Liberal Democracy at the End of its Rope: The Participatory Democracy Alternative Part II

by Bruce Lerro / February 7th, 2026

Orientation
Unfortunately, in the United States the terms “liberal, “democracy” and “capitalism” are all mushed together according to the following logic:

• All democratic societies are liberal;
• All liberal societies are capitalist and
• All democratic societies are capitalist

In Part I of my article, I challenged this logic because many capitalist societies have dictatorships and some socialist societies are democratic. Part I was divided into two parts. The first half is about the shortcomings of representational democracy in its ontological ground in Newtonian and epistemological foundations in Descartes.  I also discussed how representational liberalism cannot be democracy because it conceives of wholes as either mechanical aggregates where the whole is no more than the sum of individuals. The other kind of whole is a mystical whole which has no individuality. This mystical whole, called “unitary democracy”, is the subject of the second half of Part I. At the end of Part I the author Benjamin Barber describes how liberal representational democracy consciously or unconsciously supports authoritarian unitary democracy which can turn into mobs. At the end of Part I I posed some questions which set up participatory, thick politics as moving beyond both representational and unitary democracy.

I. What is Thick Participatory Politics?
According to Benjamin Barber in his book Strong Democracy, politics is a very special activity which differentiates us from the rest of the animal kingdom with the known exception of chimps, crows, ravens and dolphins all of whom have a rich social life. All human activity is not political. For example, where there is consensus there is no conflict, power struggle or the need for political reasonableness. At the other extreme, in human society if there is no common agreement there is no ground for politics.

There are four conditions for politics which I’ll list and then go into detail about:

• Necessity of public action (as opposed to voluntary);
• Choosing means and ends between actual evils that are distinguished only by degree (rather than between an ideal good and an ideal evil);
• In the presence of conflict (vs harmony) and
• In primordial interdependency

Let us go over each of these. By “necessity” Barber means actions enmeshed in events that are part of a train of cause and effect already at work in the world and will continue in their motion unless there are contrary inputs from conscious political actors. Non-actors bear responsibility for whatever results their non-decisions have allowed. By “action” Barber means doing (or not doing), making (or not making) something in the physical world that limits human behavior, changes the environment or affects the world in some material way. Where there is no action (or non-action of consequence) there is no politics.

Choosing means deciding on ends and means through a process of collective deliberation, weighing the pros and cons, deciding, making a plan, taking action and monitoring the results. Action that is impulsive or arbitrary is not yet political action in terms of thick democracy. The rabble is not an electorate and a mob is not a citizenry.

The search is for solutions that are less than arbitrary even though they cannot be true or certain. Liberal representation of abstract rationale based on a pre-political natural right is not realistic. Rather, a reasonable choice will be practical rather than metaphysical and it will be without force or coercion. It makes preferences and opinions earn legitimacy by forcing them to run the gauntlet of public deliberation and public judgment.

Political processes for thick participatory democracy are not about bargaining and horse-trading in which individual preferences are accepted as given as they are for representative liberalism. The collective process in participatory democracy of having to think for the whole corrects, opens up and transforms narrow preferences as it widens them. Barber gives the analogy of the difference between liberal democracy’s voting compared to citizens’ participation.

Barber writes that voting is like a group of people in a cafeteria bargaining about what they can buy as a group that will suit their individual tastes. Voting in the bargaining model often fixes choices and thereby stultifies the imagination. Liberal representational democracy treats individual opinions as given and conflict is simply a bargaining process by which individuals come to the table to choose among options. Those with the most votes are the winners and others give their consent. Thick democratic politics is like a group of people in a cafeteria contriving new means, inventing new recipes and experimenting with new diets in the effort of creating a public taste that they can all share and that will supersede the conflicting private tastes about which they once tried to strike bargains.

Thick participatory democracy resists the liberal idea that conflict is intractable and at best vulnerable only to adjudication among lawyers or toleration. Instead, it develops a politics that can transform conflict into cooperation. It is the creative dialectical struggle of conflict which creates an expanded cooperation.

If there is political truth it can only be the kind of truth that is made in the course of the doing. Barber declares that politics is like a rag-and-bone shop of the practical and the concrete – the everyday and the ambiguous, the malleable and the evanescent. Politics can be grimy with the muddled activity of reluctant doers who must nonetheless do the best they can. It is dark, confused and tumultuous with many bends, angels and elbows.

