This article calls for the development of democratic hybrids that combine elements of representative democracy with elements of participatory and deliberative democracy. It presents and evaluates an ...empirical model of hybrid democracy from a Danish municipality and tests whether the positive Danish experiences can be transferred to a Norwegian municipality with less favorable local conditions. The finding is that the hybrid model of democracy is relatively robust in the face of context variation, not least due to conducive local dynamics in the Norwegian case. The relative robustness of the so‐called ‘Gentofte model’ may stimulate its diffusion in countries sharing key elements of the Scandinavian model and inspire municipalities in other countries to experiment with the development of hybrid democracy. The diffusion of hybrid democracy helps to enhance the overall performance of local democracy and reduce the inherent tension between democratic leadership and democratic equality.
Are populist parties bad for representative democracy or are they filling a representative gap? While it has been broadly established that the emergence and success of populist parties is not merely ...a sign of protest, there is still a sparsity of empirical investigations into whether these parties represent hitherto under- or unrepresented social groups or whether they offer a policy profile that was in demand but not present. Using Pitkin’s concepts of symbolic, descriptive and substantive representation, this article opens up the dimensions in which populist parties might challenge or aid democratic representation. It then places the articles in the Special Issue ‘Populist Representation of, by and for the People?’ along these dimensions and highlights their specific contributions.
Core values, which can be defined as prescriptive beliefs about government and society, help ordinary citizens to reason about politics in a principled and efficacious manner. As such, core values ...have appeal for mass politics and representative democracy. To fulfill this role, core values should possess several characteristics. Chief among these are resistance to elite influence and trans‐situationalism, that is, the ability to guide political evaluations across different contexts. Despite their importance for mass politics, it is unclear as to how well core values fulfill these criteria. I examine this here by testing whether core values can be systematically primed by electoral campaigns. That is, I test whether core values can be made, by political elites, to matter more in certain situations over others. I do this by using observational data from the 2012 and 2016 ANES, along with data from a nationally representative survey experiment, originally fielded in 2005. Overall, I find little evidence to suggest that electoral campaigns can prime citizens’ core values. These findings have implications for our understanding of value systems, electoral campaigns, and public opinion.
Can deliberative mini‐publics contribute to deepening the democratic dimensions of electoral democracies? The question is framed in this article using a problem‐based approach to democratic theory–to ...count as democratic, political systems must accomplish three basic functions related to inclusion, communication and deliberation, and decision making. This approach is elaborated with an analysis of a real‐world case: a deliberative mini‐public with a citizens’ assembly design, focused on urban planning convened in Vancouver, Canada. This example was chosen because the context was one in which the city's legacy institutions of representative democracy had significant democratic deficits in all three areas, and the mini‐public was a direct response to these deficits. It was found that Vancouver's deliberative mini‐public helped policy makers, activists and affected residents move a stalemated planning process forward, and did do so in ways that improved the democratic performance of the political system. Depending on when and how they are sequenced into democratic processes, deliberative mini‐publics can supplement existing legacy institutions and practices to deepen their democratic performance.
Why, when, and how does populism emerge in a stable democracy? This article investigates the political logic and ideological appeal of a rarely explored form of populism: technocratic populism. ...Technocratic populism uses the appeal of technical expertise to connect directly with the people, promising to run the state as a firm, while at the same time delegitimizing political opponents and demobilizing the electorate by instilling civic apathy. Technocratic populism is an anti-elite ideology that exploits competence to create the appearance of authenticity and proximity to ordinary people. It is less exclusionary than nativist or economic forms of populisms and its broad appeal is therefore arguably more threatening to representative democracy. In order to understand the appeal of technocratic populism, as well as why it arises at critical junctures when dominant ideologies are in turmoil, we argue that one must not ignore its historical roots, which shows that it transcends both regime changes and the traditional left–right divide. The article develops and examines these points using evidence from communist-era populist campaigns against “elitist” dissidents (from Charter 77) in the Czech Republic, and demonstrates how post-1989 politicians have exploited and also adapted ideas and strategies from the authoritarian past for the new democratic setting. The article highlights the adaptive character of technocratic populism across political regimes.
