citizen participation and democratic...
TRANSCRIPT
Citizen Participation and Democratic Deficits: Considerations from the Perspective of Democratic Theory
(forthcoming in Activating the Citizen.
Edited by Joan DeBardeleben and Jon Pammett. Palgave MacMillan)
Mark E. Warren
Are there political problems faced by the developed democracies to which more
citizen participation is the answer?1 From the perspective of democratic theory, the
answer is clear and long-standing. Governments should be responsive to citizens as a
consequence of citizen participation, through elections, pressure, public deliberation,
petitioning, or other conduits. For these forms of participation to function democratically,
all affected by the decisions of a government should have the opportunity to influence
those decisions, in proportion to their stake in the outcome. From a normative
perspective, governments are in democratic deficit when political arrangements fail the
expectation that participation should elicit government responsiveness. From an empirical
perspective, governments are in democratic deficit when their citizens come to believe
that they cannot use their participatory opportunities and resources to achieve
responsiveness. From a functional perspective, governments are in democratic deficit
when they are unable to generate the legitimacy from democratic sources they need to
govern.
My aim in this chapter is to clarify the question of democratic deficits as they
relate to the participatory elements of democracy. What would it mean to understand the
participatory features of the developed democracies as ‘in deficit’? To address this
1 I am grateful to Joan DeBardeleben for providing many of the examples from the European Union as well as paragraphs on pp. 10, 11, and 15, and suggested wording elsewhere. I thank Hilary Pearse and Laura Montanaro for their research assistance.
question, I distinguish two kinds of participatory issues within the broader problem of
democratic deficits. The first, deficits in formal institutions of electoral democracy, are
well-recognized and well-researched. The second is more recent and distinctive: deficits
have appeared in the many new forms of ‘citizen engagement’, which have developed in
response to deficits in electoral democracy. Following this distinction, I suggest that each
kind of deficit requires distinct, though complementary, approaches. The first kind of
deficit calls for institutional reforms, such as the redesign of electoral systems,
parliamentary institutions, and basic constitutional changes, so that they are more
responsive, and have greater capacities for information gathering, deliberation, and policy
formation. The second kind of deficit calls for what I shall call the ‘retrofitting’ existing
institutions: designing new forms of democracy which supplement and complement the
formal institutions of electoral democracy, primarily in those functional policy areas
where electoral institutions now have weak capacities to generate democratic legitimacy.
The Concept of a Democratic Deficit
The term ‘democratic deficit’ originated in discussions about the political
integration of the European Union (EU) (Bellamy and Castiglione 2000). As a problem
frame, the EU debate does not directly generalize to the developed democracies, as the
EU is not a ‘state’ but rather a federation that emerged as an incremental consequence of
market integration under the direction of the European Commission. The claim that the
EU is in ‘democratic deficit’ reflected not a democratic past that was eroding, but rather
the growing democratic expectations that came with political integration, combined with
institutions—the European Parliament in particular—that can and should be measured
according to democratic norms. Measured in these terms, the EU was (and is) found
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wanting, with expectations evolving more quickly than the institutions. In the early
1990s, ‘permissive consensus’, which enabled the elite-brokered rule that underpinned
the EU was thrown into question by the Danish and French referendums on the Maastrich
Treaty (Norris 1997). It is unclear whether representative institutions can generate the
legitimacy to replace the permissive consensus. Turnout for European Parliament
elections is low, and parties focused on Europe-wide issues have yet to form, leaving
candidates to focus on national issues. Much policy continues to be formed by relatively
independent regulatory commissions. There is little worry that the EU might become an
illegitimate tyranny: its structure is relatively ‘safe’ in that it is well checked by national
governments, judicial review, and elections (Moravcsik 2002). But it is not clear whether
the EU can find the democratic legitimacy to push forward with a deeper integration—
that is, it lacks the responsive flexibility that a confident and connected people will give
its government (Follesdal and Hix 2006; Pammett, this volume).
Although the institutional differences between the EU and the established
democracies do not allow direct comparison, at a broader level the EU serves as a
limiting metaphor for a more general condition. It is in this sense that the ‘democratic
deficit’ metaphor is apt, as it suggests a set of problems that are well short of crisis.
Neither the EU nor the established democracies—the vast number of which are EU
members—are failing. Over the last several decades, there has been little to bear out the
1975 predictions of the Trilateral Commission’s Crisis of Democracy, which expressed
the fear that an excess of political demand would cause democratic institutions to revert
to authoritarianism. The problems of the developed democracies today are less dramatic,
consisting in a widespread citizen malaise with respect to the formal institutions, and
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common views among citizens that political institutions underperform. The ‘deficit’
concept suggests that we think about democratic malaise structurally, as a misalignment
between citizen capacities and demands, and in terms of the capacities of political
institutions to aggregate citizen demands and integrate them into legitimate and effective
governance.