To say that a society is too complex to manage through direct democracy ignores the technological means of communication which already exist like the electronic communications systems of multinational corporations and international banks. These networks incorporate, however unconsciously, millions of workers in dozens of countries. The communal imagination is like a rubber balloon. The initial stretching is the hardest, but after that it stretches with increasing ease.

Thick Participatory Democracy vs Thin Liberal Representational Democracy

Thick participatory democracy	Category of comparison	Thin, liberal representational democracy
A collective creative activity: process politics	What is politics?	A thing, a place, a set of institutions: instrumental politics
Done by Citizens: Public participation	Who does it?	Something done by professional politicians: Masses give consent
Transform it	What is to be done with conflict?	Suppressing it; ameliorating it; tolerating it; resolving it
Collective reasonableness	What kind of cognition is involved?	Abstract rationality (libertarians)
Transformation: collective judgment and leads men and women to modify and enlarge options as a consequence of seeing them in new, public ways.	How is deliberation framed?	Bargaining with the private preferences of individuals taken as given.
The community	Who sets the agenda?	Political representatives, journalists, clerics, social scientists
Collective deliberation	Decision-making process	Voting
Public place provided for losers to express regret after the results	Political process	Representation makes it impossible to assume only political talk beforea decision
Collective deliberation allows people to hash things over	Discussion vs privacy	Voting discourages witness function

II.  The How of Participatory Politics
Brian Barry lists seven models of decision-making  in his book Political Argument:

• Decision by combat
• Bargaining
• Discussion on merits
• Voting
• Deciding by chance
• Deciding by voting
• Authoritarian determination
• Political talk

Pragmatic ancient republicans generally understood intelligence as a property of communities rather than of individuals. Charles Sanders Peirce contends that the back and forth of me and you dissolves in a form of talk possible only for human beings, no other animal. The art of conversation is the art of finding language that is broad and novel enough to bring out conflicting perceptions of the world yet sufficiently genuine to withstand the later objections and wear and tear of the subscribing parties. Political dialogue is not about expressing affection or building friendships. In fact, the attachments we feel toward natural kith and kin can be constricting and parochializing.

One measure of healthy political talk is the amount of silence it permits. Barber says silence is the precious medium in which reflection is nurtured. “I will listen” does not mean “I will scan my adversary’s position for weaknesses and potential trade-offs”. Neither does it mean “I will tolerantly permit my opposition to say whatever they choose”. It means I will try to put myself in their place. I will strain to hear what makes us alike. I will listen for a common rhetoric evocative of common purpose. As a result of our common talk, we create alternative future consequences and then ones more provisional and concrete. Political talk is not talk about the world which makes dialogue too passive. Political discussions are talks that shape and reshape a world that is in the process of becoming.

Agenda Setting
In thin democracies, agendas are typically regarded as the province of elites – political committees or executive officers. In thick democracies decision-making can be vital democratic processes. However, who controls the agenda  – even over only its wording may not determine the outcome, but they control it. The ordering of the alternatives can affect the patters of choice as decisively as their formulation. If we reserve talk and its evolution to specialists – to journalists, managers, clerics or social scientists – then no amount of equality will yield democracy.

Thick democratic talk places its agenda at the center rather than at the beginning of its politics. Agenda setting as an ongoing function involving the persistent reconceptualization of public business, of the very idea of the public. Thick democratic decision-making is based on judgment rather than preference. Our preferences are merely contemplative or speculative until we make them subjects of our wills and transform them into actions. With preferences we ask, “Do you prefer A, B or C?”. With wills we ask “what sort of world do you will our common world to be?

Political Will – Deliberation vs Voting
Liberal representative democrats commonly assume that democracy means democratic choice with voting as the essence of choice. The reduction of democracy to voting implies that a ready-made agenda exists when none has been agreed on. This deliberative process lends itself neither to quantification nor representation. “Majority wins” is a tribute to the failureof democracy: to our inability to create a politics of mutualism that can overcome private interests. A weak and complacent majority can unthinkingly overrule an impassioned and well-argued minority.

III. The Limitations of Thin Democratic “Preferences”
The first liberal  representative to collective decision-making is that there  so many different preferences there would be overload.  Liberal democrats say If we take people’s right to preferences as given it would be impossible to coordinate and rank them all with a finite agenda. But Barber comments that intransitivity is a problem in liberal democracy because it suggests preferences are incommensurable, like individual atoms.

