A Normative Conceptual Perspective of Citizen Participation and Democracy in Venezuela

The conceptual approach to citizen participation and democracy in Venezuela taken in this article is extracted from the national Constitution of 1999, linking what is normative to the epistemic construction of the participatory process, with which other key concepts such as citizenship and state, are necessarily associated. The methodology that facilitates this anchoring is located in the multidisciplinary, construction of discourse analysis in the social sciences, mentioning the semantics of Pottier (1992) and the semantic-pragmatic discourse analysis of Molero (1999, 2003, 2007), Conclusion: participatory democracy is the conceptual network that explicitly underlies what ought to be according to the constitution, but in practice, its contextualization varies according to the interests of the established political status quo.