From this perspective, the EU challenges look much like those common to the
developed democracies. The list is well-known. As it must protect national identities and
interests as well as minorities, the EU cannot function as a majoritarian manner, and thus
lacks the capacity for decisiveness. It handles some protections through federal
structures, others though subsidiarity, and still others through independent judicial
review. Most developed democracies are evolving along similar trajectories. In addition,
the EU functions to regulate trade and market integration, responding less to citizens than
to market forces, which in itself requires regulatory processes that are relatively insulated
from ‘politics’—including democratic politics. Likewise for the developed democracies.
Finally, over the last half century or so, governing has become increasingly technical and
complex: no citizen can hope to know more than a tiny fraction of the business of
government. The result, of course, is that government is very much a matter for experts,
who at best attempt to uphold the public trust, and at worst govern as disconnected
technocrats.
Our received models of electoral democracy have had the advantage of clear lines
of direction from, and accountability to, majorities or majority coalitions. Outside of
questions as to whether ‘majoritarianism’ should be equated with democracy (it should
not), the electoral machinery of democracies is an increasingly poor fit with the complex,
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pluralistic, multi-level business that governing has become. Our societies now seem to be
developing more rapidly than their institutions of government—in terms of citizen
expectations and values, in terms of complexity and demands for sophisticated
performances, in terms of pluralism, and in terms of levels and scales of organization.
Under these circumstances, the most common and least costly form of citizen
participation—voting for representatives—has less functional value.
Yet these developments do not make citizen participation less important for
governing. It is because democracies build in responsiveness and accountability to the
people that they have reflexive capacities to form collective wills. Democracies enable
their societies to benefit from evolving consensus where possible. Where consensus
remains elusive, democracies transform conflict into discourse, where it can serve a
creative rather than destructive role. At the limit, democratic deficits undermine the
capacities of democratic political systems to evolve and reform into ever more effective
and legitimate agents of citizens. The notion of a ‘democratic deficit’ calibrates the
problem: the misalignment in the established democracies is not a ‘crisis.’ Rather, the
concept identifies long-term problems which, if left unattended, are likely to gradually
undermine the legitimacy and capacities of governments.
What Should We Expect? Participation and Trust
To what extent can democratic deficits be narrowed through more citizen
participation? This dimension of the question also requires perspective, since the same
trends that open deficits may also limit participatory responses. Those who first
emphasized the complexity of governing and its strategic consequences—Max Weber
and Joseph Schumpeter—concluded that effective citizen participation is limited to
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choosing an elite in competitive elections. In the face of governing structures that depend
upon professionals and favour concentrated power, citizens can at best play a passive and
mostly retrospective role in checking elites who abuse their offices. These expectations
have empirical relevance even today. In a study of citizen views of participation in the
US, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2002) argue that citizens do not like ‘politics’; they
would prefer that politicians do their jobs while they get on with their lives. On average,
citizens are averse to conflict. They are interested neither in the constant engagement
necessary to communicate their preferences (when they have them), nor in disciplining
politicians to attend to them. Rather, they want to trust politicians to look after the public
good—though, of course, their trust is often disappointed, which in turn reinforces
disaffection. Those who believe more participation is the answer to democratic deficits,
Hibbing and Theiss-Morse argue, are waging an uphill battle.
Although Hibbing and Theiss-Morse overstate their case (Dalton 2007), such
studies are important for calibrating expectations for participation in a healthy democracy
(Moravcsik 2002; Van Deth 2000). No citizen can attend to, let alone master, every
decision that affects them. Nor, given the range of possible activities and satisfactions in
today’s societies, should we expect citizens to choose attentiveness to politics—
particularly conflict-oriented politics—over competing forms of engagement: family,
friends, occupations, hobbies, recreation, and entertainment. In the developed
democracies with their high degrees of institutional and system differentiation, political
organization does not encompasses these other domains, and so citizens are faced with
trade-offs. From an economic perspective, the political resources any citizen is able to
marshal will be scarce.
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A good democracy should enable citizens to optimize their political resources.
Ideally, citizens should be able to focus their lowest cost resource—voting—on choosing
representatives who will fight most of their battles and protect most of their interests.
They may join associations that fight other battles. In both cases, citizens would judge
whether their interests align closely enough with their representatives—whether they are
formally elected or informally selected—that they can trust them as political proxies
(Warren 1996, 2000). To participate in these ways, citizens do not need to participate
directly in decision-making, but they do need to know something about their
representatives’ trustworthiness, based on judgments about alignments of interests and
value. They need to participate to the extent that they can ensure that they are, in fact,
being represented. In many areas of government—typically those overseen by executive
bureaucracies or quasi-judicial commissions—citizens may simply decide that public
officials share their interests, and will uphold the trust placed in them by the public. They
may decide that their representative proxies will alert them when and if their trust appears
misplaced. Under these circumstances, citizens would be able to allocate their high-cost
political resources to the few areas where political conflicts exist—where they have
reason to mistrust government or their representatives—and where the investment of
knowledge, time, and attentiveness may make a difference. In this way, a healthy
democracy would enable citizens to divide their relationships to government between
those of active participation and those of trust based on informed deference. In turn, this
division of labour would enable citizens to deploy their political resources to those issues
that are most contested, and to which trust is least warranted. The political institutions of
a democracy should strive to underwrite these participatory expectations.
