The Democratic Multiverse: Governance, Associations and the Prospects for Progressive Democratic Renewal

In this chapter I show that Governance-Driven Democratization and Democracy-Driven Governance encounter almost insurmountable challenges in advancing progressive democratic reform. To fully appreciate the size and nature of these challenges, we need to put them in a larger perspective that includes the (neo-liberal) political economy. This chapter lays the groundwork for a broader theory of progressive democratic reform. I describe how democracy is suspended within a triangle of distinct operational orders formed by civil society, the state and the corporate-financial sphere. Within this triangle democracy needs to persuade the three spheres to accept it practices, rules and values. I show that in the last half century the economic sphere has gradually insinuated itself into the other two spheres to the point that the whole triangle forms a dense hegemonic complex, insulating itself against democratic influence. However, democratic innovation occurs within a participatory ecology that, in addition to GDD and DDG encompasses associations (commons) and progressive public administration. Taken together these alternatives form a repertoire of, admittedly piecemeal, progressive reform in the democratic multiverse.