Citizen involvement in subnational governance: innovations, trends and questions

Abstract

This chapter discusses initiatives for involving citizens in local and regional democracies. We examine initiatives that take an aggregative and majoritarian approach to citizen involvement, promoting a range of direct and plebiscitary additions to representative democracy. And we look at initiatives of participatory and deliberative democracy which take an integrative, non-majoritarian approach to public decision-making and public involvement. Reviewing the development of these initiatives, 2008 does not appear to be a dramatic turning point. The general trend is one of steady expansion and a broadening of initiatives that supplement representative democracy. Comparing 2020 with 2008, however, we conclude that there is an ever-expanding number and variety of citizen-involvement initiatives, that these initiatives do not replace existing democracy, but do potentially change how it works and thus also trigger fundamental questions about democratic rule, and that new ways of involving citizens by using digital tools are becoming more common.