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Contestatory democracy entails a model for citizen participation that carries limited political potential to guarantee and promote non-domination as a communal value. This paper argues that the actual problem does not lie in institutional design but in the tensions between this model of democracy and the notion of freedom attempting to normatively guide such notion. Freedom as non-domination is a type of negative freedom. As such, it is indifferent to the subject's goals, it does not allow for justifying motivations beyond individual's interest. Due to this, disputation turns out to be a control mechanism that fails to achieve its main goal in public sphere decision-making: defending freedom in a republican sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues about the qualities of the mechanisms of participative democracy as a way to solve the problems of political representation that are currently lived. It takes into account the experience of Latin American countries that have recently established in their laws figures such as the referendum, plebiscite or citizen legislative initiative, while noting the nomination of citizens without party or the revocation of the mandate. By overcoming an elitist vision of politics and an electoral conception of democracy, these mechanisms can foster participation, deliberation, transparency, accountability and, in essence, the direct intervention of the subject in decision-making, without disrupting bases of the form of democratic government in force in most Latin American countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multidimensional concept of the right to the city involves a pursuit of community and participatory urban experience. This perspective is evident in the theoretical frame but complex in its applicability and translation into concrete facts of everyday life of men and women who live, work and circulate in Latin American cities. This paper aims to make a combination between theory and practice through a case study in a middle range city in the Andean North-Patagonia - Argentina. Strategies as regards participatory patterns, relationships and tensions between local scales (municipality) and neighborhood (neighborhood councils) are been analyzed. Even with its flaws, incipiently, these associations tend to improve the right to the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to cinsider the migrant struggles as a new field in sociology that ponders over the collective action. This work is an exercise that focuses on struggles led by migrants with or without legal documents. Thus, this emerging social movement can be deciphered. Also, the main actors, practices and normative or political projects of these struggles, as well as the exact role they play on the map of current dissent, are analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 2014 electoral process of Quebec, migrants were central actors. The dominant identitarian-populist faction had targeted its attacks on migrants, particularly Muslims, and presented them as a threat for society since their religions and traditions were dangerous to the Quebec's secular state --inspired on the "French model"--. The 2014 election evinced a new role of migrants, traditionally marginalized in both the political and public arena. Academics and citizens mobilized to stand against the dominant populist media and the powerful official discourse. Besides, the high rate of participation among migrants determined the defeat of the separatist party. This paper is a documentary media research as well as a testimony, as a migrant myself, about the electoral campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper debates the traditional notions of political transnationalism used in the United States by showing the formation and the activist process followed by the #YoSoy132 movement in New York City. The conclusion drawn is that immigrants organizations in the US have diversified their acting repertories, political perspective and their demands. Therefore, it is necessary to broaden the concept of political transnationalism to a social-political perspective. The latter will allow having a wider theoretical notion to analyze a larger number of immigrants organizations in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper proposes to examine the relationship between citizenship and social rights, which some authors call social citizenship. Some objections made to social rights are reviewed; the dependency on social rights relating to citizenship is discussed and questioned, and it is assumed that they should be recognized as belonging to any person regardless of having citizenship or not. [TRANSLATION]

In today's democracies there is a reconfiguration in the public sphere relations that involves a change in the places of the old political actors while opening up a set of new ones. Therefore political parties have begun to share the citizenship's representation and the demands channeling with a series of new actors that have grown up in the political field. However, there is no answer about the current role of the political parties as well as the new political actors in democracy. For these reasons, this paper analyses the relation between citizens and political system in the new democratic context by making a theoretical approach that is supported with two public opinion surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]