New Approaches to Citizens Involvement in Public Decision-Making Processes: Strategies at the Local Level to Reduce Institutional Disaffection

Abstract

The increasing political disaffection has received a varied array of innovative answers that seeks to incorporate the citizens in the decision making process. Disaffection, lost of confidence, appearance of deregulated public spaces, etc., compose a framework into which political institutions have to develop new inclusive methodologies. The aim is to mitigate this kind of problems and to increase the closeness to the citizens of the making decision process, to enhance the political transparency, to improve the efficiency, and to bolster the legitimacy. Until now, there were some procedures that aimed to incorporate the citizens in the making decision process or, actually, to hand out it to them completely. Therefore, these kind of practices are not a novelty in the area of public management or governance, particularly in local arena. Notwithstanding, through recent years, the point of view on these procedures and practices has considerably changed. It is no more a top-down relation where public authorities grant citizens an increasingly degree of participation, but a bottom-up demand, where citizens call for new ways of joining in public decision processes. It is now a regular practice in local governments to incorporate new participative models in decision making process. We can see how new technologies —sometimes related with latest developments in artificial intelligence, decision making software, active listening through social networks, decentralization processes, etc.— have been widely applied. So innovation goes beyond the old practices of the new public management model. They reached a new level through methodologies and technologies that transform the very relationship between citizens and institutions. The goal of this process are both to increase the closeness between who is responsible for the decision and who is its final receiver, and to increase the transparency, the efficiency, and quality of public policies. Therefore, we consider that it is of major interest to show illuminating examples from local governments practices and to analyze their impact on the government/citizens relationship. It would be particularly interesting to show, also, the changes appeared in the way citizens perceive public institutions and their capability to give answer to their more pressing concerns. These are the aims of the panel we propose. We would like to attract both theoretical papers and case studies related with the aims of the panel.