Citizen Participation and the Policy Process

Dialogue-oriented forms of citizen participation are of growing empirical relevance. As supplement to procedures required by law, round tables, public meetings, open fora etc. are said to facilitate democratic inclusion, improve decisions, reduce conflicts, generate acceptance, strengthen the community, and countervail disenchantment with politics – at least in the long run (Michels 2012; Vetter et al. 2015). Within the political process, the function of informal participatory procedures (PP) lies in resolving societal conflicts in the broadest sense of the term. Perceived legitimacy of results and policy-measures may be seen as indicator of successful conflict resolution. But as informal PP do not end in authoritative decisions, it remains unclear, how they develop impact within the macro political process in which the decision is ultimately located and consequently how they contribute to the legitimacy of political decisions. The conventionally used distinction between modes of participation (e.g. Arnstein 1969) is not adequate to research dynamics of participatory processes. It detracts from the actual question concerning their embedding in the greater political arena and suggests a picture in which the political-administrative system acts in sharp distinction to the citizens and other relevant societal subsystems. As a consequence, dependencies and exchange processes relevant to conflict resolution may be overlooked. We argue, that it is necessary to view PP as one arena among others that process societal conflicts and try to affect policy-decisions at least indirectly. This perspective aims at modelling PP as elements of a macro political process and asks for the causal mechanisms that explain, how certain conditions within the participatory process contribute to the processing of political issues on a societal level. Additionally, it has to account for the dynamics that arise from arguing and bargaining and which affect the beliefs of participants and observers. Aim of the proposed paper is to set out a framework for a theory-based analysis of PP. Instead of reviewing participation against ostensible criteria like transparency or levels of information, the evaluation of dialogue-oriented democratic innovations should focus on their actual political function. We will argue, that the implementation of PP ultimately aims at the legitimacy of political decisions and the acceptance of subsequent measures. Consequently, PP have to be examined with reference to their embeddedness within a policy domain and the function they serve in the political process. The current state of research does not provide an adequate framework to capture and describe this issue. In addition, current evaluation only insufficiently accounts for differences between procedural criteria and outcome criteria and is not sensitive to the conditionality of the proposed effects. To address these shortcomings, we argue that the participatory procedure has to be analysed with regard to its integration in the macro political policy process and that the qualities and structural properties of a participatory process have to be assessed more differentiated. For this purpose, we utilise the advocacy coalition framework as macro perspective to locate the PP within the policy process and combine it with a model of the deliberative quality of the participatory procedure itself.