Between Deliberation and Interpretation: Social Movements’ Democratic Rationalities in Legal Discourse

Abstract

Scholarship on democratization often reduces social movements’ legal engagement to deliberative rationality, obscuring how transformation operates through distinct yet complementary procedural logics. This article argues that movements democratize law through dual-track engagement: Political deliberation universalizes moral demands via communicative rationality, whereas legal interpretation determines indeterminate norms through self-reflective juridical reasoning. These processes generate rights through formal procedures that transform constitutional meanings irreducible to deliberative consensus alone. Democratic legitimacy thus derives not from institutional success but from juridification—maintaining three conditions that enable complementary navigation: communicative translation preserving deliberative genesis throughout legal formalization; functional differentiation sustaining both rationalities’ autonomous character; and identity preservation preventing organizational absorption into system logic. Chile's student movement (2011–2022) validates this framework through paradigmatic contrast: The same actors successfully constitutionalized education as a social right (2011–2016) when navigating dual rationalities as an organized movement yet failed catastrophically in constitutionalizing comprehensive social rights (2019–2022) despite wielding maximum institutional power—holding the presidency, ministries, and the Constitutional Convention. Progressive institutionalization colonized operational capacity, transforming navigational practices through instrumental rationality that supplanted communicative foundations. Citizens rejected the resulting progressive constitution by 62%, despite its substantive embodiment of the movement's historical demands. This analysis advances democratic theory by operationalizing the conditions distinguishing juridification from colonization, revealing that movements’ transformative capacity depends not on institutional access or progressive ambitions, but on specific organizational configurations that preserve communicative rationality through complementary procedures.