Participatory Democracy in Southern Europe

Causes, Characteristics and Consequences

Joan Font, Donatella della Porta, Yves Sintomer

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783480753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Democrazia

Citizen participation is a central component of democratic governance. As participatory schemes have grown in number and gained in social legitimacy over recent years, the research community has analyzed the virtues of participatory policies from several points of view, but usually giving focus to the most successful and well-known grass-roots cases. This book examines a wider range of participatory interventions that have been created or legitimized by central governments, providing original exploration of institutional democratic participatory mechanisms. Looking at a huge variety of subnational examples across Italy, Spain and France, the book interrogates the rich findings of a substantial research project. The authors use quantitative and qualitative methods to compare why these cases of participatory mechanisms have emerged, how they function, and what cultural impact they’ve achieved. This allows highly original insights into why participatory mechanisms work in some places, but not others, and the sorts of choices that organizers of participatory processes have to consider when creating such policies.

1

Introduction

Joan Font, Donatella della Porta and Yves Sintomer

In 2010 a number of new democratic practices were launched or were already functioning in Southern Europe. Participatory budgeting allowed citizens to directly influence the division of municipal public resources in Getafe, Spain. The same mechanism was used in the Poitou-Charentes region of France, where each high school community was able to decide on three investments to be made during the next year. In Tuscany, Italy, the regional law on citizen participation led to a flourishing of local participation experiences.

Are these three examples representative of a broader trend in Spain, France and Italy? What factors explain why participatory mechanisms are launched in some places and not others? What precisely are these mechanisms? What impact do they have on participants? These are the central questions this book will address.

1.1. WHAT IS INSTITUTIONAL PARTICIPATION, WHAT IS NOT AND WHY IT MATTERS

Participation is a central component of any democratic polity, and the virtues of participatory policies have been analysed from several points of view. Normally, outside of elections and party politics, when we think about participation, we imagine bottom-up citizen-dominated activities. Here, we focus on a limited (albeit important) sphere of the participatory landscape, where institutions are less important than in electoral politics (Dalton and Wattenberg 2002) but more important than in grassroots mobilisations (della Porta and Diani 2006). Citizens and citizen organisations continue to be actors in the participation field we refer to, but it is usually not a grassroots-created arena; instead, it is one built, provided by or at least approved by public institutions.

The first characteristic that differentiates this kind of participation from that related to social movements or voluntary associations of various types is precisely the central role played by a government in organising or providing legitimacy to these processes. This characteristic is important because it provides a direct link between participation and governmental decision-making processes. Whether these processes have much impact on policy is an empirical question that will only be briefly discussed in this volume. It may be the case that bottom-up pressure from social movements or private lobbies is more effective than any of the participation mechanisms covered here. However, such influence results from a different logic than mechanisms¹ of institutional participation, which are instead explicitly linked to the policy process (albeit in many cases in a rather superficial way). The fact that a public institution is involved in the organisation of the process (alone or in cooperation with other social actors or institutions), or at least providing legitimacy to it, gives it a public character and links civil society to the policy process. This can be seen quite clearly in some of these processes. This is the case when (even minor) final decisions are being discussed in processes like participatory budgeting in Getafe and Poitou-Charentes, or in the public debate over the “law on participation” in Tuscany. This policy linkage is less clear in other processes covered here, such as the Andalusia citizens’ jury on water or the electronic town meeting on energy (part of Ideal-EU) in Poitou-Charentes, where the link with a concrete decision-making process may be less evident for participants and organisers alike.

We consider as part of our universe of analysis any at least loosely formalised activity that attempts to involve the citizenry in the discussion of or making of decisions about public policies. The definition we give to participation is therefore different from those that we find in local government or among citizens involved in public activities. For many of these actors, the preparation of local holidays, with citizens and associations staging dances or fireworks or even dancing at festivals, is a clear participatory activity. In our usage of the word, being involved in the planning of these activities, drafting the agenda or its contents and discussing how much to spend or whether to have a sporting activity or a religious parade has a clear participatory content. However, if one just runs in the local marathon or attends the religious parade, we do not consider this to be a contribution to public debate. As a result, a meeting to plan local celebrations would be considered part of our research universe, but the local celebrations themselves would not. Since our usage is more restrictive than the one common among social actors, we need to filter the information they provide to accommodate our definition.² In short, any at least loosely formalised activity that attempts to involve citizenry in the discussion or making of decisions about public policies is part of our universe of analysis.

