The multifaceted challenges of contemporary governance demand a complex account of the ways in which those who are subject to laws and policies should participate in making them. This article ...develops a framework for understanding the range of institutional possibilities for public participation. Mechanisms of participation vary along three important dimensions: who participates, how participants communicate with one another and make decisions together, and how discussions are linked with policy or public action. These three dimensions constitute a space in which any particular mechanism of participation can be located. Different regions of this institutional design space are more and less suited to addressing important problems of democratic governance such as legitimacy, justice, and effective administration.
Empowered participation Fung, Archon
Princeton University Press,
2009., 20090110, 2009, 2004, 2006-00-00, 2004-01-01, 20040101
eBook, Book
Every month in every neighborhood in Chicago, residents, teachers, school principals, and police officers gather to deliberate about how to improve their schools and make their streets safer. ...Residents of poor neighborhoods participate as much or more as those from wealthy ones. All voices are heard. Since the meetings began more than a dozen years ago, they have led not only to safer streets but also to surprising improvements in the city's schools. Chicago's police department and school system have become democratic urban institutions unlike any others in America.
Empowered Participationis the compelling chronicle of this unprecedented transformation. It is the first comprehensive empirical analysis of the ways in which participatory democracy can be used to effect social change. Using city-wide data and six neighborhood case studies, the book explores how determined Chicago residents, police officers, teachers, and community groups worked to banish crime and transform a failing city school system into a model for educational reform. The author's conclusion: Properly designed and implemented institutions of participatory democratic governance can spark citizen involvement that in turn generates innovative problem-solving and public action. Their participation makes organizations more fair and effective.
Though the book focuses on Chicago's municipal agencies, its lessons are applicable to many American cities. Its findings will prove useful not only in the fields of education and law enforcement, but also to sectors as diverse as environmental regulation, social service provision, and workforce development.
This article develops two conceptual tools to synthesize democratic theory and the empirical study of institutions. The first is a standard to assess conceptions of democracy called pragmatic ...equilibrium. A conception of democracy is in pragmatic equilibrium just in case the consequences of its institutional prescriptions realize its values well and better than any other feasible institutional arrangements across a wide range of problems and contexts. Pragmatic equilibrium is a kind of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium. The second is a method of practical reasoning about the consequences of alternative institutional choices that brings conceptions of democracy closer to pragmatic equilibrium. These two ideas are then applied to four conceptions of democracy—minimal, aggregative, deliberative, and participatory—and to two governance problems—deciding rules of political structure and minority tyranny—to show how each conception can improve through reflection on the empirical consequences of various institutional arrangements.
Full Disclosure Fung, Archon; Graham, Mary; Weil, David
03/2007
eBook
Odprti dostop
Governments in recent decades have employed public disclosure strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these targeted ...transparency policies include financial securities disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens. However, as Full Disclosure shows these policies are frequently ineffective or counterproductive. Based on a comparative analysis of eighteen major policies, the authors suggest that transparency policies often produce information that is incomplete, incomprehensible, or irrelevant to the consumers, investors, workers, and community residents who could benefit from them. Sometimes transparency fails because those who are threatened by it form political coalitions to limit or distort information. To be successful, transparency policies must place the needs of ordinary citizens at centre stage and produce information that informs their everyday choices.
Since the first generation of deliberative democratic theory, and the ‘deliberative turn’ in the 1990s, many societies around the world have become more institutionally fragile, multi-dimensionally ...unjust, and deeply divided. Does deliberative democracy have a constructive role to play in in these more challenging times in politics? As scholars of deliberation widen their ambit to explore broader forms of political communication, interactions between directly deliberative and non-deliberative institutions, and the roles for forms of highly adversarial political action, developments in deliberative democratic theory can help to guide efforts to strengthen our institutions in the short term and create political arrangements that are more just and democratic in the longer term.
The past two decades have seen a proliferation of large- and small-scale experiments in participatory governance. This article takes stock of claims about the potential of citizen participation to ...advance three values of democratic governance: effectiveness, legitimacy, and social justice. Increasing constraints on the public sector in many societies, combined with increasing demand for individual engagement and the affordances of digital technology, have paved the way for participatory innovations aimed at effective governance. Deepening legitimation deficits of representative government create opportunities for legitimacy-enhancing forms of citizen participation, but so far, the effect of participation on legitimacy is unclear. Efforts to increase social justice through citizen participation face the greatest obstacles. The article concludes by highlighting three challenges to creating successful participatory governance: the absence of systematic leadership, the lack of popular or elite consensus on the place of direct citizen participation, and the limited scope and powers of participatory innovations.
In Infotopia, citizens enjoy a wide range of information about the organizations upon which they rely for the satisfaction of their vital interests. The provision of that information is governed by ...principles of democratic transparency. Democratic transparency both extends and critiques current enthusiasms about transparency. It urges us to conceptualize information politically, as a resource to turn the behavior of large organizations in socially beneficial ways. Transparency efforts have targets, and we should think of those targets as large organizations: public and civic, but especially private and corporate. Democratic transparency consists of four principles. First, information about the operations and actions of large organizations that affect citizens’ interests should be rich, deep, and readily available to the public. Second, the amount of available information should be proportionate to the extent to which those organizations jeopardize citizens’ interests. Third, information should be organized and provided in ways that are accessible to individuals and groups that use that information. Finally, the social, political, and economic structures of society should be organized in ways that allow individuals and groups to take action based on Infotopia’s public disclosures.
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