However, Barber says in part the problem is because preferences have been grown and seeded in the dark cellars of isolation. Of course, if you bring these preferences to the light of the agora they will be at first blinded and then disoriented. But once the individual preferences get their bearing, and come to the communal gathering, they will find their place or misplace together with others. Those preferences which are half-baked, immature and pathological will be exposed and those which are inspiring will acquire a following. Discussion enables us to examine the rank orders and the effect of time and place.

Preferences are connected to voting. Voting freezes us into rational dilemmas. Those who believe that democracy is like a Pythagorean puzzle that becomes invalid if it cannot be solved by the theorems of logic and statistics mixed up with problems of numbers and worlds that are unnecessary to confront. Thick participatory citizenship is more than the expression of preferences and the pulling of levers. Voters are equal in the number of votes they cast but may be widely unequal in the intensity of their understanding of an issue. A minority of people who are committed to something intensive are a qualitative minority who can persuade those who feel more moderately or apathetic about a political issue.

Thin democratic voting and preferences obstruct communal talk in two ways:

• Through representation they make it impossible for losers and dissenters to voice their postelection regrets in a public place where it will be heard. As a consequence, disappointed participants are often transformed into voiceless aliens.
• Liberal institutions slight the witness functions of talk in presuming that views should be aired only before the decision is make and such self-expression has no rational function afterwards.

IV. Thin Democracy Lacks Rituals
Lastly, voting has no rituals as accompaniments of celebration. In the United States Barber writes that voting is like going to a public toilet. In his book The Death of Communal Liberty he writes that the Swiss still choose their representative and vote in day-long assemblies in which festive games, theatre and drinking accompany the formal voting process. Founding myths and the rituals associate with them such as Bastille Day in France or August 1^st in Switzerland. Representative political heroes can supplement political talk through the imagination reconstruction of the past in live images.

V. So Where Does Participatory Democracy Apply?

In his book Strong Democracy, Benjamin Barber does not talk about socialism. However participatory democracy is alive and well in the history of workers’ councils during the Paris Commune and the Russian and Spanish revolutions in the first half of the 20th century. It is present in the communal councils in Venezuela in present time as well as in workers’ cooperatives all over the world. Participatory democracy is the natural micro-unit of state socialist societies linking up with mesoregions and macro life of state planning by socialist parties, each influencing and being influenced in a dialectical manner.

Three types of Democracy

Story Line	Representative Democracy	Unitary Democracy	Participatory Democracy
How is the social individual’s relationship conceived ?	Society is a motley multitude – an aggregate Society no more than the sum of its parts	A mystical whole independent of individuals. “A night in which all cows are black”	Society a concrete whole is a product of the collective creativity of individuals
Boundaries are determined by…	Generic, fixed constitution	Fixed geography, climate, language, race	Procedural standard
Relationship between Church and state is…	Separation of church and state	State becomes a church. Civic religion, tribal kinship, national chauvinism – games that brought citizens together frequently, public spectacles
Citizens are conceived of as..	Legal persons	Brothers	Neighbors
Bound together by..	Contract—state has watchdog quality	Blood (as in the clan)	Commonwealth participatory activity
Related to the state  as..	Private citizens tied to state but not to each other	Corporate body	Active participants
By ties that are…	Mechanical	Organic	Dialectical
Civic virtue is..	Accountability (reciprocal control)	Fraternity (reciprocal love and fear)	Civility (reciprocal empathy and respect)
Status of citizenship vs other social roles	Discretionary (one among many roles)	Omnicompetent (Parents can turn their children in as traitors)	Sovereign (the first among equals)
At worst citizens are…	Distrustful, passive, apathetic	Self-abrogation, submissive	Active but argumentative
How is conflict resolved?	Through representative bodies—the executive (realist), legislative (pluralist) and judicial (libertarians)	Community consensus founded with something like Rousseau’s general will or loyalty to a mystical collectivity	A participatory process of ongoing, proximate self-legislation.
Type of Agreement?	Quantitative counting voting	Qualitative discussion (substantive consensus)	Qualitative discussion, common talk, decisions at  work (creative consensus)
Place of ritual?	Consciously discouraging it as superstitions throwback to monarchy while smuggling it in unconsciously	Superstitions use of ritual People getting carried away	Non-superstitious use of ritual Acknowledging history w/o reifying it.
What happens to citizens?	Left alone citizen apathy	Extirpated Citizen totalism	Transformed

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Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.

