How Participatory and Deliberative is your Municipality? Measuring Participatory, Deliberative and Direct Democratic Possibilities at the Sub-national Level

How participatory and deliberative is your municipality? This question has become salient during the last few decades, as cities and municipalities have adopted democratic innovations at an accelerating pace. The availability – both in terms of type and number – of these participatory channels, however, varies dramatically depending on where one lives. This variation within countries is the Achilles’ heel in empirical research of democratic innovations that aims to identify both favorable conditions for the adoption of these institutions and their causal effects on the democratic process and attitudes. There is also a growing need to describe political units according to the extent to which they enable citizen participation outside elections, in order to control for this aspect in multilevel analyses that have become a methodological gold standard. This paper develops and discusses two approaches for measuring the “participatoriness” of sub-national units of government. The first approach focuses on the participatory toolbox of a local government unit, and looks which participatory channels tend to co-exist in different types of municipalities. It is based on clustering these units according to the participatory channels they offer. The second approach takes democratic and bureaucratic values as a starting point, and describes how well the combination of participatory channels fulfills these criteria – such as deliberativeness, inclusiveness and effectiveness. These participatory scores are based on researcher-led weighing of different participatory instruments. In the end of the paper, the potential use of these measures is illustrated with an exploratory analysis on the preconditions for democratic innovations in Finnish municipalities (N=320).