Participatory Democracy and Political Participation

Can Participatory Engineering Bring Citizens Back In?

Thomas Zittel, Dieter Fuchs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415371865
• eBook ISBN: 9781134194704
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A detailed new examination of the initiatives governments are exploring to reform the institutions and procedures of liberal democracy in order to provide more opportunities for political participation and inclusion.

Combining theory and empirical case studies, this is a systematic evaluation of the most visible and explicit efforts to engineer political participation via institutional reforms. Part I discusses the phenomenon of participatory engineering from a conceptual standpoint, while parts II, III and IV take a comparative, as well as an empirical, perspective. The contributors to these sections analyze participatory institutions on the basis of empirical models of democracy such as direct democracy, civil society and responsive government and analyze the impact of these models on political behaviour. Part V includes exploratory regional case studies on specific reform initiatives that present descriptive accounts of the policies and politics of these reforms.

Delivering a detailed assessment of democratic reform, this book will of strong interest to students and researchers of political theory, democracy and comparative politics.

Part I
Democratic reform and political participation

Two theoretical perspectives

1
Participatory democracy and political participation

Thomas Zittel

Political institutions and political participation

This chapter addresses efforts in established democracies to reverse downward trends in political participation through participatory engineering. This concept indicates purposive attempts on the part of political elites to affect political participation positively via the reform of the institutions of democracy. German politics provides one recent example for this kind of democracy policy. In 2002 the Red–Green government coalition introduced a bill to change the country’s constitution, allowing for measures of direct democracy at the federal level. This bill was explicitly promoted as a means of revitalizing the waning interest of German citizens in political affairs.

The concept of participatory engineering is linked to two core assumptions which form the basis of the following analysis. The first core assumption is that any policy to reform the institutional basis of democracy should be based upon empirical evidence regarding the effects of these reforms on political participation. It seems absurd to engage in far-reaching institutional reforms on an ad-hoc basis without taking systematic empirical research into account. The second core assumption of the paper is that the theory of participatory democracy provides a useful vantage point from which to consider the effectiveness of participatory engineering from a theoretical perspective. This means that participatory theory can serve as a basis to specify concrete institutional structures suited to stimulating participation, and that it can help link them to the behavioral level of politics in plausible ways. The aim of such theoretical reasoning should be to formulate hypotheses regarding the effectiveness of participatory engineering and to test them in the course of empirical research.

The main focus of participatory theory lies in the critique of the liberal conception of democracy as a competition for political power among responsible elites. This critique originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the midst of a larger cultural quest for more democracy and social equality. Participatory theory envisions citizens who engage into political decision-making in great numbers and who share a sense of collective responsibility. Its protagonists claim that this vision can be achieved by increasing opportunities to participate through institutional reform (Pateman 1970; Cook and Morgan 1971; Macpherson 1977; Bachrach and Botwinick 1992). They argue that the institutional restraints impinging on political participation within the frame of liberal democracy lessen political engagement and spawn political apathy in the long term, while different institutional impulses are assumed to engender contrasting behavioral effects (Walker 1966).

Participatory theory faces many critics in various fields of the discipline. Liberal democratic theory views the preoccupation with private concerns and the hesitancy to participate in public affairs as quasi-anthropological constants at the individual level that can hardly be influenced by institutional frameworks (Sartori 1987; Kielmansegg 1977). This claim drew empirical support from students of political attitudes such as Dieter Fuchs (2000) and Jan van Deth (2000) whose analyses stress that politics takes a back seat in the minds of the citizens. Students of political participation tend to see differences in the degree of political engagement as explained by socioeconomic factors rather than by the institutional context. Their findings suggest among others that citizens with advanced educational background and above-average income are most likely to develop an interest in politics and to cope with the complexities of modern political life (Verba and Nie 1972). From this perspective, it is economic development rather than political institutions that makes a difference in terms of participation.

Critics of participatory theory argue, regardless of debates on alternative determinants of participation, that its proponents carry little theoretical ammunition to support their analytical claim regarding the impact of political institutions on participation and that this strand of democratic theory remains purely normative in character. Participatory theory is criticized for failing in three respects: first, its critics argue that it fails to tell us which particular institutions could have a positive effect on participation; second, it is criticized for being silent on the contextual conditions under which these institutions might affect political behavior; third, participatory theory is denounced for lacking a plausible explanation of how and why particular institutions foster which type of political behavior. All in all, critics of participatory democracy claim that it is solely driven by normative concerns without opening itself up to empirical inquiry and to empirical testing of its claims. Proponents of participatory theory are pictured as utopian dreamers obsessed with the question of how things should be rather than how things can be in real world settings (Offe 1997; Pieterse 2001).¹

In contrast to its critics, this chapter perceives the theory of participatory democracy as a useful starting point to specify institutional options for democratic reform, to discuss theoretically their effectiveness at the behavioral level, and to develop hypotheses that can be tested empirically. My argument is that participatory theory does have potential as an analytical tool. To make this point I argue in particular that participatory theory should neither be reduced to those critical authors writing in the 1960s and 1970s who coined the original concept, nor simply to particular strands in this debate. Rather, I suggest an inclusive understanding of participatory democracy incorporating various as yet distinct strands of democratic theory. This encompasses among others the literature on direct democracy, secular models of democratic reform (Burnheim 1985) as well as the theory of deliberative democracy (Dryzek 2000; Fishkin 1991).