 

How cultural norms shape childhood development

Duke University

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How do children learn to cooperate with others? A new cross-cultural study suggests that the answer depends less on universal rules and more on the social norms surrounding the child.   

In the study, researchers examined how more than 400 children ages five to 13 from the United States, Canada, Peru, Uganda and the Shuar communities of Ecuador behaved in situations involving fairness, trust, forgiveness and honesty. The team also surveyed children and adults in each community to understand what people believed was the “right” thing to do.  

The results show that while young children across cultures begin with similar, largely self-interested behavior (what maximizes resources for them, individually), their choices diverge over time in ways that reflect local cultural norms.  

“We wanted to try and map the regularities and variation in how cooperation develops, and what it looks like across different cultures, which was the impetus for the cross-cultural developmental angle,” said Dorsa Amir, assistant professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. “We wanted to uncover the roots of human cooperation, which surpass those of all other species in scale and flexibility.” m 

From shared beginnings to cultural pathways  

To look at how children make choices, researchers played a set of four simple games with them, where the children were asked to make choices about sharing resources (in this case, Starbursts), returning favors, forgiving mistakes, and telling the truth, often at a cost to themselves. Together, the games measured how children think about fairness, trust, forgiveness, and honesty in everyday social situations. Across all five societies, younger children tended to prioritize their own interests. But as children entered middle childhood, defined as roughly between ages eight and 13, their behavior increasingly aligned with their community’s values.  

In some societies, children became more likely to reject unfair advantages or share their candy with anonymous others. In Shuar hunter-horticulturalist communities in Amazonian Ecuador, children focused on not wasting resources and getting the most out of what they had, which matched up with how their society functioned. In those areas of Ecuador, where resources are sometimes scarce, it may be more important for people to minimize waste than spread resources out equally.    

“In cross-cultural research, it’s common to measure behavior and then speculate about the causes,” said Amir. “But we wanted to contextualize the work: to actually talk to people in these communities and understand how those choices fit their environment. What we find is that in places like Ecuador, these behaviors aren’t breaking a norm, they are the norm.”  

Importantly, the researchers emphasize that these differences should not be interpreted as some children being more or less “moral” than others. Instead, children appear to be learning what kinds of cooperation make sense in their social world.  

Learning what’s ‘right’, and when to act on it  

To better understand how social norms shape behavior, the research team compared what adults believed others should do with what children actually did when faced with cooperative tasks.  

They found that, in many cases, children’s behavior gradually moved closer to adult norms over time, especially when it came to fairness and trust. However, for some behaviors, such as honesty, children often knew the “right” thing to do before consistently acting on it.  

Forgiveness stood out as an exception. Across all five societies, both children and adults showed strong agreement that accidental mistakes should be forgiven.  

Different strategies for cooperation  

Rather than showing a single, general tendency to cooperate, children in the study followed one of three distinct strategies: maximizing personal gain, cooperating broadly with unknown others, or cooperating selectively depending on the situation.  

The prevalence of these strategies changed with age and differed across societies. In more industrialized societies, children were more likely to cooperate with strangers, perhaps because that was rewarded in their everyday life. But in societies where people rely more on close relationships and resources are scarce, children were more likely to focus on using the resources they have more efficiently. This, researchers said, doesn’t mean one set of children is more or less ‘cooperative’; rather, cooperation itself is culturally constructed and can take many forms.  

Why middle childhood matters  

The findings highlight middle childhood as a critical period for social learning, because that’s when children refine both their behavior and their understanding of how they’re supposed to act in society.  

“Children become increasingly sophisticated at learning and picking up on norms through middle childhood,” said Amir. “In addition to learning the norms around them, they also start to behave more and more in line with those norms, which is sometimes hard to do because it could involve paying a cost.” 

According to researchers, this extended period of learning allows children to fine-tune their behavior to fit the expectations of their community, a process that may be key to human cooperation more broadly.  

Broad implications  

By studying children across a wide range of cultural contexts, the research demonstrates that behaviors observed in U.S. children shouldn’t be treated as the global standard, challenging the frequent and sometimes implicit assumption that findings from Western, industrialized societies apply universally.   

“It’s important to remember there isn’t one single ‘normal developmental pattern’ when it comes to behavior, because whatever we observe is happening within a culture,” said Amir. “There’s no culture-free development. You cannot take culture out of the developmental process.”  

