Politicians and Civil Servants’ Preferences for Participatory Policy Making

Participatory mechanisms are suggested as helping address problems of representative democracy by bringing citizens closer to policymaking. Mechanisms include varieties of ‘deliberative democracy’, especially deliberative polls and mini-publics, and these have been applied across countries and policy areas (Fishkin 2018; Landemore 2020; OCED 2020; Smith 2009). However, despite research about citizens’ preferences for participatory mechanisms (Goldberg, Lindell and Baechtiger 2024) we know little about politicians and public managers’ views. This gap matters because it is public officials who typically decide about their use and the specific features adopted. This study asks: what are civil servants and politicians’ preferences about using participatory mechanisms? Specifically, what are their preferences about different forms suggested as important in the literature on participation: forms of recruitment, size, the involvement of citizens or others (including preferences about the involvement of different age groups), the degree of consensus, the decisiveness of decision, the formal power of the decision, and the outputs. The findings have implications for the design of participatory institutions and understanding reasons for particular forms of their use, or failure to be used, by public organisations.