Letting Citizens In? Party Positions on Participatory Democracy at the Local Level

Local governments increasingly adopt diverse forms of citizen participation in policy-making. Through mechanisms such as advisory boards, participatory budgeting, and referenda, citizens are offered opportunities to directly influence policies that affect their everyday lives. While scholarly research on citizen participation is extensive, political parties’ positions toward these “new” participatory arrangements remain comparatively understudied, particularly at the municipal level. This lacuna is surprising, given that parties make up local governments and, as a consequence, design citizen participation policies. This paper addresses this gap by systematically mapping local parties’ positions on citizen participation using a dataset of 1,100 election manifestos from almost all municipalities in Flanders (Belgium). Through a dictionary-based coding of these documents, we uncover how parties articulate their views on participatory democracy and identify variations in their approaches. By doing so, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the role political parties play in shaping participatory governance at the local level.