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Even measured against these more modest expectations, however, political
institutions in established democracies are in deficit. The easiest form of participation,
voting, has been stagnant at best in established democracies over the last several decades
(Franklin et. al. 2004, 11), and in EU elections has been at markedly lower levels than in
national votes. Citizens are now more likely to distrust their political institutions—
particularly legislatures—than a few decades ago. They are more likely to judge that
government performance has deteriorated. They are less inclined to identify with political
parties, which remain the key institutions for translating public opinion into government
(Pharr and Putnam 2000, Rosenblum 2008). As in other advanced democracies, voting
turnout in Canada has declined in recent decades (reaching a record low at the federal
level of 60.9 per cent of eligible voters in 2004, with a slight rebound in the competitive
election in 2006 (Elections Canada 2006). And, in Canada as in the EU, elite-brokered
constitutional referendums have failed to pass muster with the voters (LeDuc, this
volume, Johnston et al. 1996).
Other developments also suggest that political institutions based on electoral
representation are failing to generate the legitimacy necessary for many government
functions. Innovations driven by gridlocked government and poorly performing programs
began a few decades ago, as evidenced by the rapid proliferation of ‘public engagement’
devices including, for example, citizen juries and panels, advisory councils, stakeholder
meetings, lay members of professional review boards, representations at public hearings,
public submissions, citizen surveys, deliberative polling, deliberative forums, focus
groups, and advocacy group representations (Cain, et. al. 2003; Smith 2005, 2008; Gastil
and Levine 2005; Fung 2006a). These developments are not in themselves evidence of
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democratic deficits in electoral institutions, but they do suggest that there is much
necessary political work generated within complex, pluralized democracies is not
accomplished through formal electoral democracy.
While the general patterns of disaffection are clear, the causes are not. There is
disagreement as to whether the political disengagement of citizens should be attributed to
the poor performance of political institutions (Pharr and Putnam 2000, Dalton 2004); to
the increasing capacities of new generations of better educated, more informed, less
deferential citizens to be critical of those institutions (Dalton 2004; Inglehart 1997;
Nevitte 1996; Norris 1999); to a broader civic phenomenon of declining participation in
the social groups and networks that are vital to foster norms of trust and reciprocity
(Putnam 1995, 2000); or to a fundamental popular distaste for the conflict-ridden
messiness of politics and a general disinterest in public policy debates (Hibbing and
Theiss-Morse 2001, 2002).
Electoral Representation Deficits
Not every actionable diagnosis requires that causes be pinpointed precisely.
Deficits in electoral representation are a case in point: because electoral representation
forms the most visible connective tissue between the people and decision-makers, issues
here are likely to be interconnected with most of the possible causes of democratic
deficits. While I do not address causalities here, their relevance to normative democratic
theory depends on how we cast the normative expectations. What should electoral
representation achieve, normatively speaking?
All forms of electoral representation share three formal features which specify the
extent to which they have democratic content. Through elections representatives are
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authorized to represent those who inhabit geographical constituencies. Electoral
representation is held to be egalitarian and inclusive owing to the universal franchise.
Every member of an electoral unit, excluding those unfit or not yet fit to exercise the
responsibilities of citizenship, is entitled to one vote. Subsequent elections function to
hold representatives accountable for their performance while in office (Pitkin 1967;
Mansbridge 2003; Urbinati and Warren 2008, Warren 2008). These three features include
normative criteria: institutions that are inadequate or incomplete in one or more of these
dimensions are also less than democratic—they are ‘in deficit’ from a democratic
perspective.
In practice, democratic deficits appear in each of these three dimensions of
representation (see, e.g., Fung 2006a). With respect to authorization, for example,
citizens may have unstable preferences which are neither adequately formed by the
electoral process, nor communicated by the blunt instrument of the vote. Elected leaders
often claim mandates based on very thin evidence, since voting is information poor.
Single Member Plurality (SMP) systems compound the information problem by limiting
the choices of voters, usually to a maximum of two viable parties. The stagnation of
voting itself diminishes the significance of electoral authorization. In the 2006 federal
election in Canada, for example, the Conservatives were able to form a government based
on a 36.3 percent share of the vote. But because turnout was only 64.7 percent, the
government was authorized by a mere 23.5 percent of eligible voters. This outcome may
in part be the result of the preference of the strongest political party to form a ‘minority
government’ rather than a multi-party coalition, as is more common in Europe,
particularly in countries with proportional representation electoral systems. However, a
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similar phenomenon can arise as a result of other institutional arrangements and political
practices as well.
Another problem is that the roles of political parties are increasingly ambiguous.
