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For twenty-first-century movements such as the World Social Forum, Occupy Movement, Brazilian participatory budgeting and Kerala’s democratic decentralisation, direct democracy is a vital part of constituting visions and practices. Movements around the world increasingly demonstrate their distrust of political and economic leaders as the institutions of representative democracy, and vanguard party politics is losing legitimacy, with headline stories splashed across the world of the 1 per cent’s (as opposed to the 99 per cent) complicity in the corruption of political processes. These movements demonstrate that ordinary people are tired of paying the price of an under-regulated global economy that provides enormous benefits to the 1 per cent, while the 99 per cent live increasingly precarious lives. Movements are increasingly calling on government to be accountable and responsive to people, rather than to corporations. In this context we have seen an explosion of movements across the globe which, while they vary significantly, share in their belief that ‘another world is possible’ through the active participation of ordinary people.

What is meant by direct democracy? Direct democracy (often referred to as participatory or radical democracy) is where ordinary citizens are directly involved in the activities of political (and economic) governance. Unlike representative democracy where elected officials act on behalf of citizens, or vanguard democracy where the party acts on behalf of the people, people participate directly in deliberation and decision making in direct democracy. It is about popular empowerment of ordinary citizens to make decisions and carry through with implementation. Key for direct democracy is the actual participation of ordinary citizens (in other words, direct democracy requires participatory practices). Obviously, participation is crucial for this type of democracy. But what is participation? For some it simply means showing up to a meeting where citizens are informed about decisions made. For others it means consulting ordinary people about plans, although the power to make decisions lies with the leaders or officials. Neither of these forms are real participation. Meaningful participation requires that ordinary people engage in deliberation, make decisions and very importantly, have the power to ensure the implementation of the decisions (Pateman [1970] 1999). It is government by the people. For direct democracy to have meaning, then, ordinary people must directly participate in and control decision-making processes in the political, economic and social domains and have the power to ensure implementation, which requires access to resources and information. Open and transparent processes are a necessary condition for effective participation. There are examples of weak versions of direct democracy where citizens simply vote yes/ no on various initiatives and referendums. There are also strong versions in which citizens directly make decisions about local governance and the distribution of resources.

One of the legacies of the liberal tradition’s (mis)appropriation of representative democracy is that direct democracy is often placed in opposition to it. Yet direct democracy is not a replacement for or competitor of representative democracy, but rather, the two forms of democracy are vital institutional spaces for deepening and extending democracy in society. Direct democracy is appropriate and desirable for local-level decision making, while representative democracy is necessary for complex and large societies in which direct decision making by every member of the polity is impossible for every decision. The two types of democracy should not be seen to be in conflict with each other; rather, direct democracy and representative democracy complement and deepen democratic impulses in each other. Indeed, the aspiration of government by the people is further realised through combining direct and representative democracy.

This recent emphasis on direct democracy was anticipated by South African scholar Rick Turner, who argued for radical forms of democracy within the liberation movement in South Africa. The search for humanist and participatory dimensions of Marxism was articulated by Turner in his The Eye of the Needle (1972). After his assassination in 1978, he became an iconic hero of the liberation movement, but it was only toward the end of the millennium that the ideas embodied in The Eye of the Needle started resonating once again with movements. Turner looked to the importance of imagination, human agency, values and consciousness, which, for him, lie at the centre of social and human transformation. In other words, social transformation and human freedom only made sense in dialogue with each other as the one could not be attained without the other. He placed worker control and democratic planning at the centre of his understanding of participatory democracy and at the centre of human freedom (1972: 34–47). For Turner, vanguard democracy led by the Party impoverishes human freedom and social transformation.

One of the most famous recent examples of a direct democratic experiment is the Brazilian Workers’ Party’s (PT as it is popularly called) participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre (Baiocchi 2003; Baiocchi, Heller and Silva 2011; Bruce 2004). In 1986 the PT won the mayoral position in the city, but was not a majority in the city council. This led it to innovate. It decided to open up part of the city’s budget for popular participation. It held popular assemblies in neighbourhoods across the city where ordinary people got to decide what the city’s development priorities were. By democratising the allocation of part of the city’s budget, civil society was transformed into a robust arena of citizen participation. Neighbourhood associations increased from 240 in 1986 to 600 in 2000 and district-level popular councils increased from 2 to 12. Housing cooperatives jumped from 11 to 71 between 1994 and 2000 (Baiocchi 2005: 42). The participatory budgeting process not only gave civil society a voice to determine the investment of some of the city’s funds, but also created vibrant institutions in civil society (Goldfrank 2003). This is clearly a model of democracy that is different from vanguard democracy in which the Party dominates, or representative democracy in which elected officials make all the decisions.

Another radical experience in direct democracy is the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s (CPI[M]) democratic decentralisation campaign in Kerala, India (Williams 2008). While the CPI(M) is a vanguard party in name, in practice it has had to be extremely responsive and accountable to its support base, forcing it to create spaces of mass participation in state governance.⁷ Kerala became famous in the developing world in the 1980s for its achievements in human development, but had not achieved economic growth, which was necessary to maintain its redistributive programmes. In the 1990s the CPI(M)-led state government decided to try an exciting and novel experiment in participatory democracy (Williams 2008). The state devolved forty per cent of its finances to local government institutions that had to engage in local development planning with communities. Communities were involved in the deliberations, the decisions made and the implementation of development plans. A few elements of the decentralisation project are worth highlighting. First, a significant part of the funds were earmarked for local economic development projects, mostly through cooperatives. In this way, the state was marrying direct democracy in the political sphere to the economic sphere. Second, the devolution of power and resources was not about bypassing the state, but rather was about using participatory democracy to strengthen (through becoming more accountable and effective) the representative institutions. Third, this shift to decentralisation was not simply a decision of the state, but was integrally linked to the organisational support of the CPI(M). For example, the CPI(M) helped train thousands of community activists, through thousands of hours of training and four thousand pages of training material. The point is that it requires immense organisational support to coordinate grassroots activists. Finally, the project has been successful in galvanising people to become more involved in the development of their communities.

It must be noted, however, that these recent experiments in direct democracy work within representative democracy. It was the PT mayoral election victory that provided the opportunity for participatory budgeting, and the CPI(M)’s involvement in representative democracy that created the space for the radical experiment in direct democracy.