Improving Local Democracy Work: Does Social Capital lead to More Transparent and Deliberative Municipal Governments?

With the introduction of modern technologies, participatory democracy is not only a theory of political philosophy, but can actually be introduced in practice. Making institutions more transparent and deliberative might build bridges and trust in democratic government once again. This paper aims to explain how the local governments in the Czech Republic involve citizens to a decision making process. Based on social capital (Putnam, 1993) literature and theory of deliberative democracy (Pateman, 1970) it is hypothesizes that it is more likely that cities located in more civic regions – where the electoral turnout, civic participation, donation to charity and volunteering is more common – will also promote more transparent and deliberative mechanisms to involve citizens in the political process. This will be tested on the case of 205 Czech municipalities with extended scope of authority in the current electoral period (since 2014). The main dependent variable is a composite index measuring openness of a government and degree of how citizens are involved. Two clusters of indicators can be identified. The first one is transparency and openness consisting of online broadcast of legislative debates, open data and transparent accounting. All indicating transparency and openness, though also mechanisms that can improve democracy to be more deliberative. The second cluster of variables indicates possibilities of citizens involvement such as participatory budgeting, participatory urban planning, and geoparticipation (emotional maps). The study is relevant because empirically explore the effects of modern deliberative technique on civic participation. The local politics is crucial for proper functioning democracy. Local governments redistribute large share of taxes. Deliberative local governments might foster civic participation and particularly trust dimension of social capital. This is of particular importance in the recently democratized region.