ABSTRACT
Participatory democracy was based on the conviction that people could, should, and in fact were capable of shaping their world and that they needed to do so not just through individual but also through collective decision making. The right to participate implied a responsibility to be more than a passive consumer of political results. Participatory democracy has sometimes been conflated with 'direct democracy' in which people make decisions themselves. In conventional democratic theory, representatives nominated by competing political parties provide the chief means for ordinary citizens to influence the political system. Participatory democracy also implied a critique of the theory and practice of both communism and social democracy indeed, that critique was a big part of the New Left. Conventional socialism, as seen in the social democratic parties of Europe, offered far more personal and political liberty than actually existing Communism, but its vision was still far from that of participatory democracy.