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.adw9995 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Around the world, children’s cooperative behaviors and norms converge toward community-specific norms in middle childhood, Boston College researchers report

Boston College researchers examined four cooperative behaviors—fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, and honesty—in children from Canada, Ecuador, Peru, Uganda, and the United States

Boston College

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image: 

Researcher Dorsa Amir, at the time a post-doctoral research fellow at Boston College, works with a child in Uganda completing a “fairness task” as part of a five-country study of the how cooperation develops in children.

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Credit: Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College

Chestnut Hill, Mass. (2/6/2026) – Children across the globe engage in a constellation of behaviors that support cooperation, an action critical to the survival of the human species, a team of Boston College researchers report today in the journal Science Advances.

The team from Associate Professor of Psychology Katherine McAuliffe’s Cooperation Lab surveyed children in the urban United States, rural Uganda, Canada, and Peru, and the hunter-horticulturalist indigenous Shuar of Ecuador.

The researchers found there are cross-cultural regularities in some aspects of the development of cooperation — namely, that younger children tend to be self-interested, and that as children get older their behavior starts to reflect local norms, according to the report.

The researchers examined the development of four cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, and honesty — in more than 400 children aged 5 to 13 from five societies. They also collected normative judgments from more than 160 peers and nearly 90 adults from each community. 

“Cooperation is crucial to the success of our species,” said McAuliffe. “We were interested in how behaviors related to cooperation—fairness, trustworthiness, honesty, and forgiveness—emerge with age across diverse populations. We found some similarities, such as fairness and trustworthiness behaviors aligning with adult norms over age across societies. And we found some differences, such as variations in the norms themselves.”

The norms themselves contained cross-cultural differences. For instance, adults across cultures have different ideas of what constitutes “fair" behavior.

“There are cross-cultural regularities in some aspects of the development of cooperation — namely, that younger children tend to be self-interested, and that as children get older their behavior starts to reflect the norms of their broader society,” said co-author Dorsa Amir, a former post-doctoral researcher in McAuliffe’s lab and now an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience and Duke University.

“We find cross-cultural differences in the norms themselves,” Amir said. For instance, adults across cultures have different ideas of what constitutes ‘fair’ behavior. Our study shows that children seem to be sensitive to those specific differences and tend to bring their behavior in line with them over time.”

The team worked with 5- to 13-year-old children and adults in Canada, Ecuador, Peru, Uganda, and the U.S. They designed four different child-friendly activities to measure fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, and honesty. For example, in the fairness activity, children used an intuitive wooden apparatus to make decisions about whether to accept or reject uneven divisions of candies between themselves and a peer.  

The research found substantial variation in cooperative behaviors and norms across populations, but, more generally, that children’s behaviors and norms tend to converge toward community-specific norms in middle childhood. 

The team also identified three cooperative strategies – maximization, generic cooperation, and partner-contingent cooperation – that become more prevalent with age and differ across societies. All told, the findings show how the differences and similarities present as cooperative behavior develops within and across cultures.

McAuliffe said the study, undertaken with funding from the John Templeton Foundation, built on previous work that had looked at children’s sharing and fairness behavior across societies to understand a broader suite of cooperative behaviors.

“By including a ‘cooperative task battery’ we were in a good position to explore how cooperative behaviors relate to one another,” said McAuliffe, referring to the collection of activities and tasks they administered during their sessions with participants in the study.

McAuliffe said the researchers were most surprised by the findings about the role of forgiveness.

“Our lab has done a lot of work on punishment behavior, finding punishment to be a common response to transgressions across societies,” she said. “Yet, here, both adults and children seemed to endorse forgiveness over punishment. It’s possible that, in past work, we have overestimated how much people want punishment because we haven’t given them alternative options such as forgiveness.”

McAuliffe and her team are working on a follow-up report from four of these same countries that looks at the mechanisms of norm transmission. 

“Specifically, we are comparing the influence of adult and peer models in influencing children’s fairness and trustworthiness behavior,” she said. “This is an important extension of the current work because it goes beyond showing that children vary in their cooperative behavior and looks at how that variation may come about.”

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Researcher Gorana González, at the time the coordinator of the Cooperation Lab at Boston College, works with a child in Uganda completing a “fairness task” as part of a five-country study of how cooperation develops in children.

Credit

Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.adw9995 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

The emergence of cooperative behaviors, norms, and strategies across five diverse societies

Article Publication Date

6-Feb-2026