In theory, parties put forward platforms for which they seek authorization; in doing so,
they enable voters to authorize substantive policy preferences. Yet broad declines in party
identification suggest that party elites should have less confidence that votes are
signalling approval or disapproval of a party’s proposal policies and positions—a deficit
that is particularly pronounced in Canada, where voters are four to five times more likely
to declare an absence of partisan ties than Americans or Britons (Clarke and Stewart
1998, 368-69, Cross and Crysler, this volume). While levels of partisan identification
vary across European countries, at the EU level citizens find it hard to view
parliamentary elections as a contest between competing political parties, partly because
of the weakness of Europe-wide party groups and partly because these elections are often
understood as ‘second order’ politics, that is, commentaries on national politics rather
than on EU-level issues (LeDuc, 2007, pp. 142-43).
Indeed, advocacy groups are increasingly displacing political parties as key
conduits of public opinion, though we have yet to understand and assess their connections
to electoral authorization (Whiteley, this volume, Dalton, et. al. 2003). As Justin
Greenwood notes (2007, p. 180-83) at the EU level, the European Comission has actively
promoted the formation of a wide range of Europe-wide groups or associations, in part to
gain the benefit of expert input, but also to reinforce the EU’s ‘input legitimacy’ by
creating a systematic and transparent process of interaction with a range of civil society
interests. Because of the weakness of elections and political parties as ‘authorizing’
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vehicles in the EU, however, interaction with advocacy groups may take on an even
greater role there than in most national states.
With respect to inclusion, citizens are formally equal by virtue of the universal
franchise. In practice, however, electoral systems add several layers of exclusion. The
first layer of exclusion resides in constituency definition: leaving aside problems of
drawing boundaries, electoral institutions represent ‘the people’ only insofar as they are
residents of a particular territory. Attributes not tied to geographical residence (e.g., sex,
occupation, life-style, class, religion, etc.) are not formally represented (Rehfeld 2005).
The second layer of exclusion is inherent in the design of electoral systems, simply
because they function to produce collective governing capacity under conditions of
conflict. But different systems produce different degrees of exclusion. SMP systems in
particular exclude minorities. In some cases (Canada at the federal level, for example),
SMP systems exclude majorities as well, concentrating power in the hands of
representatives of a plurality of voters. In contrast, consensus-based Proportional
Representation (PR) systems tend on average to be more inclusive (Lijphart 1999). But
all electoral systems produce legislative bodies that fail the tests of descriptive
representation (and thus exclude the perspectives of those most disadvantaged within
society), though some systems (party-list PR) tend to do better than others on this
measure. A third layer of exclusion concerns the locus of decision-making in complex
societies. Even without the first two layers of exclusion, collective decision-making has
tended to slip into the hands of administrators over the last several decades—not owing to
any conspiracy or even as a consequence of bureaucratic power, but simply owing to a
lack of legislative capacity to set more than broad goals for the more complex work of
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administration. As well, in contemporary, differentiated, market-capitalist societies,
governments are also responsive to markets, which tend to shift much social control out
of the domain of government altogether Lindblom 2002). As a strategic consequence,
some government agencies are effectively insulated from democratic control (central
banks, for example), and some government policies are responsive not to votes or other
clearly democratic inputs, but rather to those who control productive resources. The
development of the EU in response to economic integration is a case in point (Bellamy
and Castiglione 2000). More generally, the fact that powerful EU institutions, such as the
European Commission and the European Council, are only indirectly responsible to the
pubic at large raises the possibility that these institutions are more responsive to well
organized interests than to the public. The problem is not limited to indirectly responsible
institutions. Even elected representative institutions respond better to intense and well-
organized special interests than to latent interests, unorganized interests, and public
goods. Because pressure groups tend to represent those with the resources to organize and
who care intensely about a single issue, constituency communication may systematically
disadvantage public will-formation around common goods. That said, the Commission’s
efforts to increasing transparency and establish criteria to help assure that groups
represent their acclaimed constituencies are reforms that support inclusion (Greenwood,
2007).
With respect to accountability, the picture is also mixed. On the one hand, the
sheer amount of electing has increased steadily in the EU, Canada, and other OECD
countries over the last several decades—so much so that while voter turnout has been
declining in most elections, the number of times citizens vote—their numbers of trips to
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the polls—has actually increased over the last several decades (Dalton and Gray 2003).
On the other hand, while there are many ways and means of introducing accountability,
the vote is often a weak mechanism. Voters are often inattentive, information is
incomplete, and other forms of power permeate the system, including actors with
capacities to provide or withhold economic resources, or administrative officials who
have knowledge that representatives cannot match. Citizens often demand contradictory
things from government, such as first-rate health care and schools combined with low
taxes. And while elections may serve to aggregate preferences into competing packages,
they are not very good instruments for stimulating deliberative consideration of collective
goals and trade-offs.
