(New) Municipalism

Introduction

According to the world values survey, 85.3% of the people in the world think that living in a democracy is important. At the same time, 57.2% of the people do not trust parliaments (Inglehart et al. 2014). One interpretation of these numbers that scholars have been developing for quite some time is that people value democracy, but just not the kind of representative democracy that they have. In addition, political parties from the extreme right are gaining support in many countries, offering simple and quick answers to people’s fears and disenchantment with traditional representative politics.

In the face of these circumstances, so-called new municipalism or the municipalism of the Fearless Cities movement (see the municipalist map at www.fearlesscities.com) appears as a new political phenomenon that aims at responding to the different challenges posed by the current political context. The main examples can be found in Spanish cities such as Barcelona, Madrid, Zaragoza,...