The Democratic Quality of the Decentralisation of Social and Healthcare Policy in the Netherlands: The Role of Self-Appointed Representatives

Numerous opportunities for individuals to participate in public decision-making have been created. However, few citizens use these opportunities. Those who do are often the highly educated, white, middle and upper classes that also tend to dominate other democratic spaces. Therefore, these opportunities to become active can increase inequalities in terms of whose voices are heard in public decision-making. This fundamentally challenges the central democratic value of equality. It is therefore argued that we need democratic innovations to enhance the quality of democracy. In this paper we explore such democratic innovations using Saward’s theory on representative claims (2010), focusing on the idea that others can represent the interests of those who remain silent. The added value of this theory is that it broadens the scope of representation beyond elected representatives. We use the decentralization of social and healthcare policies in the Netherlands as our case study. In the debate about this decentralization the importance of democratic decision making is continuously emphasized. However the consequences of these policies are typically felt by vulnerable groups of citizens who do not tend to participate in democratic fora, which makes it an interesting focus of research on representative claimmaking. We studied two municipalities using multiple qualitative methods (document analysis, interviews, and observations). In the paper we focus on a broad variety of actors who claim to represent citizens in the debate on social and healthcare policy at the municipal level: elected representatives, non-elected formal representatives and informal self-appointed representatives. Moreover, we studied the basis of these claims, the variety of authorization and accountability structures in place and the acceptability of these claims by policy makers. Based on this study we reflect on the democratic quality of the decentralization and the added value of representation for democratic innovation.