Still, there are important differences in the kinds of accountability electoral
systems can provide. Westminster systems, for example, specialize in strong
retrospective accountability, owing to strong institutional connections between electoral
parties and the power of the majority party in parliament to govern. But the costs to
inclusion and other forms of accountability are high. In Canada, it is unusual for a
government to represent a majority of voters, owing to a combination of regionally strong
parties and SMP. Only three times in Canada’s history have governments based their
power on a majority of voters. When this fact is combined with the Westminster-style
concentration of power in the Office of the Prime Minister, the effect is to sever
representative linkages to the other parties represented in parliament. The system fails in
the deliberative dimension of accountability as well: legislatures should have a
deliberative element, which serves a democratic function by displaying before the public
reasons for decisions and decision-making (Urbinati 2006). Because Westminster
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systems concentrate power in the Office of the Prime Minister, decisions are announced
and then defended. In a pure Westminster model, parliament itself is a weak policy-
making body, empowered only to say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and lacking the power or capacity to
formulate decisions in deliberation with the affected publics. Because Westminster
systems concentrate power, there are few incentives for power-holders to seek out
information or deliberate policy options even in the semi-public forums of parliamentary
committees, let alone the public forum of the legislature (Peters 1997). Accountability to
citizen is after the fact; when governments miscalculate—as they are often do without
inclusive linkages to citizens—they find themselves left with angry or disaffected
publics. Of course, this is an all-other-things-being-equal kind of diagnonsis: these effects
are mitigated, for example, by minority government, federalism, Senate reform, and
parliamentary reform—though many of these characteristics, adopted in the absence of
other reforms, are just as likely to produce stalemate as performance, further eroding
legitimacy.
Those EU countries that use PR systems present a different kind of accountability
problem. Parliamentary styles tend to be more consensual and deliberative, no doubt a
structural consequence of the coalition-building required by PR systems as well as
systems with effective dual chambers (Lijphart 1999, Steiner, et. al. 2004). For the same
reasons, however, it is difficult for citizens to hold any particular party responsible for
policies which are often brokered not only among coalition partners, but also between
chambers, or (in some cases) between executives and legislatures. The trade-offs between
accountability and institutional complexity are characteristic of the EU as well. As
DeBardeleben and Hurrelmann (2007b, p. 7) point out, in a complex system like that of
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the EU, it is difficult to hold any particular institution or individual accountable ‘since it
is difficult to trace political acts to identifiable agents.’ Referring to multilevel
governance systems, which include both the EU but also federal states like Canada, they
note that blame-shifting by authorities at various levels in the system ‘can be used as a
political tool by political actors in the face of unpopular policies or policy failure’.
Finally, electoral representation in itself limits the deliberative dimensions of
accountability (Mansbridge 2004). Because elected representatives function within a
context that combines public visibility and adversarial relations, they must weigh the
strategic and symbolic impact of speech. Thus, representative institutions have limited
capacities for deliberation, which requires a suspension of the strategic impact of
communication in favour of persuasion and argument. Because of electoral cycles,
representative institutions have limited capacities to develop and improve public policies
over a long period of time. And because representatives must attend to vested interests,
representative institutions have limited capacities for innovation and experimentation.
In short, there are good reasons to conclude that, however necessary, the
traditional and recognizable forms of democratic representation—elected officials
convened in representative assemblies such as legislatures, parliaments, and councils—
are no longer sufficient to carry out the normative purposes of democratic representation,
at least not as stand-alone institutions.
Democratic Deficits in the Participatory Response
Although these observations are not new, they do underscore the degree to which
politics—and democratic demand—has flowed into venues outside of electoral
representation. The developments are striking. As Dalton, Cain, and Scarrow (2003)
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demonstrate, political changes that open venues outside of electoral representation have
developed rapidly in all the OECD countries with long-standing democratic systems. On
the demand side, citizens increasingly expect to have a voice in matters that affect them,
with younger cohorts leading the way, even as they participate less in formal democracy
(Dalton 2007, Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Saunders, this volume, Pammett, this volume,
cf. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002). On the supply side, decision-makers have
increasingly identified ‘democratic deficits’ as an issue in all of the developed
democracies, in practice if not in name. Public sector decision-makers increasingly find
the authority granted to them by election, appointment, or expertise insufficient for their
decision-making and governance responsibilities. In most areas of public policy,
decision-makers have found that standard administrative techniques based on legislative
mandates are suboptimal. They may generate unexpected opposition from stakeholders,
fail to maximize the effective and efficient use of public resources, lack the legitimacy
necessary for public acceptance and cooperation, fall short of substantive goals, such as
health, public safety, individual development, or fail to achieve normative ideals, such as
distributive justice. Performances that publics judge to be clumsy, inefficient, wasteful,
unjust, or unfair can undermine citizens’ confidence in public sector organizations, and
democracy is impoverished when the citizenry lacks collective agents for public
purposes.
Over the last few decades, we have seen an enormous inventiveness in addressing
these deficits through new institutions designed, in one way or another, to involve
citizens in decision-making (Smith 2009, Gastil 2008, Parkinson 2006, Fung 2006b). The
array of processes and practitioners is now extensive, including, to name a few,
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referendums, public hearings, public submission processes, client polling, deliberative
polling, town hall meetings, citizen juries, citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting,
numerous techniques for dialogue, neighbourhood councils, and issues forums. ‘Citizen
participation’ and ‘engagement’ are typically understood by administrators as one among
many strategies for gaining advice, co-opting pressures, and improving services, in this
way seeking to increase the legitimacy of their policies (Brown 2006). The frameworks
of engagement usually have administrative rather than ‘political’ origins. And
administrators are typically seeking citizen input rather than citizen empowerment in
decision-making.
