Lessons From Democratic Innovations

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-107
Author(s):  
Graham Smith
Keyword(s):  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Participatory Budgeting ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Study Circles ◽  
Participatory Processes ◽  
Town Meetings

Democratic innovations, variously described as ‘empowered participation’ or ‘civic innovation’, are designed to increase and deepen citizen participation in the decisions that affect them directly. This chapter reviews current understanding of participatory processes such as citizens’ assemblies, citizens’ juries, deliberative polling, participatory budgeting, study circles, town meetings, and online dialogues; and considers their impact along with an analysis of the implications of different participatory designs on democratic qualities and policy outcomes. One of the limitations of the burgeoning literature on democratic innovations is the tendency to focus on exemplary cases, which often underplays the variety of conditions that need to be in place for the success of these forms of public engagement. Close attention is given to the different approaches taken with participatory budgeting and randomly selected mini-publics in diverse contexts, to illustrate both the substantial potential of democratic innovations to improve democratic politics and their vulnerabilities to misapplication.

scholarly journals Enabling Multichannel Participation Through ICT Adaptation

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kawaljeet Kaur Kapoor ◽  
Amizan Omar ◽  
Uthayasankar Sivarajah
Keyword(s):  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Participatory Budgeting ◽  
Participatory Processes ◽  
Online Deliberation ◽  
Ict Tools ◽  
The Many

Online deliberation invests significant sums in priorities co-decided by inhabitants, and is mostly relegated to small and non-influential experiments. There is a gap between ICT solutions and participatory initiatives. E-participation is a broad, undefined space of opportunities that needs to be operationalized to prove if the many theoretical exercises emphasizing on the potential of ICT in increasing deliberative quality of participatory processes and security, are realistic or not. The EMPATIA platform seeks to radically enhance inclusiveness and impact of participatory budgeting processes in increasing multichannel citizen participation by designing, evaluating and making publicly available an advanced ICT platform for participatory budgeting. EMPATIA takes advantage of the fact that it surrounds an established and widespread social practice with clear and adaptable principles recognized worldwide, alongside a community of practitioners and researchers, and ICT tools, which only need to be adapted, refined and integrated into an adequate PB platform.

scholarly journals Differentiating Participation: Identifying and Defining Civic Capacities Used by Latino Immigrants in Participatory Budgeting

2021 ◽  
pp. 153568412199347
Author(s):  
José W. Meléndez ◽  
Maria Martinez-Cosio
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Participatory Planning ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Participatory Budgeting ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Civic Skills ◽  
Budgeting Process

Participatory planning has faced challenges engaging predominantly Spanish-speaking immigrants beyond the bottom rungs of Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation. Participating at any level of the ladder requires individual civic skills, or capacities, that are integral to participatory processes. However, the specific skills necessary for collective action are less certain, due in part to a lack of clear definitions and a lack of clarity about how these capacities work in practice. Drawing on two years of data from a participatory budgeting process in an immigrant community in Chicago, Illinois, the authors identify key civic capacities that Spanish-speaking immigrants activated while engaging in civic discourse, and they explore the role these capacities played in moving ideas toward collective decision making. The authors present an organizational schema that aligns the study’s findings of 17 unique civic capacities with capacities identified in the literature as helping participants engage more meaningfully in decision-making processes.

scholarly journals Elections and local government performance in Brazil

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (83) ◽  
pp. 580-599
Author(s):  
Pedro Luiz Costa Cavalcante
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Electoral Competition ◽  
Institutional Arrangement ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Government Performance ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
National Analysis

Abstract The 1988 federal Constitution introduced a complex and innovative institutional arrangement that not only reestablished political rights and democratic procedures, but also reinforced decentralization as a fundamental guideline for policy implementation in Brazil. As a result, municipalities have become pivotal actors in the policymaking process. Scholars of Latin American politics have given much emphasis to the causes and determinants of decentralization, but not much has been done toward a more general understanding of how this increased decentralization has affected policymaker behavior and policy outcomes. This paper aims to do exactly that. Specifically, it investigates how institutional arrangements and electoral competition affect local government performance. The theoretical basis is the electoral democratic theory that broadly highlights elections as instruments of citizen control in retrospective and prospective voting approaches. The research employs a large-N cross sub-national analysis based on a dataset of electoral, partisan, socioeconomic and public financial information collected from over 5500 municipalities. Local governments’ performance, our dependent variables, are synthetic indicators formulated from 2009 nationwide surveys on public education, health, housing and welfare services. The OLS regression results confirm the hypothesis that politics variables do matter in how politicians make decisions and implement policy under the new Brazilian democratic Era. The empirical evidences suggest that electoral competition does not present a direct effect on government performance, however, ideology and citizen participation do. Therefore, this paper helps to expand our understanding of a political system’s impact on public policy outputs, which is extremely important not only for academic purpose but also to support policymakers’ decisions.

scholarly journals Open science: policy implications for the evolving phenomenon of user-led scientific innovation