An inclusive and broad reading of participatory theory certainly offers a tapestry of conceptual discussions and empirical models of democracy. These models rely on a variety of scientific methods and are pitched at different levels of abstraction. No element of this mosaic manages to provide a model that could give an explicit and comprehensive answer on which particular democratic institutions affect which particular type of political behavior and why (Zittel 2003). However, this chapter argues that these different approaches share an institutionalist approach to political participation, as well as the basic tenet of participatory theory, namely that political participation can be positively affected by political institutions and that this should be the case. They thus can be seen as elements of a common debate that can be synthesized and reconstructed to serve as a theoretical basis to discuss, evaluate and inform a strategy of participatory engineering. This will be the task of the following analysis. It will be based on a simple organizing argument.

On the basis of a comprehensive reading and a synthesis of the theory of participatory democracy, the chapter distinguishes between three different strategies of participatory engineering that emphasize different linkage mechanisms related to different institutional options to be implemented in the course of democratic reform. I label these strategies as expansive democratization, integrative democratization and efficiency-oriented democratization. These different strategies are analytical constructs that cannot be equated with any single author. They rather follow from distinct lines of argumentation which are sometimes clumsily intertwined or which are frequently simply kept implicit within the debate on participatory democracy. They provide a comprehensive road-map to comparative and empirical research on participatory engineering and the question of its effectiveness. They also alert us to the existence of vital tradeoffs between the political feasibility and effectiveness of particular democracy policies and to a reform dilemma that I will outline in the course of this analysis.

Integrative democratization

The strategy of integrative democratization describes the relationship between individual actors and institutions in a distinct way. Institutions are seen as a factor that shapes the very goals and perceptions of individuals (Hall and Taylor 1996). With a view to increasing political participation, this notion is linked to the classical argument that people are not born as citizens. Rather, democracy must be learnt and this can be ensured only through relevant institutional frameworks that empower people by educating them.

The notion of individual growth and self-transformation triggered through institutional context is probably a dominant paradigm among theorists of participatory democracy (Warren 1992). At the same time, it is the most difficult aspect of participatory theory to deal with because the notion of citizen-education has been perverted by dictatorships across the globe. However, the decisive difference between a totalitarian concept of education and participatory theory lies in the interrelationship between education and political choice. Participatory theory does not substitute political choice with self-transformation as totalitarianism does. It argues rather that expanding citizens’ rights to affect policy choices has to be paralleled by a process of political socialization and self-transformation to balance the pursuit of private interest with a sense of collective responsibility. Choice and education stand in a complementary relationship rather than being substitutes for each other.

The emphasis on political choice does not only distinguish participatory theory from totalitarianism. It also provides the crucial institutional principle to specify concrete institutional structures and to distinguish them from those structures that are related to liberal democracy. Participatory theory argues that participatory institutions maximize opportunities to affect policy decisions. This stands in contrast to liberal democratic theory that stresses the significance of institutions that allow only for the selection of political personnel. Having stated these crucial principles of participatory theory and the strategy of integrative democratization that flows from it, I will have to turn to several follow-up questions.

The strategy of integrative democratization raises first and foremost the question of which educational goals this perspective ought to address. In other words, it asks what are the individual characteristics of good citizens who are motivated and capable to participate. Participatory theory proposes various answers to this question. Carol Pateman points towards the notion of political efficacy that recognizes at the individual level a basic disposition in relation to the possibility of exerting political influence (Pateman 1970). Political efficacy is less about cognitive knowledge of political issues that are at the center of a decision and of constitutional rights to participate in decision-making. It is also not a behavioral concept that assumes that individuals actually participate all the time in any given situation. This concept rather points to the attitudinal level. It is about subjective faith in one’s own ability to influence political decision-making and to make a difference in public life. As an alternative to the notion of political efficacy, Jane Mansbridge’s concept of unitary democracy stresses the idea of a social urge, which means a focus on common interests and social cooperation on an equal basis as the most basic feature of the good citizen (Mansbridge 1980: ch. 3). Jürgen Habermas’s concept of individual autonomy combines both notions of individual empowerment and social responsibility and can be perceived as a third vision of the democratic personality (Habermas 1962, 1992, 1998).

The Habermasian autonomous self is distinguished by a balance between self-referentialism and the capacity for internal and external reflection. The notion of internal reflection suggests that the self is critical toward his or her own impulses and motivations in the process of generating a preference. It touches upon the awareness that individual preferences have to be reconciled with the interests and preferences of other actors. According to Habermas, it is from this balance – which can be considered a psychological state of mind – that flows the ability to cooperate and to be part of a community that forms t...

Table of contents

• Routledge/ECPR studies in European political science
• Contents
• Contributors
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Democratic reform and political participation
• Part II Democratic reform and political responsiveness
• Part III Democratic reform and direct democracy
• Part IV Democratic reform and civil society
• Part V Democratic reform and local government
• Index