At the same time, the administrative contexts have perhaps masked the essentially
political nature of these developments. We have not really grappled systematically with
the question as to what ‘more citizen engagement’ in this sense would mean for the
democratic system as a whole. But we must: these developments are likely to continue,
and insofar as democracy is deepening, much of the action is occurring here rather than
within formal representative institutions (Cain, Dalton, and Scarrow 2003, Warren 2002,
2003, Fung 2006b, Smith 2009).
At the same time, these new arenas of democratization can cause their own
democratic deficits. Referendums, while inclusive of the entire electorate, provide
numerous opportunities for interest-group mischief (Pharr and Putnam 2000, 44-8).
Moreover, as the European constitutional referendums of 2005 demonstrated, they may
produce outcomes they are hard to interpret because they force voters into yes/no
responses on issues that are inherently complex and multidimensional. Many other kinds
of new opportunities for citizen participation are less inclusive because they are based on
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self-selection, and therefore tend to favour those who are better educated and wealthier,
generating the paradox that increasing citizen opportunities for participation may increase
political inequality (Cain, Dalton, and Scarrow 2003). The same dynamic of self-
selection allows the most intense interests and loudest voices to dominate, leading to
under-representation of those who are less organized, less educated, and have fewer
resources (Mansbridge 1983). And for similar reasons, participatory venues can increase
the neglect of public goods or increase the unjust distribution of their burdens by
empowering local resistance by well-organized groups. Forms of participation that
simply aggregate existing opinion (e.g., public submissions and hearings) contribute little
to the deliberative formation of preferences and policy. And participation without power
can lead to more disaffection, as citizens go through the exercise of engaging, only to
have decisions taken elsewhere and for reasons unrelated to citizen input (Abelson and
Eyles 2002, 8ff, 16; Irvin and Stansbury 2004 58-60). Under these circumstances, more
participation can actually decrease democratic legitimacy. Finally, participatory venues
are replete with representative claims by individuals and groups, on behalf of any number
of interests, identities, and ideals. These representative claims are usually untested, not
because they are untestable in principle, but because we have little grasp of what
representation means outside of the formal institutions of electoral representation, in spite
of the current and growing importance of these informal domains of representation
(Urbinati and Warren 2008; Rubenstein 2007).
What Should Be Done?
These considerations should help disaggregate the question as to whether more
citizen participation will reduce democratic deficits. There are at least two general areas
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we shall need to think about, corresponding to two distinct kinds of deficits. The first has
to do with deficits in the formal institutions of representative democracy. Democratic
deficits in electoral representation are likely to involve incremental reforms of existing
institutions, in part because they are not functioning so poorly that they are generating
broad constituencies for wholesale changes, and in part because democratizing strategies
are subject to limits of scale, complexity, and governability. Our expectations here should
probably focus on other goods necessary to a well-functioning democracy such as more
responsiveness, high capacities for inclusive deliberation of public matters and decisions,
and better performance in governance.
The second area of deficit is in administration and governance, where electorally-
based political institutions have inherent incapacities. The potential for more citizen
participation is greatest here, owing to the close relationships between policies and
interests enabled by their disaggregation and delivery (Warren 2002). I shall thus
distinguish the reform of representative institutions from the retrofitting of these
institutions—that is, upgrading their democratic capacities by supplementing them with
new democratic devices, primarily in the areas of administration and governance. In both
cases, we shall need to imagine institutional changes that build on broader social
changes—including increasing advocacy, changing norms of citizenship, and declining
deference to authority—while also enhancing system performance.
Reforming institutions
It is easier to generalize about democratic deficits in the developed democracies
than about institutional reforms, since the institutional causes of deficits vary with the
kind of system. Some systems, Denmark’s for example, exhibit few of the deficits
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evident in the other consolidated democracies (Elklit and Togeby, this volume), probably
because of that country’s history of supplementing electoral democracy with policy-
specific “network governance” (Sørensen and Torfing 2003). Others, such as Italy’s,
suffer from gridlock induced by inclusion. In the case of Canada, the institutions suffer
from overly concentrated executive powers and parliaments with weak deliberative and
policy-making capacities, combined with gridlock in federal-provincial relations. EU
institutions are sui generis, although they share some of these institutional problems of
national multi-level systems such as Canada’s.
We can think of reforms as targeting three kinds of institutions: electoral systems,
parliamentary bodies, and constitutions.
Electoral reform
From the perspective of democratic deficits, any reforms should function to make
parliaments more inclusive and deliberative, to increase citizen input into policy-making,
and to improve and stabilize policy outcomes (Lijphart 1999, Steiner, et. al. 2004, Peters
1997). In the Canadian case, changing electoral systems from SMP to a PR system such
as Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) or Single Transferable Vote (STV) should result
in reducing the capacities of prime ministers’ offices to make policy in the absence of
broad input and deliberation, since powers are more likely to be shared among coalition
partners. In addition, fixed election terms are likely to reduce the strategic powers of
executives. Both reforms should increase the inclusiveness of electoral representation,
which would in turn stabilize and probably improve policy outputs.
