The dichotomy between Representative Democracy and Participatory Democracy and Education in Brazil

Abstract

The text that follows is based on a combination of a literature review about the representative democracy and the participatory democracy and a theoretical essay with some critical opinion about the crisis of democracies, mainly in Brazil, and an alternative that, in case of not guaranteeing the solution, at least puts us on the same track of the most socially and humanly developed countries – the education. The dichotomy between representative democracy and participatory democracy, based on what is meant by democratic decentralization from the perspective against hegemonic is questioned here, since from the conceptual point of view of democracy, this dichotomy consists of a redundancy, as any representative democracy is also participatory. Therefore, the analysis that should be done should not revolve around the proportion of one and the other in the search of the ideal democracy model, but in the analysis of the quality and the commitment of people's participation in the representative democracy, where education, which is an important factor in representative democracies that really represent the electorate because there is there is an electoral participation with quality and political commitment, is seen as the difference between a society with social justice and quality of life and another with generalized poverty and enormous concentrations of income. The comparison between investments in education and human development rates show that educated people are, at least, democratically fulfilled.