The Effectivity of Social Rights and the Right to Participation

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.