Although these reforms might produce parliaments that are more inclusive and
deliberative, the impact of electoral reform on citizen participation is likely to be modest
21
at best. In New Zealand, for example, although voter efficacy and perceptions of
government responsiveness initially increased, they are again in decline (Banducci,
Donovan and Karp 1999). Japanese voters have become disillusioned with their new
electoral system’s dual candidacy rules that allow candidates who have narrowly missed
out on election in a single member district to return to the Diet via the party list. The new
rules function very much like the old rules, in that they still protect incumbents, suppress
turnover, and encourage personalistic candidate behaviour (McKean and Schiner 2000.
447). The lesson may be that those changes that are possible are those that are not likely
to have a dramatic impact on political elites and other vested interests.
But even well-designed electoral reforms are unlikely to close democratic deficits.
Nor should we expect them to: given the complexity and scale of government within
pluralized contexts populated by multiple powers and actors, it seems unlikely that the
standard model of representative democracy—voters elect representatives who develop
policy guidelines and direct administrators to execute them—can ever again be adequate,
if indeed it ever was. Nonetheless, even if electoral reforms are not sufficient, they may
be necessary—particularly in SMP systems—to keep democratic deficits from growing.
Parliamentary reforms
Once voters elect their representatives, the bodies within which they serve should
function to form their interests and values into public wills. The design of parliamentary
bodies makes a difference. In the Westminster cases (Canada and the UK), parliaments
should no doubt be strengthened as representative policy-making bodies relative to prime
ministers’ offices, with the aim of increasing their capacities to receive and deliberate
inputs. These capacities can be increased through a number of reforms, including relaxing
22
party discipline and strengthening parliamentary committees. (Special Committee on
Reform of the House of Commons 1985; Martin 2002; New Brunswick Commission on
Legislative Democracy 2004). In addition, stronger freedom of information and sunshine
legislation would reduce the capacities of executives to use information for strategic
reasons, while increasing the numbers of informed participants in political processes—
though these are likely to be groups and parties rather than individual citizens (Cain,
Egan, and Fabbrini 2003).
Efforts within the European Union to strenghten the role of the European
Parliament would be another example of this type of reform. Since the Parliament was
made a popularly elected body in l979, its role has been gradually extended. With the
expected adoption of the Reform Treaty (Treaty of Lisbon) by 2009, the Parliament
would take on a further enhanced role in legislation alongside the Council, and the
Commission will be made formally responsible to it. In addition the Parliament would
also elect the President of the Commission based on a recommendation of the Council
(Benz, 2008). These treaty changes, akin to constitutional changes in a national polity,
are also efforts to address the EU’s democratic deficit.
Constitutional reforms
From a democratic perspective, there may be new roles for checks and balances,
which can increase the inclusiveness and responsiveness of political systems by
multiplying veto players, as long as mediating institutions exist to avoid conflicting
mandates and gridlock, as in the case of Germany. In Canada and the UK, changing
upper houses into democratically elected or otherwise democratically legitimate bodies
would introduce effective bicameralism, which should also increase the inclusive and
23
deliberative qualities of policy-making (Department for Constitutional Affairs 2003;
Gibson 2004). As in the EU, judicial review should continue to be strengthened and
developed, in order to pluralize and regularize points of access to the political system,
while dispersing powers of judgment (Cichowski and Stone Sweet 2003). On average,
these reforms should increase the inclusiveness as well as the quality of policy-making. A
stronger judiciary and rights-based regime should increase the power and standing of
citizens with respect to government, which is in turn likely to show up as increased
advocacy, particularly within the arenas of administration and services.
Political party reforms:
Finally, like other institutions within established political systems, political parties
have real but constrained potentials for reform. Dramatic changes in party organization of
the kind that would respond to declining citizen identification are most likely to follow
from changes in electoral systems and parliamentary reforms—changes that would alter
the environments and incentive structures to which parties respond. These constraints
differ by system, making it difficult to generalize about party reform across the
democracies.
But even though institutional contexts vary by country, parties face social and
cultural developments across the developed democracies that are much more comparable.
Citizens are less deferential to political elites, more plural in their identities, and more
likely to attend to values (Norris 1999, Dalton 2004). Citizens are increasingly
“postmodern” in Inglehart’s sense (1997). From the citizen’s perspective, many
representative functions of parties are being displaced by public interest groups. At the
same time, the bases of political authority have been shifting. It is not enough to win
24
elections and assume power; it is not even enough to be held to account by an opposition.
Government (and the oppositions that hope to succeed them) must continually explain
themselves to the public, and do so with every piece of legislation, and with every action
and inaction. From one perspective, governing now appears to be a permanent campaign.
From another perspective, however, the bases of political authority have become
increasingly discursive and public in nature. Merely winning elections no longer confers
the authority necessary to govern.
