Democracia y participación ciudadana en los municipios

¿Un mercado político de trastos?

Abstract

We have often wished to see the municipal sphere as being, for reasons of scale, the most ideal
for putting into practice citizen participation experiences that involve the democratization of
representative democracy. From our point of view, scale is not, however, the only obstacle in the
way of such democratizing processes. There are structural constrictions that are related to the
nature of the democratic systems of authority existing between parties and which determine the
preferences of the social protagonists in such a way that the democratization of local representative
democracy through the channel of citizen participation becomes complex. This conclusion is reached
after using the instruments of the games theory for an analysis of the system used for integration
of protagonists of the model (municipal government and local associations). It seems that this
system of interaction also possesses a series of characteristics that have a certain similarity to what
is known in economics as a junk market. The abstract model is applied to the study of two specific
cases: that of citizen participation experiences in the municipal districts of Cordoba and Malaga
between 1979 and 1995.