Putting the Public Back into Governance: The Challenges of Citizen Participation and Its Future

Abstract

The past two decades have seen a proliferation of large‐ and small‐scale experiments in participatory governance. This article takes stock of claims about the potential of citizen participation to advance three values of democratic governance: effectiveness, legitimacy, and social justice. Increasing constraints on the public sector in many societies, combined with increasing demand for individual engagement and the affordances of digital technology, have paved the way for participatory innovations aimed at effective governance. Deepening legitimation deficits of representative government create opportunities for legitimacy‐enhancing forms of citizen participation, but so far, the effect of participation on legitimacy is unclear. Efforts to increase social justice through citizen participation face the greatest obstacles. The article concludes by highlighting three challenges to creating successful participatory governance: the absence of systematic leadership, the lack of popular or elite consensus on the place of direct citizen participation, and the limited scope and powers of participatory innovations.

Democracy Without Participation: A New Politics for a Disengaged Era

“…Mini-publics are most often defended for their epistemic benefits: supporters have argued that small groups of individuals afforded the right support and information in controlled circumstances can reach informed and helpful conclusions which, if fed into democratic debates, can enrich democratic decision-making and improve governance (Fung 2015;Fishkin 2009;Goodin 2012). But mini-publics can also facilitate the inclusion of citizens' voices in ways more appropriate for the contemporary democratic age than rich forms of citizen participation and deliberation.…”

“…They have also seen a growing concern among many political philosophers about the state of democracy, and the need to establish a more deliberative model of democracy in place of conventional aggregative majoritarianism (Benhabib 1996;Cohen 2009;Dryzek 2012;Fung 2015;Gutmann and Thompson 2004;Mansbridge et al 2012). These two literatures are at once complementary and in tension.…”

“…Theories of deliberative democracy require that individuals possess the opportunity to participate in appropriate forms of deliberation with others and that they take up this opportunity (Parvin 2015). This is a demanding requirement which has led to a split in the literature characterised by Simone Chambers (2009) as being between supporters of deliberative democracy, who argue for a thoroughgoing and holistic conception of deliberative democracy as a system which operates at all levels of citizens' lives, from explicitly political participation through to 'everyday talk' (Mansbridge et al 2012;Cohen 2009), and democratic deliberation, who focus less on establishing deliberative democracy as an alternative to traditional representative democracy, and more on the incorporation of more deliberation into traditionally conceived representative democratic systems through the use of mini-publics (Fishkin 2009;Fung 2015). While support for democratic deliberation is growing, support for deliberative democracy among political theorists remains strong.…”

From Competition and Collusion to Consent-Based Collaboration: A Case Study of Local Democracy

“…In this respect, distrust in public institutions and a growing sense of powerlessness among citizens appear to reflect a deficient democratic governance system (Ansell, 2011) that tends to generate substantial gaps between winners and losers (Dahlberg & Linde, 2016). The deficiencies of democratic governance have been attributed to a lack of systematic leadership and participatory governance as well as the limited scope and powers of participatory innovations (e.g., Ansell, 2011;Fung, 2015) Despite the fact that decreasing levels of trust in public institutions tend to reduce the political legitimacy and stability of these institutions, the vast majority of political scientists attempts to describe and explain these phenomena, rather than engaging in actual experiments and efforts to change the (conditions of the) system itself. Several scholars have been advocating a fundamental rethink of the apolitical character of much research in the area of political science and public governance (e.g., Gunnell, 2004;Ricci, 1984;Schram, Flyvbjerg, & Landman, 2013).…”

The Ethics of Political Participation: Engagement and Democracy in the 21st Century

“…Habermas 1997;Young 2002;Dryzek 2012), while others have advocated limited opportunities for deliberation, perhaps constrained to minipublics, citizens juries, or other deliberative fora (e.g. Fishkin 1991;Fung 2015;Lafont 2014). Others have eschewed the deliberative route, for other approaches more focused on ideas of radical contestation (Laclau and Mouffe 1985;Bevir 2010), or representation (Runciman 2014).…”