Regimes and Participatory Governance: Democracies, Autocracies, and Converging Practices

This chapter reveals the hidden normative assumptions in operation when scholars study non-electoral forms of participation in different political regimes, and argues that the function of such participation may be more similar than is currently assumed. It uses participatory budgeting (PB) as a case of non-electoral public participation to explore how it is framed and conceptualized in the literature on democracies and the literature on autocracies. It finds that entirely different interpretive frameworks are used in each: in the former, PB is referred to as a “democratic innovation” with its primary benefit seen as strengthening citizen’s trust in democratic institutions and adding epistemic value to public policies through citizens’ own lived experience. In the latter PB is referred to as a “participatory mechanism” and is considered to enhance authoritarian stability and overall state capacity. Challenging these dichotomous portrayals, the chapter draws on the authors’ prior research across Europe, China and Russia to show that the outcome of PB is largely the same across regime types: the production of consent in government-organized participatory processes that function to improve governance outcomes, mostly producing consensus for the status quo, whether formally liberal “democratic” or “authoritarian”.