Is local democracy changing?

New initiatives for citizen participation change local democracy. This research project aims to get a better understanding of how citizen participation works in local governments. We are 10 researchers from different research groups at Ghent University.  We focus on the next important questions: Do roles of politicians, citizens, civil servants and civil society change? Do relationships between these actors change? Does citizen participation provide more trust in the quality of local policymaking and local governance? 

About the project

 

 

It is a widespread assumption that democracy is in crisis: political parties suffer from a decreasing membership, elections have lower voter turnout, trust in government is in decline, and many citizens are in a state of political apathy. A lot of research confirms this picture, but other (and more interesting!) research shows that democracy is changing rather than suffering. An important part of changing democracy is the turn to more participation: initiatives like citizen panels, participatory budgets, citizen co-production and the like are blossoming worldwide. Especially in and around local government. What we observe is a participatory layer that is put on top of traditional representative bureaucracy. In a representative democracy, citizens are not much more than voters and consumers of public services: it is elected politicians and professional civil servants who decide on policies, with or without input from civil society (which has a rich tradition in corporatist countries like Belgium e.g.). The figure below illustrates our point about the participatory turn: citizens influence policies, and co-decide and co-produce public policies and services.

This leads to a more layered and hybrid form of local democracy. There are many examples of how close cooperation between government, civil society and citizens can lead to innovative solutions for complex problems. A lot of research has been done into the nature and causes of citizen participation, and many practices have been documented. But we need a better understanding of the effects of this participatory turn. And this is where our projects steps in. We can discern effects on different levels, and from different perspectives. Politicians may not have the same perspective on citizen participation, compared to civil servants, civil society, or citizens. Moreover, we can expect that there is no unanimity about the desirability of citizen participation between politicians, between civil servants, between citizens: some are more in favour than others, for many different reasons.


It is this complexity we want to unravel. Also, and especially because we want a better understanding of the phenomenon, as this understanding is crucial for policy-makers that aim for a strengthening of local democracy via more citizen participation. Therefore, we ask some fundamental questions, which we want to answer by researching local government in Flanders (Belgium):

 

  • What are the attitudes towards an increasingly participatory local democracy of politicians, civil servants, citizens, and civil society organisations? Do they think this is an evolution for the better, and why (not)?
  • Do they perceive policy-decisions that are participatory in nature as democratic, and why (not)?
  • Are the roles of these actors in the local democracy, and their relations, changing? And how?

 

By answering these questions, we will for the first time come to a broader and more encompassing view on how changing democracy really works. This is not only relevant from a scientific point of view, but also essential knowledge if we want to address an important societal challenge: (re-)vitalizing democracy.

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