Markus Holdo’s Participatory Spaces Under Urban Capitalism examines how citizens engage with and leverage power through participatory institutions in capitalist societies. The book is meticulously researched and elegantly argued, writes Adrian Bua, though he contends that it could have benefitted from a stronger grounding in relational sociology over rationalist perspectives.
Markus Holdo’s Participatory Spaces under Urban Capitalism concerns the relationship between participatory institutions and power in capitalist societies. Institutions like participatory budgets or citizen assemblies are often seen to function as shallow legitimising devices, but Holdo argues that it is precisely the need for legitimacy, a currency that only citizens can provide, that can grant participants some leverage to negotiate the terms of their participation and extract concessions.
Central to the book is the distinction between co-optation, understood as absorption of civil society actors into the state and consequent loss of autonomy, and the conditional cooperation that maintains civil society independence and can foster democratising dynamics. In order to tease this out the book draws on empirical evidence from Participatory Budgeting (PB) in Rosario, Argentina, as well as a range of evidence from other cases, from the US Civil Rights movement to political party Podemos in Spain. In doing so, the book inventively combines theoretical perspectives that often speak past each other, critical political economy meets democratic theory and relational sociology meets rationalistic political science.
Participation can support democratisation when it contributes to aligning elite and citizen interests.
The book is composed of six chapters and a methodological appendix. Chapter one sets up the puzzle: participatory governance is both seen as a force for democratic change and an elite legitimising device. The chapter argues for a relational perspective that views participation as a social practice embedded within power-laden fields, while also introducing a rationalistic and strategic view of agency to test whether participation retains democratic potential even under cynical assumptions regarding human motivation.
A dual theoretical orientation that underpins the book as a whole begins to become apparent: relational in its understanding of agents’ interactions with social fields, and rationalist in its analysis of elite-citizen interactions. While it is clear that Holdo has a stronger commitment to the former, the latter is important in order to convince “even the most hardcore … realists” (5) of his arguments.
Chapter two explores how structure shapes participation, arguing that neoliberal constraints generate needs for new forms of legitimation. Holdo deploys his “relational-rational” lens to show how, within such spaces, participation can support democratisation when it contributes to aligning elite and citizen interests. The stage is set for subsequent chapters focussing on different aspects of interactions between elites and citizens.
Holdo argues that commitment to community and representation of neighbours’ interests are generative of a form of symbolic capital within participatory fields.
Chapter three confronts concerns of co-optation. It proposes the concept of “conditional cooperation”, a rational strategy in positive-sum contexts where elites respect and nurture the autonomy of citizens in order to extract stronger legitimacy. Situated between suppression, co-optation and concession, which are rational in zero-sum contexts, conditional co-operation explains how participation enhances legitimacy by preserving the capacity for dissent.
Chapter four hones on subaltern motivations. Holdo argues that commitment to community and representation of neighbours’ interests are generative of a form of symbolic capital within participatory fields. The recognition and respect derived from this motivates citizens to guard against co-optation, by creatively balancing submission and subversion when negotiating with state actors.
Chapter five, explains how this “deliberative capital” was leveraged by participants in his case study of Rosario, arguing that influence depended on maintaining autonomy while cooperating with government. Linking the generation of legitimacy to interdependence between elites and citizens, Holdo critiques accounts that conflate contention with non-co-optation, instead highlighting the conditions that make the kinds of civil society autonomy necessary for contention rationally and strategically valuable to both parties.
Overall, Holdo presents a compelling and elegant account of how participatory processes can create social spaces which nurture new forms of capital that can feed into democratisation.
The final chapter ties the different threads together, theorising participation as a process of “boundary negotiation” and showing how participants use their symbolic capital, and the legitimacy it can provide to elites, to generate responsiveness. Participation is recast not as empowering or co-optative but as an ongoing site of renegotiation.
There is much to like in this book. It successfully accounts for constraints whilst avoiding a structuralist dead hand, is perceptively attuned both to the complexity of power relations and the subtle forms of creativity employed by agents. Overall, Holdo presents a compelling and elegant account of how participatory processes can create social spaces which nurture new forms of capital that can feed into democratisation.
There are, however, some issues, rooted in the combination of relational sociology and rationalistic political science. In the Bourdieuisian relational sociology that Holdo draws upon, “strategy” (or, perhaps more accurately, “practice”) emphasises the pre-reflective internalisation of social structure through habitus, sitting uncomfortably alongside assumptions regarding utility maximisation by rational agents made in rational choice approaches. The dispositions generated by habitus are ”strategic” in the sense of an unconscious adjustment of subjective goals to the chances of their realisation, which is objectively determined by social structure, rather than in the sense of rational calculation.
Holdo is led by rational choice to understand co-optation as a way to neutralise dissent by absorbing opponents, especially their leaders, into power structures. However, from a relational sociology perspective, the boundaries between conditional cooperation and co-optation are arguably blurrier. Individuals can be, in effect, more subtly co-opted by accepting the rules of a field and internalising its values, such as by internalising certain notions of what is, or not, legitimate. For example, it often happens in institutionalised forms of participation that protest is frowned upon for being unconstructive, something hinted at by two of Holdo’s interviewees in Rosario (74).
The rationalist perspective leads Holdo to argue that co-optation makes sense in zero-sum contexts, but co-optation can occur, and even be more effective, when participants gain something, such as social status or even material concessions, especially if those gains leave the basic structure of institutions unchanged. In essence, this raises questions about whether “conditional cooperation” escapes co-option or reconfigures it in more subtle ways, as in a Gramscian “passive revolution”.
The book bears important lessons and insights for political scientists, sociologists and urbanists interested in participatory democracy
To be sure, this is, in part, a definitional debate, and Holdo accepts within the book that the boundaries between conditional co-operation and co-optation are blurry and a matter of degree. Nevertheless, the analysis remains influenced by the (too) sharp distinction between these, rooted in rational choice theory. In the end, the rationalist perspective takes on a stronger role than Holdo’s justification for it in chapter one as an extreme case test of participations’ democratic potential. In my opinion, a deeper grounding in relational sociology would have been preferable, especially in investigating the grey areas between conditional cooperation and co-optation.
However, this does not detract from the overall merit of the work, which is meticulously researched, elegantly argued and advances theories of participatory and deliberative democracy in important ways. The book bears important lessons and insights for political scientists, sociologists and urbanists interested in participatory democracy. While empirically grounded in Latin America, the book discusses and engages with a range of cases from the Global North, and its insights speak to contemporary debates about the limits and possibilities of citizen engagement in the context of capitalist poly-crisis and democratic decline.
- This review first appeared at LSE Review of Books.
- Featured image: Lennon Ying-Da Wang on Flickr. License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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- Note: This article gives the views of the reviewer, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.
