The Effectivity of Social Rights and the Right to Participation

Abstract

The article deals with the role attributed to participation
tools in Italy, in order to evaluate past experience and how
much still needs to be done to give shape to the right to participation.
The effectivity of rights has crucial importance in contemporary
pluralist constitutional systems: the lack of effectivity
regarding all rights, and of social rights in particular, can undermine
the legal nature of those very rights. The complexity of
policy concerning social rights has helped to spread the idea that
only public authorities are in a position to protect social rights:
the content of social rights, therefore, would be subordinated to
the organizational structure. In this way, problems of inclusion
are not resolved and many difficulties continue to persist before
reaching integration and the combination of interests of the various
components of civil society. Western democracies have seen
the affirmation and predominance of representative democracy;
however, political parties and unions have not been able to carry
out their tasks and, as a result, participation itself has been compromised.
In order to avoid this situation, the definition of objectives
and goals should be made through knowledge gained and
comparison in order to draft more feasible rules and approximate
them to the requirements of the society at large and its real
needs. The decision-making process by public authorities should
be open to contributions from civil society. The cultural resistance
which still conceives only the institutions of representative
democracy as the essence of democracy needs to be overcome:
without the right to participation, the individual cannot be
part of a community because participation is the assumption of
rights, i.e. the right to have rights.