THE COMPLEXITY AND UNCERTAINTY OF GLOBALIZATION AND ITS EFFECTS ON REPRESENTATION AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

The point of departure for this article is the hypothesis that an essential factor in the construction of modernity and an idea underlying the framework of democratic development, parallel to ideas on progress, was the construction of ideologies whose ambition it was to reduce preexisting diversity, in a political and social sense, although this process was not free from contradiction. The most patent reflection of this was in the tension between mechanisms of representation and participation. In a certain sense, this phase culminated in the social State, in the conditions of the Cold War. With the culmination of the latter and the crisis of the former, the stage of globalization, barely understood in terms of its political effects on democracies, was characterized by the dissemination of a level of economic, identity-based, and social complexity hitherto unknown. Such complexity broke down previously held certainties and, in the midst of an exponential growth of uncertainty, replaced them with an unstable balance between euphoria and fear, as the social experiences having the greatest dissemination. The preservation of that balance is making it necessary to implement neo-authoritarian mechanisms, with the consequent decline in some values of the social State, of the democratic State that abides by the rule of law. One of the effects of this is the weakness of the old participation/representation dialectic, which is having negative effects, for example, on the prestige of political parties. From this perspective, it seems that a period of new forms of participation and dynamization of social movements may open, as long as there is compliance with some pragmatic, standards-related premises that this article attempts to explain.