One important distinction between this book and much previous research is our decision to cover any kind of participatory process that fits this broad definition. Clearly, this is not without controversy. For many, using a web-based consultation to choose the name of a village street is considered too distant from a well-crafted annual participatory process to make decisions regarding important parts of the local budget. However, it is precisely because we do not know much about the weight of each of these two kinds of processes in the overall participatory sphere that we decided to include all of them and to consider their heterogeneity as one of our main interests and concerns.³

This book is not exclusively focused on the local level, but most of the empirical material that we use refers to participatory processes on that level. The processes covered here have, in fact, taken place at various subnational levels, ranging from a few developed at the neighbourhood level (e.g., the Vallecas district in Madrid) to a few occurring in an area covering several municipalities (e.g., the Andalusian environmental plans for a nature area covering several municipalities) and to a small group that cover a full region (e.g., the Poitou-Charentes high school participatory budget or the Tuscan participatory process to draft a new law on participation). What they have in common and what differentiates them from national-level processes is related less to the size of the administration involved (Vallecas, even though a district, has a greater population than the Andalusia national park that includes several municipalities) or the particularities of a given administrative level, and more to the limited visibility that subnational processes have and, in many cases, the more limited political conflict that they entail. Although many are not, some of these processes are remarkably important in the local public sphere. However, even in such cases, they remain largely absent from the national news and the mass media. The only partial exception to this rule within our study—the Poitou-Charentes high school participatory budget process—is not so much a result of the development of the process itself, but rather of its instrumental use in political conflicts at the national level (e.g., the presidential campaign of Ségolène Royal in 2006–2007).

In recent normative theory, the acknowledgement of mounting challenges to representative democratic institutions has gone together with rising attention to alternative conceptions of democracy. In particular, increasing emphasis has been placed on channels that may enhance the occasion and effectiveness of citizens’ participation as well as the discursive quality of public decision-making. Conceptions of deliberative democracy, especially when joined with participatory elements, have had effects on existing democratic institutions. In the search for complementary sources of legitimation that could allow them to face the challenge of weak electoral accountability and the erosion of “legitimation by output”, public institutions are more frequently discussing various forms of citizen involvement in decision-making. At the beginning of the new millennium, an EU White Paper on European Governance (Commission of the European Communities 2001) recognised the principle of participation by means of open consultation with citizens and their associations as one of the fundamental pillars of European Union governance. Building on the Charter of Fundamental Rights and within the context of the debate on “The Future of Europe”, the European Commission urged the identification of ways of constructively managing change by more actively involving European citizens in decision-making—a move that has not yet really been done at the European level: the experience of the convention for the elaboration of the Charter of Fundamental Rights provided examples for greater involvement of “civil society” in the European Union, but the level of success of these processes remains questionable, and the European “constitution” has been adopted against the express will of two national electorates (in France and the Netherlands).

In the early years of institutional participation research, although some of the best empirical literature was quite critical of the actual performance of these instruments (e.g., Mansbridge 1983), a substantial amount of study focused on the positive dimensions of participatory mechanisms as a possible remedy for democratic malaise.

Our argument here is different. We do not claim that these participatory activities are more useful or important than others, or that they necessarily produce better results in terms of policies or cultural impact. However, what is strikingly clear is that these participatory mechanisms have grown in number and gained in social legitimacy and academic visibility. Even if they continue to be a very small part of the real policy process, they have probably evolved from a completely marginal and experimental setting to being one of the “normal” ways to contribute to political decisions. In any case, their purely quantitative presence in more settings and policy decisions has converted them into a political instrument that deserves further attention.

What would we like to know about these participatory processes? We want to answer three traditional questions: Why do they emerge (causes)? How do they function (comparative description and analysis of their qualities)? And what cultural impact do they have (consequences)? Each of these questions has received some attention in previous research, but we intend to provide an innovative answer to each of them and at the same time address the three together, focusing on a particular geographic area (Southern Europe) and all types of (institutionally recognised) participatory processes.

The question of the cause or the factors facilitating the development of participatory practices in different governments is surely the question which has been previously studied the least. As we explain in chapter 3, a substantial amount of research has discussed the social changes and administrative reforms facilitating the appearance of participatory reforms in specific places. There has also been much research explaining the emergence and diffusion of specific participatory processes (Vetter 2009; Fournier et al. 2011; Bacqué and Sintomer 2010). However, we lack a systematic analysis that covers both participatory and nonparticipatory administrations and permits a comparison of the characteristics and motivations of both types. Up to what point are the resources available to each administration, the ideologies of the parties or individual politicians in power and the role of diffuse networks important to understand why some administrations have been very active and others have not?

