Political Participation vs. Egotopy: The constitutional approach as a response to ideological conceptions of human rights

Abstract

The present essay proposes that political participation can be understood as a constitutional right composed of principles and rules. To explore this idea in the combative context of recent political experience in Latin American countries, including Brazil, it is necessary to understand how Constitutional Law is to be differentiated from ideologies, particularly because these have impregnated several spaces – including the interpretation of fundamental human rights. In order to achieve this objective, we first show the elementary construction of law as the regulation of individual interests, illustrating how it is composed of principles and rules. We then present the connection between political participation and ideologies, starting from the separation of the former from the latter in strong and weak senses. Finally, we propose a mechanism to separate political participation from ideological conceptions in favor of a constitutional approach, in which political participation is presented as being based on non-“egotopy”; we argue that, while the people is the basis of the Constitution, they must demand the regulatory framework that arises from its text.