The policy impacts of public participation

Abstract

The democratic world is facing crises in representation, participation, and political legitimacy. An increasing number of governments and scholars are moving away from traditional conceptions of democracies, which revolve around regular elections and representative politicians, and hoping solutions can be found in the promise of democratic innovations in public participation. However, this field is novel, and little is known about when democratic innovations are successful at ameliorating these crises and the reasons as to why. Even seemingly simple concepts such as what ‘success’ ought to constitute are far from agreed upon. Focussing on cases in the UK and Ireland, this thesis uses cases drawn from the Participedia dataset, validated through comparison to official evaluator documentation, to determine what conditions facilitate policy-impacting success and which do not. Through a comparative analysis of 35 cases, this research argues that there is no one singular condition which makes or breaks a DI’s success, but rather a combination of conditions. The results show that successful policy-impacting is largely down to the preferences of target politicians, and that facilitating conditions merely act to attract or maintain these relationships. This suggests that DIs are still reliant on the elite political actors and institutions who have suffered from the losses of democratic trust and legitimacy. However, this need not be the case, and lessons from this thesis can be used to better design DIs and their political environment in the future.<br/