Interactive – or Counteractive – Governance? Lessons Learned about Political Leadership and Interactive Governance

Self-governance and citizen initiatives are on the rise, adding a new channel for participation. Large parts of the literature tends to see self-governance and citizen initiatives as a fruitful and welcomed expansion of democracy, presuming classic representative democracy and newer forms of citizen initiatives can go hand in hand. However, from the perspective of political leadership theory, it is not obvious that participation associated with representation and citizens direct participation can be linked together in any easy way. Some would even argue there is a deep and insoluble tension between the two models of democratic participation. The paper will partly discuss this tension related to a typology of possible outcomes, and partly how the possible gap, to some extent, can be closed. The theoretical discussions will be followed by empirical examples derived from a literature study in ten highly ranked international journals within the field of planning.