For these reasons, all parties have struggled over the last few decades to become
more internally democratic as well as more attentive to organized advocacy groups,
social movements, and the media, while retaining a cohesion sufficient to form platforms,
field candidates, and win elections (Kittilson and Scarrow 2004). Ideally, parties would
begin to view themselves as elements of a deliberative political system that generates
public legitimacy for their parties and their candidates through public arguments—a trend
currently most advanced in American staging of numerous pre-election debates among
candidates, organized and moderated by citizen groups and the media (Rosenblum 2008).
Still, because parties are creatures of the electoral system combined with
constitutionally-determined functions in government or opposition, there are limits to
party reform, particularly with regard to their functions in connecting society and
government. Parties can translate the voices of organized interests and social movements
into legislative bargaining positions, particularly in strong party systems. They are not
equipped, however, to represent latent and disaffected interests; nor can they engage
publics directly affected by policies on an ongoing basis. Their interests are, in the end,
episodic (determined by electoral cycles) and strategic (oriented toward winning
25
elections). Parties succeed when they put together winning coalitions, which means that
their concerns and platforms operate at a relatively high level of abstraction when
compared to the highly differentiated responses to highly complex societies that
responsive governing requires, and of the kind provided, say, by single-issue
associations, interest groups, and social movements. Parties are essential for democracy,
but their current difficulties are unlikely to be significantly mitigated by internal reforms.
Retrofitting institutions: Supplementary democracy
Institutions can be designed to be more sensitive to information, more
deliberative, and more formally inclusive. But for these potentials to be realized there
must be connective tissue between institutions and society. The connective tissue needs
to perform the political work of defining and engaging the publics affected by policies.
As suggested above, over the last few decades all democratic systems have experimented
with new, supplementary conduits for engaging citizens, gaining information, and
generating informed public opinion. What is distinctive about these experiments is that
they have little to do with organized party politics or formal political institutions. Most
are functional and segmented by policy area (Ansell and Gingrich 2003, Hajer and
Wagenaar 2003, Sørensen andTorfing 2003, Fung 2006a, 2006b).
We might think about these new forms of citizen participation as retrofitting
formal political institutions with venues designed to gather interests, organize latent
public opinion, and, particularly, provide governments with guidance that is not oriented
toward strategic electioneering. As also suggested above, however, many of these new
forms suffer from their own democratic deficits. Each has strengths and weaknesses: they
are more or less inclusive, more or less deliberative, and more or less costly. Each form
26
performs different kinds of political work, from co-opting obstruction to bringing
informed ‘publics’ into existence for future issues. They may generate information; they
may produce more just outcomes; they may produce legitimacy; they may institutionalize
new forms of learning. Each kind of process has costs: all cost time and money. But
many may also generate alienation, provide venues for NIMBYism, and produce
outcomes that are substantially more unjust than professional public servants might
produce if sheltered from public pressure.
Compared to our extensive and increasingly sophisticated knowledge of formal
political institutions, understanding these new forms of citizen engagement is still in its
infancy (cf. Fung 2006b, Parkinson 2006, Gastil 2008, Smith 2009). We have more
questions than answers: What kinds of processes are appropriate for what kinds of issues?
What kinds of processes are likely to generate better rather than worse outcomes—more
legitimacy, justice, or effectiveness, say—given the characteristics of the issues and the
constraints of time and money?
We know pieces of the answers. For example, combining experts with lay citizens
over time within a deliberative context can overcome many of the constraints of technical
complexity. We know that processes that allow citizens to self-select will bias the process
toward organized, high-resource interests, and that random selection can produce a closer
approximation of informed public opinion.
But we don’t know how to begin with an issue and a set of goals, and then design
a democratic process appropriate for these particular goals and constraints. We do,
however, have discrete pieces of knowledge and beginnings of middle-level theories that
27
we now need to develop into broader theories and generalizations (Fung 2006b,
Parkinson 2006, Gastil 2008, Smith 2009).
That it is possible in principle to narrow democratic deficits through the careful
design of supplementary institutions is suggested by research on the British Columbia
Citizens’ Assembly, an institution created by the BC Government in 2004 to produce a
referendum question on electoral reform (see also Rose, this volume, Warren and Pearse
2008). The Citizens’ Assembly (CA)—and experiment repeated in Ontario and the
Netherlands—included two key innovations. The first, random selection, avoided
interest-group domination of the venue. The second, extensive deliberation over a period
of ten months, developed citizen expertise and a near-consensus recommendation. A
survey indicated that the citizens of British Columbia placed an extraordinarily high level
of trust in the CA and its recommendation (Cutler and Johnston, 2007), a consequence of
an institutional design that closely matched the purposes and qualities of the issue.
The case of the BC Citizens’ Assembly suggests that it is possible in principle to
design supplementary forms of democracy in ways that directly address and affect
democratic deficits. Our more general understanding of supplementary democracy is,
however, still in its infancy. But we should get started, since it is likely that the long-term
solutions to democratic deficits will not only reform of our existing institutions, but also
retrofitting them with new and innovative forms of democracy.
28
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