omniharmonicParticipatory Democracy
Participatory democracy refers to democratic systems in which citizens directly engage in decision-making rather than delegating all authority to elected representatives. Unlike pure representative democracy, participatory models create structured pathways for ordinary people to deliberate on policy, allocate resources, and shape the rules that govern their lives.
In the context of civic innovation, participatory democracy represents a fundamental challenge to the passive consumer model of citizenship that dominates liberal democracies. When democracy becomes a spectator sport — where citizens vote every few years and otherwise disengage — it creates the conditions for capture by concentrated interests. Participatory mechanisms like citizen-assemblies, quadratic-voting, and participatory budgeting restore agency to communities and rebuild the civic muscle that atrophies under representative-only systems.
Participatory democracy connects to subsidiarity through the principle that decisions should be made by those most affected. It also intersects with collective-intelligence, since distributed decision-making taps into knowledge that no central authority can possess. In practice, participatory models are often nested within polycentric-governance frameworks, where different scales of decision-making each have their own participatory mechanisms. The rise of digital tools — including liquid-democracy platforms and quadratic-voting systems — is making participation at scale increasingly viable.