There is a growing body of empirical research on democracies with strong or weak deliberative and/or direct democratic features. But how do these features affect the performance of a country? How do ...participatory types of democracies differ considering system performance, democratic performance, and social performance? Which type is more successful? Although these questions are most crucial and pressing in democracy research, they remain mostly unexplored. Our explorative study is a start to fill this gap. It analyzes which participatory types of democracies perform better: countries with less or more deliberation, countries with less or more direct democratic elements, countries that score high or low on both features. Based on several datasets and applying different statistical tools, we show that the associations between these types of democracy and performance are multifaceted. The most important finding, however, is clear-cut. Democracies with strong deliberative as well as strong direct democratic features perform better than other democracies. Combining deliberation with direct democracy seems to be the optimal formula to guarantee high social, system, and democratic performance. However, many questions remain open and we discuss the need for future research.
In this paper, we explore how state-led regulatory planning is utilised to push for delivery of an urban megaproject (UMP) in the specific context of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Our ...focus is on the large-scale brownfield redevelopment project ‘Belgrade Waterfront’ under implementation in the Serbian capital, a joint venture between the Republic of Serbia and Abu Dhabi-based investor Eagle Hills. We show this UMP to be an extreme example of state-led regulatory intervention, characterised by lack of transparency and haste in decision-making processes, all of which serve to prioritise private investors’ interests in project delivery above the principles of representative democracy. Through analysis of legislative and planning documents, expert reports and media coverage from the period between 2012 and 2017, we explore the legislative mechanisms, contractual strategies and modes of governance involved in the project’s delivery. This provides two insights: first, it reveals that, in contrast with the active role of local governments in conceiving entrepreneurial strategies that is often assumed today, in the case of Belgrade Waterfront, the national government has instead played the decisive role; second, it shows how modifications to national law were instrumental in defining public interest, in enabling certain types of contracts to become technically legal, and in minimising risks for the private investor. We conclude by highlighting the need to further conceptualise nation-state politics and autocratic rule as driving forces of urban development processes.
本文探讨了在后社会主义中东欧的特定背景中，国家主导的监管规划如何被利用来推动城市大型项目的交付。我们的重点是塞尔维亚共和国与阿布扎比投资者鹰山公司合资在塞尔维亚首都实施的大规模棕地重建项目“贝尔格莱德海滨”。我们展示的这个城市大型项目是国家主导的监管干预的一个极端例子，其特点是决策过程仓促而缺乏透明度，造成了在项目交付中优先考虑私人投资者的利益而牺牲代议制民主的原则。通过分析 2012 年至 2017 年期间的立法和规划文件、专家报告和媒体报道，我们探讨了项目交付涉及的立法机制、合同战略和治理模式。我们得出了两点见解：首先，当今通常以为地方政府在构思企业家战略中发挥积极作用，但在贝尔格莱德海滨的例子中，分析表明反而是国家政府发挥了决定性的作用；其次，分析表明了国家法律的修订如何有助于界定公共利益，从而使某些类型的合同变得在技术上合法，并最大限度地降低私人投资者的风险。最后，我们强调需要进一步将民族国家政治和专制统治理解为城市发展进程的驱动力。
Direct-democratic instruments are often seen as a cure for the current disenchantment with representative democracy. While research has begun to investigate whether direct-democratic instruments ...match the procedural preferences of populist citizens, it is an under-researched question whether populist citizens and populist voters would actually participate in direct-democratic voting. This study advances existing research by focussing both on direct-democratic preferences and effective direct-democratic participation of different types of populist citizens in Germany-populist voters on the right and left and citizens with general populist attitudes. Analyses based on survey data from 2018 show that while populist citizens and right-wing populist voters display strong attitudinal sympathy for direct-democratic instruments, especially right-wing populist voters fail effectively to participate in direct-democratic voting. Those who strongly participate in direct-democratic procedures are sophisticated and postmaterialist citizens whose preferences hardly align with those of right-wing populist voters and citizens, widening rather than closing the 'representation gap'.
For the second time in the history of the Fifth Republic, the candidates of France's former mainstream left- and right-wing parties were disqualified during the first round of the presidential ...elections. The repetition of the duel between Emmanuel Macron (centrist candidate) and Marine Le Pen (radical-right candidate) in the second round of the presidential election marks the durable transformation of the political space in French politics, an evolution that was already taking shape in 2017. The 2022 parliamentary elections confirmed the transformation and reconfiguration of the political landscape. Overall, the results of the elections in 2022 underscore major shifts in the party system as well as deep political fragmentations not only on the left but also, and in particular, on the right. Above all, the poor level of turnout in both elections reconfirms the considerable and enduring crisis of representative democracy in France.
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