Consenting Participation? How Demands for Citizen Participation and Expert-Led Decision-Making Are Reconciled in Local Democracy

Butzlaff, Felix ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6247-3194 (2022) Consenting Participation? How Demands for Citizen Participation and Expert-Led Decision-Making Are Reconciled in Local Democracy. Political Studies Review. ISSN 1478-9302

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Abstract

The rising participatory demands of citizens have been addressed with a variety of democratic innovations. However, increasing demands for democratization have been accompanied by a parallel rise in scepticism and doubt about the capabilities of representative democracies to ensure policy efficacy. I seek to address this democratic ambivalence by focusing on the demands for citizen participation in the context of local democracy. In a series of qualitative interviews, and using Vienna’s Seestadt Aspern, Europe’s biggest city development project, as an illustration, I examine (a) bottom-up and top-down understandings of democracy and participation among administration, city-planners and citizens and (b) strategies to reconcile inconsistent expectations of participation. I show that conflicting understandings of participation are dealt with in different settings and that, despite a public commitment to democratic participation, citizens, city-planners and administration alike expect a democratically concealed yet controlled management process allegedly ensuring more efficacious policy decisions.

Item Type:	Article
Divisions:	Departments > Sozioökonomie > Gesellschaftswandel und Nachhaltigkeit
Version of the Document:	Published
Variance from Published Version:	None
Depositing User:	Felix Butzlaff
Date Deposited:	04 May 2022 20:02
Last Modified:	04 May 2022 20:02
Related URLs:	Publisher
FIDES Link:	https://bach.wu.ac.at/d/research/results/104059/
URI:	https://epub.wu.ac.at/id/eprint/8616

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