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Direct Parliamentarianism: an Analysis of the Political Values Embedded in Rousseau, the ‘Operating System’ of the Five Star Movement

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Direct Parliamentarianism: an Analysis of the Political Values Embedded in Rousseau, the ‘Operating System’ of the Five Star Movement JeDEM 9(2): 47-67, 2017 ISSN 2075-9517 http://www.jedem.org Direct Parliamentarianism: An Analysis of the Political Values Embedded in Rousseau, the ‘Operating System’ of the Five Star Movement Marco Deseriis Marie Curie Fellow, Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, Firenze, Italy, [email protected] Abstract: This article focuses on the technological affordances and use of Rousseau, the decision-making platform of the second largest Italian political party, the Five Star Movement. Crossing an empirical observation of the platform’s functionalities with data regarding its use and qualitative data collected during the 2016 and 2017 national meetings of the Five Star Movement, the essay argues that Rousseau supports an emerging “direct parliamentarianism,” which allows party members to entertain an ostensibly direct relationship with the party in public office, at the expense, however, of deliberative processes that may allow them to influence the party agenda. Thus Rousseau leaves the deliberative, and strictly parliamentary moment in the hands of elected representatives and party leaders, leaving to the party base the task of choosing between options that have been defined elsewhere. Keywords: Five Star Movement; Rousseau; decision-making platform; direct democracy; direct parliamentarianism; crowdsourced lawmaking. Acknowledgment: Research for this article was funded by a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship grant under the Horizon 2020 program of the European Commission (H2020-MSCA-IF-2015 grant agreement no. 7101513). The author would like to thank Lorenzo Mosca for his useful comments. 1. Introduction With over 140,000 registered users as of August 2017 (Casaleggio 2017), Rousseau is one of the world’s largest online platforms for political participation and collaborative law-making.1 Owned 1Rousseau can be accessed at https://rousseau.movimento5stelle.it. As of October 30, 2017, participa.podemos.info, the online platform of the Spanish party Podemos, declares over 487,000 registered users. The portal, however, embeds less functionalities than Rousseau, especially in the area of collaborative or crowdsourced law-making. 47 CC: Creative Commons License, 2017. JeDEM 9(2): 47-67, 2017 Deseriis Marco and developed by the Five Star Movement (5SM), the second largest Italian political party, Rousseau allows its users to select candidates via online primaries, vote the party program, provide feedback to elected representatives on draft legislation, publicize local events, and submit their own legislative proposals to Members of Parliament. Further the platform allows 5SM city councillors and regional councillors to take online courses on the regulatory frameworks of local authorities and exchange administrative acts with other councillors across the nation. In this article I am going to argue that the integration of these functionalities within the same platform embodies a particular model of political participation and democracy. At a first sight, such model reflects the programmatic statements of the 5SM co-founders Beppe Grillo and Gianroberto Casaleggio. As we will see, the 5SM founders frame the participation of citizens to institutional decision making via the Internet as a modern form of direct democracy and a positive check on the autonomy of elected representatives. At a closer look, however, the platform combines direct democracy measures with consultation procedures typical of representative democracy. My wager is that this combination produces an emerging form of direct parliamentarianism, that is, a hybrid institutional arrangement wherein the direct participation of citizens to policy making does not reduce the autonomy of elected representatives, but on the contrary reinforces it and legitimizes it. To support this argument, I will contrast the founders’ programmatic statements to three kinds of data: an empirical analysis of Rousseau’s affordances; quantitative data regarding the use of Rousseau; and qualitative data I have personally collected through fieldwork at two national meetings of the 5SM in Palermo in 2016 and in Rimini in 2017. The affordance analysis begins from the notion that, far from being technologically neutral, the design of any participation platform is inflected with certain political values, that is, a specific conception of democracy and of political representation. In this case, the frequent recourse to voting and the lack of in-platform discussion tools suggests that Rousseau privileges preference aggregation over processes of opinion formation, decision-making over deliberation. During their presentations of the platform in Palermo and Rimini, the MPs who oversee the lawmaking areas of Rousseau confirmed that the platform has been designed to allow members to make decisions rather than for extended intra-party conversations.2 Yet data concerning platform usage show that voter turnout and the volume of