There is a very long tradition of case studies, too numerous to be mentioned here, that provide rich descriptions and analyses of specific participatory processes. Significant comparative research has also been carried out in certain policy areas and on particular mechanisms. This research tradition has covered participatory budgeting (Sintomer, Herzberg and Röcke 2008a; Hartz-Karp and Wampler 2012; Sintomer, Traub-Merz and Zang 2013), sectorial consultation councils (Schattan 2006), participatory processes based on random selection of participants (Carson and Martin 1999; Bobbio and Giannetti 2007; Buchstein 2009; Sintomer 2011) and direct democratic procedures (Budge 1996; Papadopoulos 1998), among others. Other research has focused on wider comparisons (Font 2001; Fung and Wright 2003; Santos 2005; Smith 2009). We will build upon this tradition but also extend it as:

1) we include all types of participatory processes and consider the analysis of their diversity as one of our main concerns;

2) we build a picture, as representative as possible of the activities developing (mostly) in the municipalities of several Southern European regions; and

3) departing from this heterogeneous reality, we start the discussion about the democratic qualities of this set of very representative participatory processes, in contrast with most previous research that has concentrated primarily on the most promising ones.

The analysis of the impact of participatory processes also has a considerable history, with a long list of different mechanisms being discussed in previous research (Papadopoulos and Warin 2007). Precisely because of this diversity and because of the difficulties of making a serious assessment of each type of consequence, we concentrate here on the cultural consequences that these processes have on participants. These consequences have been studied for rather diverse types of participatory mechanisms, from those with a central deliberative character (Fishkin 1997; Fournier et al. 2011; Grönlund, Setälä and Herne 2010) to settings where direct democratic practices dominate (Matsusaka 2004; Papadopoulos 1998) to more assembly-based practices (Baiocchi 2005; Talpin 2011). Most of this research points to the existence of substantial cultural effects, but these results may be a bit too optimistic because of excessively short time spans between the processes and their evaluations, or because of biased samples. Again, the research has tended to focus on the most democratically attractive processes.⁴ While we have avoided this tendency in other parts of the book, when addressing the cultural consequences of participatory practices, this selective choice of certain good practices makes clear sense: it would, in fact, be unrealistic to expect some of the very brief or superficial processes analysed here to have any kind of cultural impact. Thus our analysis of this issue will start by acknowledging that certain minimal conditions are necessary for attitudinal changes to appear, and we focus on the conditions and practices that favour this appearance and on discussing which changes are most likely to appear.

Each of our research questions is distinct, and for this reason we devote different parts of the book to each of them. In addition, this is also why we address them with different theoretical frameworks, methodologies and types of empirical evidence. Nonetheless, there are certain issues that appear in every chapter. One of them is the role of context, which leads to the classical issue of structure versus agency. Are participation policies strongly constrained by the character of the communities in which they develop? Do they depend much on the size, resources, traditions and social structures of these communities? Or can any administration develop their ideal participation policies without being significantly constrained by their community’s specific given characteristics? These questions affect each of our main subjects and, as a result, will be discussed throughout the book: context can be crucial in the decision to have a more or less active participation policy (chapter 3); can affect the contents, the methodologies used and the actors involved (chapter 4); and can constrain the cultural impact of participatory processes (chapter 6).

If context is the structural side of the story, institutional design would be one of the central components of the agency side. Every public administration is somewhat constrained by the problems faced by its community, the resources available to it and the type of existing social bonds and organisations. However, organisers of participatory processes have many choices to make on a range of issues, such as who they want to hear from, how they want to frame debate, how much power they want to share with participants and how they want to manage meetings with participants. This is what we refer to as the institutional design of participatory processes, with each particular methodology having specific characteristics. This will be a central issue in chapters 4 and 6. In chapter 4, we will look at what the most common choices have been in each of the geographic areas analysed and how these have affected the democratic qualities of these processes, while in chapter 6 these choices will become central independent variables that may help us to understand the conditions under which cultural change can emerge.

1.2. DATA AND METHODOLOGIES

The most well-known empirical literature on institutional participation processes belongs to the case study tradition, which has focused on the in-depth analysis of the development and/or consequences of participatory processes. There are also a limited number of books and journal issues that have provided a more general mapping of similar experiences. Most of our knowledge of participatory processes comes from this research tradition, which has clearly revealed their many virtues, but also some of their limits.

Our approach clearly breaks with this research tradition. Our scepticism regarding some of its results is not because we find their conclusions unconvincing, but rather is a result of comparing their conclusions with the cases closest to us. The Porto Alegre participatory budget or the Canadian Citizen Assemblies seems, in fact, quite different from what we have observed in Tuscany, Poitou-Charentes and Madrid. The problem could be that participatory processes in Europe, or more specifically Southern Europe, have been more limited democratically; as Ganuza and Baiocchi (2012) and Röcke (2014) have noted, the “egalitarian” dimension is not very present i...