How Can Participatory Processes Improve Democracy? A Citizens’ Perspective

• In Event: What Good Are Democratic Innovations? Evidence from Around the World

Abstract

Widespread dissatisfaction with the functioning of representative democracy poses a threat to the legitimacy and stability of political systems worldwide. An increasingly popular proposal to tackle such widespread dissatisfaction is to involve citizens in the political process, for instance through referendums and deliberative forums. Critics, however, argue that participatory processes can also pose challenges to core democratic norms, such as authorisation and accountability (Lafont, 2020). In consequence, the last years have seen an active debate in normative democratic theory about the roles or functions that participatory processes can and should play in the broader democratic system (Warren, 2017; Lafont, 2015; 2020). However, it remains unknown whether citizens consider participatory processes as potential solutions to the problems they see with contemporary politics. This is striking insofar as it is citizens’ perceptions of legitimacy of the political system that is wished to improve by the inclusion of such processes.

In this study, we aim to unravel citizens’ understanding of the ways in which participatory processes can improve - or undermine - the status quo of representative politics. Inspired by Mark Warren’s (2017) problem-based approach, we ask: What do citizens perceive as problems with representative democracy that can be tackled by participatory processes? With this project, we provide the first comprehensive empirical test of a problem-based approach to understanding citizens’ attitudes towards two archetypical participatory processes, namely referendums and deliberative forums. To do so, we collect novel survey data from Belgium (n = 2000) in the Spring of 2021. Our findings will shed light on whether citizens consider participatory processes as concrete answers to particular deficits they see in politics. In addition we investigate the conditionality of these attitudes by levels of overall dissatisfaction with democracy, political sophistication and familiarity with participatory process.

Authors

• Lisa van Dijk, KU Leuven

• Hannah Werner, University of Leuven

• Sofie Marien, University of Leuven