member feedback on draft legislation have been steadily declining since 2014, and this in spite of the growth of the user base. As we will see, the only area in which participation has not been declining is Lex Members, which allows Rousseau’s registered users to submit their own ideas for a bill of law. Finally, whereas the party leadership presents Rousseau as a pioneering experiment in direct democracy, the party in public office does 2 In these two circumstances, I was able to ask questions to the representatives as a member of the public. In Rimini I also distributed a questionnaire on Rousseau to platform users. This gave me the opportunity to strike informal conversations with several party activists and to glean additional insights on platform usage. Some of these insights are discussed in this article. Others will be discussed in a subsequent article, where I will also analyse the questionnaire data. 48 CC: Creative Commons License, 2017. JeDEM 9(2): 47-67, 2017 Deseriis Marco not seem to have allocated sufficient resources to screen the proposals uploaded in Lex Members and to respond consistently to the members’ comments in the consultative areas of the platform. In this respect, the analysis of the platform affordances and of its usage patterns cannot be decoupled from an analysis of the organizational practices that are meant to support user participation. Before analyzing these data more in detail, I will briefly recapitulate the history of the 5SM and link its networked organizational structure to the co-founders’ vision of a politics without traditional parties and intermediaries. 2. Brief History of the 5SM With 25.5% of the vote and 163 elected MPs at the general elections of 2013, the Five Star Movement is the second largest Italian political party. After the expulsion of several deputies and senators, due to a series of internal conflictes in the early phase of the legislature, the 5SM still controls 130 MPs. These are part of a wider contingent of 2.200 representatives elected on various levels of the public administration, including 15 Members of the European Parliament and 36 majors, among which the mayors of Rome and Turin (Casaleggio 2017). In 2017, the 5SM has been steadily polling between 25% and 30%, slightly ahead of the ruling Democratic Party, and is well positioned to be the first party at the general elections of 2018. Although winning the relative majority may not be sufficient for the 5SM to form a government, political analysts agree that the Movement can no longer be considered as a protest party insofar as it has been able to exploit its “purely populist” rejection of the Left-Right divide (Tarchi 2015) and “ideological flexibility” (Manucci and Amsler 2017) to stably occupy the center of the Italian political spectrum. Indeed since its foundation in 2009, the 5SM has undergone a slow but continuous process of institutionalization (Bordignon and Ceccarini 2015; Tronconi 2016), which appears to be in tension with the virulent anti-establishment rhetoric of his co-founder and charismatic leader Beppe Grillo. In many ways, Grillo’s own biography epitomizes the widespread distrust, if not hatred, Italians harbor towards the political class—as demonstrated by the stunning success of the book La Casta, an investigation into the lavish lifestyle and corrupt practices of Italian politicians (Rizzo and Stella 2007). Once a popular TV comedian, Grillo was banned from public television in 1986, after he satirized the then ruling Socialist Party (PSI) on a prime-time TV show, accusing his leaders of corruption (Scanzi 2008). After the ban—which was directly ordered by the PSI Prime Minister Bettino Craxi—Grillo began touring Italy with a series of theater shows. The 1992 corruption scandal known as Bribeville (Tangentopoli), which saw the PSI at the center of a vast and institutionalized system of briberies, proved to many the prophetic character of Grillo’s satire. In 2005 Grillo launched the blog beppegrillo.it, which quickly became one of the most visited and influential blogs in the world (Mello 2013). Capitalizing on the blog’s mass following Grillo launched his first political initiatives. These included Clean Parliament (a petition to remove from Parliament the MPs who are convicted of a crime by a final judgment) and the V-Days of 2007 and 2008, two massive rallies held in Bologna and Turin, respectively, against the corruption of the political class and of the Italian media system (Oggiano 2012: 94-119). 49 CC: Creative Commons License, 2017. JeDEM 9(2): 47-67, 2017 Deseriis Marco Because the blog was an inadequate tool for organizational purposes, Gianroberto Casaleggio— Grillo’s blog administrator, and CEO of the Web marketing company Casaleggio Associati— launched in July 2005 the first Meetup group “Friends of Beppe Grillo” in Milan. In the following months, dozens of Meetup groups mushroomed all over the country. In 2009, taking inspiration from Howard Dean’s use of Meetup as the grassroots backbone of his campaign for the primaries of the U.S. Democratic Party, Casaleggio thought of mobilizing the Italian Meetups to support Grillo’s bid to national secretary of the Italian Democratic Party (PD)—a party that had been founded in 2007 to unify the centre-left.
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