“…Although the minimalist/institutionalist approach has been widely acknowledged as the contemporary mainstream view on democracy (GAMA NETO, 2011;PERES, 2008), it has been challenged by the growing crises of democracy around the globe, which are mostly institutional crises of representative democracy (MOISÉS, 2019;MOISÉS and WEFFORT, 2020;NOGUEIRA, 2014). As expected, the participatory approach inspires many of the proposals to save democracy, such as open democracy (LANDEMORE, 2020), local democracy (MORAES and DANTAS, 2021), and organizational democracy (BARRETT, 2017), all of them deeply connected to the original participatory claims arguing that, for democracy to function well in its higher lev el (nations or states, for instance), it must first be fostered in its lower levels (cities, neighborhoods, industries, organizations, among others), where individuals can develop the qualities required to be proper citizens (PATEMAN, 1992).…”