parallel forms of deliberation
by cultural publics.
Social movements have been able to create fora which challenge
the exclusive access of technicians to decision-making. The three
social movements mentioned in this article the environmental
movement, the movement of AIDS activists and urban movements
in Latin America all challenged the exclusive access of technicians
to decision-making. The environmental movement showed in the
Chesapeake Bay case that direct participation by social actors
leads to multiple designs in environmental issues, whereas bureaucratic designs are inexible; urban social movements in Latin
America have been successfully introduced into decision-making
on budget issues; anti-AIDS activists have successfully changed
administrative forms of dealing with drug licensing. All these
examples show that social movements breach the limits of compatibility between complexity and political representation because they
challenge the consequences of limiting the access of social actors to
decision-making fora on complex issues.
Social movements also tackle the issue of cultural pluralism by
dissociating the freedom to belong from the freedom to be represented. Belonging is not equivalent to representation and in a certain
sense is its opposite. Belonging is direct, representation is indirect;
belonging is the immediate enjoyment of the good that is identity,
representation is that enjoyment deferred. Pluralism is better
addressed through belonging than through representation because
cultural difference cannot be assimilated by the processes of identity
aggregation proper to representation. For representation to take
place, there is the need to reduce the plurality of the cultural
demands involved in the polity. Because of this tension, the denition of democracy in complex societies should include two further
freedoms: the freedom not to belong as the right to withdraw
from one's constituted identity in order to form a new one, and
the freedom not to be represented. Such acts, which are non-

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Trends and developments 523

aggregative par excellence, cannot be managed by the system of

representation, but only through mechanisms of public presentation
and acknowledgement of difference.
Non-authoritarian democracy in complex societies can succeed
only if it is able to accommodate these dualisms: administrative
complexity vs public deliberation; the right to belong vs the right
to refuse to belong; the right to make one's voice heard vs the
right to modify the conditions of being heard. The precondition
for a non-authoritarian democracy is the autonomy of the political
space, a space which is itself a recent creation and a property of
complex societies. We call it a public space for re/presentation. It
is distinct from government institutions and state apparatuses, but
it is part of the political realm. It extends beyond the political institutions proper to embrace systems of public presentation, representation and decision-making diffused in society. The public
space is characterized by its great variability. It may expand or
shrink according to the degree of autonomy it is granted. It is by
denition a exible space which can be kept open only by a creative
relationship between collective actions and institutions. It is structurally ambivalent because it expresses the dual signicance of the
terms ``representation'' and ``participation''. Representation is
presentative: that is, it advances demands and promotes interests.
But it is also representative: it embodies a reality which remains
irreducibly different from it and often goes unnoticed. Similarly,
participation signies both ``taking part in'', or acting to promote
one's interests and needs, and ``being part of'', as in belonging to
a system and identifying with the general interests of the community.
This insuperable ambivalence of the ``political'' both threatens and
empowers creative action. It threatens creative action by reducing
it to a general form of material and political inclusion. It empowers
it by providing the conditions that make it unique and thus
irreducible to equalization produced by aggregation of majorities.
The political role of social movements in the public space of
re/presentation is to breach the limits of compatibility between presentation and representation in order to challenge the attempt of
political rulers to reduce presentation of difference to pure representation. This tension leads to a contentious denition of the form of
the political within contemporary societies.
Social movements have the capacity to occupy the public space
without losing their specicity. The public space is the point of

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tension between political institutions and public forms of presentation, between the attempt to reduce complexity and the necessity
to acknowledge pluralism by allowing the social dilemmas raised
by movements not to be erased by their institutional incorporation.
The public space that emerged out of the bourgeois era is being
transformed into a pluralistic and conictual space which allows
movements to contest the denition of what is political, that is of
what belongs to the polis. Its function is to broaden the code of
the political by transforming what used to remain private into politics as well as by re-politicizing what has been left out of the process
of aggregation of majorities. The primary aim of the public space is
to enable movements to bring to the public the issues they raise as
well as the political forms they practise. The creation of a space
for the contentious denition of the political can enable society to
deal with the tension between the public and the political using a
strategy opposite to that of complexity reduction. Such a strategy
involves the politicization of social dilemmas by transforming
them into issues which can only be addressed by recognizing the
autonomy and the difference of social actors. By pointing out the
necessity of broadening public spaces, social movements connect
new issues with the renewal of the form of the political. They transform political representation and institutional decision-making into
one more viable political space and allow the institutional acknowledgement of a new space capable of giving voice to needs, issues and
actors which until now remained outside the borders of the political
system.
Alberto Melucci is Professor of Sociology at the University of Milan. He is the
author of many books, including Challenging Codes and The Playing Self, both
published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press. Author's address: 91 Corso di
Porto Romana, Milano 20122, Italy.
Leonardo Avritzer is Professor of Political Science at the Federal University of
Minas Gerais. His book The Morality of Democracy received the best book of
the year award from Anpocs (Brazilian Association of Sociologists and Political
Scientists) and is currently being translated into Spanish. Author's address: Rua
Joao Antonio Cardoso 305, apt. 101, Belo Horizonte 31310-390, Brazil.
[email: avritzer@fach.ufmg.br]

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Trends and developments 525

Notes
1. There were, however, a few exceptions, most importantly Bachrach (1967),
Pateman (1970) and, more recently, Held (1987). Most of these authors, whose
common origin is the so-called ``New Left'', accepted part of the democratic elitist
argument but sought to complement it with the defence of forms of direct participation at the workplace level. For them, ``the opportunity for extensive participation in
areas like work would radically alter the context of national politics'' (Held, 1987:
261).
2. The cultural side of social movements has been recently incorporated by these
authors through the transformation of culture into an additional resource. In a
volume edited by Aldon Morris and Carol Mueller, the authors concede that
resource mobilization theory, as originally conceived, self-consciously minimized the roles of ideas and beliefs and their elaboration. Like grievances, the
cultural congurations that legitimate and make collective action meaningful
were taken as givens. Recently, theorists found a starting point for addressing
cultural issues. (Morris and Mueller, 1992: 13)
Yet this starting-point entails understanding culture as a mobilizing factor subordinated to the exclusion/inclusion logic upon which resource mobilization based
its theory of collective action.

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