2010 ◽  
Vol 09 (01) ◽  
pp. A05 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Stodden
Keyword(s):  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Dna Sequences ◽  
Public Involvement ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Knowledge Generation ◽  
Reproducible Research ◽  
Treatment Research

From contributions of astronomy data and DNA sequences to disease treatment research, scientific activity by non-scientists is a real and emergent phenomenon, and raising policy questions. This involvement in science can be understood as an issue of access to publications, code, and data that facilitates public engagement in the research process, thus appropriate policy to support the associated welfare enhancing benefits is essential. Current legal barriers to citizen participation can be alleviated by scientists’ use of the “Reproducible Research Standard,” thus making the literature, data, and code associated with scientific results accessible. The enterprise of science is undergoing deep and fundamental changes, particularly in how scientists obtain results and share their work: the promise of open research dissemination held by the Internet is gradually being fulfilled by scientists. Contributions to science from beyond the ivory tower are forcing a rethinking of traditional models of knowledge generation, evaluation, and communication. The notion of a scientific “peer” is blurred with the advent of lay contributions to science raising questions regarding the concepts of peer-review and recognition. New collaborative models are emerging around both open scientific software and the generation of scientific discoveries that bear a similarity to open innovation models in other settings. Public engagement in science can be understood as an issue of access to knowledge for public involvement in the research process, facilitated by appropriate policy to support the welfare enhancing benefits deriving from citizen-science.

Popular Access to the Decision‐making Process in Switzerland: The Role of Direct Democracy

1979 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Mowlam
Keyword(s):  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Political Choices ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Popular Control

CENTRAL TO THE STUDY OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS IS THE IDEA of popular control over the activities of elites. More specifically, how can the preferences of citizens be aggregated into a political choice for a government policy or government personnel? Popular control, the effects of citizen participation in political life, is the basis of a major value orientation in the discipline: the notion of participant democracy. The degree of citizen participation becomes the key to the nature of democracry in a society : the more participation, the more democratic the political life of a country becomes. Political participation may take a variety of forms, e.g., running for office, holding office,voting, soliciting votes, and campaigning for, or contributing funds to, I the party of one's choice. However, voting is the most emphasized aspect of citizen participation, since it is the only form of active participation many engage in. The limitations placed on voting as a mechanism for popular control over political choices are well documented. Voters do not choose when to vote, nor the agenda. They have minimal input into the selection of candidates and the choice of issues which divide the parties at elections. Public participation in the selection and resolution of important policy issues between elections is severely restricted.

Hoe gesprekken een participatieproces maken of breken

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Bleijenberg ◽  
Noëlle Aarts ◽  
Reint Jan Renes
Keyword(s):  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
Comparative Case Study ◽  
Framing Analysis ◽  
Local Participation ◽  
Participatory Processes ◽  
Participation Process ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Discursive Patterns

A comparative case study into the meaning of conversations between citizens and government on the course and outcome of local participation processes Although the importance of conversations for citizen participation is widely recognized, there is still little insight into the meaning of conversations for participatory processes. This comparative case study provides insight into the discursive patterns that characterize the conversations between citizens, civil servants and other stakeholders in two participatory processes in different municipalities. Our framing-analysis shows how different discursive patterns develop in interaction and how these patterns effect the course and outcome in both participation processes. The results provide insight in how experiences of previous events influence the discursive patterns that participants construct in interaction. It is concluded that in both cases not the nature of the issue, but the way it was discussed and how participants framed this was crucial for the course and outcome of the participation process.

Thucydides and Crowds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Zumbrunnen
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Wisdom Of Crowds ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Ancient Athens ◽  
Collective Emotion ◽  
Crowd Control ◽  
The Wisdom Of Crowds

This essay considers Thucydides’ treatments of the crowd or mob in the context of his analysis of democratic politics in ancient Athens. Scholars have often located in Thucydides a critique of the crowd familiar from ancient philosophical accounts of democracy and a corresponding call for leadership that amounts to crowd control. Close attention to Thucydides’ portrayal of Athenian democratic politics complicates matters. While he indeed worries about the tendency of collective emotion to overwhelm reason, Thucydides also credits the crowd with an ability to quiet itself in a manner that makes deliberation possible. This ability does not amount to full-fledged agreement with recent claims about the “wisdom of crowds,” but it does suggest that for Thucydides, democracy requires not crowd control but the painstaking building and nurturing of an always-fragile relationship between leaders and demos.

scholarly journals New Trouble For Deliberative Democracy

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-123
Author(s):  
Robert Talisse
Keyword(s):  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Public Deliberation ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Democratic Practice

In the past two decades, democratic political practice has taken a deliberative turn. That is, contemporary democratic politics has become increasingly focused on facilitating citizen participation in the public exchange of reasons. Although the deliberative turn in democratic practice is in several respects welcome, the technological and communicative advances that have facilitated it also make possible new kinds of deliberative democratic pathology. This essay calls attention to and examines new epistemological troubles for public deliberation enacted under contemporary conditions. Drawing from a lesson offered by Lyn Sanders two decades ago, the paper raises the concern that the deliberative turn in democratic practice has counter-democratic effects.

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