The Study On Pateman's Participatory Democracy Theory

In the process of the democracy theory growth,different theories factions have emerged such as pure democracy,representative democracy,elite democracy,participation democracy,and deliberative democracy.The fraction is either the orientation of republicanism,like pure democracy and participation democracy or the orientation of liberalism,like elite democracy and pluralistic democracy.When looking back over how democracy has evolved,we could find the two sects go along with each other while they have been struggling and criticizing each other.Representative democracy is the bone of contention as it triggers a sequence of polemics about public participation.From Aristotle,Rousseau through Tocqueville to Mill,all of these theorists have been trying to seek a balance between representative democracy and elite democracy.But it's difficult to achieve as one will rise to fight if the other has an upper hand.In this connection,the dominancy of representative democracy since modern times is largely thanks to incessant doubts and criticizes from the republican democratic theorists.Carole Pateman,as a fantastic political thinker,when she identified many problems exposed in the practice and development of elite democracy properly.The theory is rather a criticism than a substitute for representative democracy.The publication of Participation and Democracy Theory by Carole Pateman in 1970 has brought about a widespread attention from the western academic field.It's a basic work for participatory democracy theory.In this book,Pateman,through reflections of Shumpeter,Dahl,Sartori's view of public participation proposed that contemporary elite democracy wasn't a full democracy,thinking it only depicted the operational logic.Instead,she believes democracy theory must be regulatory and have its requirements and tendency.Meanwhile,Pateman points out that the real democracy is that all the citizenry have the opportunity to participate in the public affairs deciding which ranges from policy designation to it execution.Only in this atmosphere can the fundamental values such as duties,tolerance and individual freedom be achieved.The paper dedicates four parts to studying Pateman's participatory democracy theory.The first part is about the proposition of it.The second part covers the contents.The third part contains its problems and values and the last part is about the difficulties in this study.