Comparative Perspectives on Public Participation as a Tool of Regulatory Governance

Abstract

In recent years, public participation has become a much-used tool of regulatory governance. In infrastructure planning, in regulatory standard-setting, or in the formulation of public policy, administrative and political actors regularly consult the public. Consequently, there is a rich literature on consultation procedures, e.g. on consultations by the European Union (Bunea and Thomson, 2015; Klüver, 2013; Rasmussen and Carroll, 2014), the notice-and-comment procedure in US administrative law (Balla, 2015; Yackee, 2006), or similar procedures in other countries like the UK (Lodge and Wegrich, 2015; Maciejewski Scheer and Höppner, 2010; Upham et al., 2011) or Germany (Fink and Ruffing, forthcoming). However, there is much less comparative research that compares public participation on a cross-national level (for notable exceptions see (Huxley et al., 2016; Rasmussen, 2015)), although public participation often adresses similar policy questions. The panel invites empirical contributions that address this comparative dimension of public participation. Basically, we want to put public participation research on a more universal footing by asking: What scope conditions (e.g. administrative traditions, type of democracy, political culture) influence the design, use, and impact of public participation procedures?