Deliberation and intra-party trade-offs in Barcelona en Comú

This article examines the institutionalization of democratic innovations within movement-parties by analyzing the longitudinal case of Barcelona en Comú (BComú), a party that emerged from Spain’s 15M movement and governed the city of Barcelona for two consecutive terms. While much scholarship suggests that participatory and deliberative structures inevitably erode under institutional pressures, this study argues that the trajectory of democratic innovation is more contingent and actor-driven. Drawing on fifteen in-depth interviews with mid-level party staff, complemented by internal documents and public materials, the article investigates how BComú navigated the tensions and trade-offs between participation, deliberation, and representation. Findings reveal that while BComú experienced the pull towards centralization, along with cadre depletion, and declining grassroots participation, it maintained reflexive organizational practices that slowed oligarchical drift and enabled periodic recalibration to reconstitute organizational legitimacy. The article argues that the durability of democratic innovations depends less on their initial adoption than on the party’s capacity to embed them procedurally and culturally across multiple organizational layers.