Democratic Innovation and Gradual Institutional Change – The Case of Better Reykjavik

Magnus E. Jonsson

Doktorand statskunskap

Örebro universitet

NOOS 2015

5-6 Februari

Malmö/Lund

TIDIGT UTKAST

VÄNLIGEN CITERA INTE DENNA VERSION

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Abstract

Democratic innovations have a tendency to be short-lived, and/or ad-hoc islands of

participation with little or none formal connection to the policy and decision-making process.

The participatory online platform for creating citizen initiatives Better Reykjavik (Betri

Reykjavik) and the participatory online budget process Better Neighborhoods (Betri Hverfi)

in Reykjavik, Iceland, are, however, two exceptions. The Better Reykjavik platform was born

out of the financial and political crisis in 2008 by a non-profit grass-root organization and has

since the local elections in 2010 been connected to the policy and decision-making process in

City Hall.

While research on democratic innovations is focusing on the institutionalization of

participatory and deliberative practices, there exists few, or none, links to the existing

frameworks in the tradition of ‘new institutionalism’. This study is departing from a

comprehensive institutional framework focusing on the interrelationship between the

characteristics of the political context, the characteristics of the political institutions and the

dominant change-agents. By applying such a broad approach, the article aims to answers the

questions on how the implementation of Better Reykjavik and Better Neighborhoods

occurred, and how we can understand the implementation in relation to the institutional

framework.

This study is based on two rounds of interviews (N=8) with key stakeholders in both the

Better Reykjavik and the Better Neighborhoods projects and secondary literature about

Icelandic civic and party culture.

The analysis shows that when the Icelandic political system was hit by an exogenous chock

(the financial crisis), a ‘window of opportunity’ opened up. Due to the weak party institutions

in Iceland and the contemporary ‘discourse’, the ‘dominant change actor’ (the political party

the Best Party) could invoked a range of participatory tools that became implemented and

(normatively) institutionalized.

KEYWORDS: Political participation, institutional change, ICT, democratic innovations,

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Introduction

Democratic innovations have a tendency to be short-lived, and/or ad-hoc islands of

participation with little or none formal connection to the policy and decision-making process

(Gießel & Joas 2013; Geissel & Newton 2012; Grönlund, Bächtiger & Setälä 2014; Saward

2000; Smith 2009; Åström, Granberg & Khakee 2011). So far, most democratic innovations

have been considered to be alien to the representative repertoire and therefore applied only as

experiments within the framework of representative democracy. Often democratic innovations

are initiated by one administration just to be dissolved by the next administration, created ad-

hoc to deal with a specific issue, or, most often, as experiments in local governments. Some

innovations do, however, live on, and among these we find the participatory budgeting in

Porte Allegre and the Bundestag e-petition system. Some innovations thus become more or

less institutionalized. This article will focus on two examples of the latter; Better Reykjavik

and Better Neighborhood.

The umbrella term ‘democratic innovation’ has recently received a lot of scholarly

attention. The concept have been discussed in the literature since the early 2000’s (Saward

2000) but has, arguably, flourished in the later part of the 2000’s and early 2010’s (e.g. Smith

2009; Geissel & Newton 2012; Grönlund et al 2014). There is no single agreed-upon

definition to the concept, but I will argue that it is suitable to apply Kenneth Newton’s (2012)

general description of democratic innovations as “the successful implementation of a new

idea that is intended to change the structures or processes of democratic government and

politics by improving them” (p. 4). The main reason why Newton’s definition is suitable is the

focus on implementation and institutional change. Most other definitions focus more on the

connection between government and citizens, but do to a large extent leave the need for actual

implementation aside.

While the literature on citizen participation and deliberative democracy to a large extent

has been focusing on non-institutionalized forms of politics, democratic innovations is more

clearly leaning towards the creation and functions of institutions. Despite the focus on

institutions, the connection to the literature on ‘new institutionalism’ is rather weak. One

reason to this de-linking might be that, as noticed above, democratic innovations, so far, has

tended to be short-lived and not fully implemented within the governmental structure. With

the current wave, in which democratic innovations has started to leave the experimental stage

and are implemented and applied in real political events, there is a need to consult the

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institutionalism literature to better understand the processes that leads to the sustainable

implementation of democratic innovations.

The case of democratic innovations in Reykjavik in Iceland started with the launch of the

participatory online platform Shadow City (Skuggaborg), which later turned into ‘Better

Reykjavik’ (Betri Reykjavik) in the mist of the financial and political crisis that hit Iceland in

the fall of 2008. Iceland was, up until then, considered to be a grand example of how to

successfully transform an economy mainly based on the fishing industry to an economy based

on financial products. Only a few years before the collapse, scholars and politicians had

unison praised the de-regulation of financial markets, the liberalization of financial

regulations and the growing financial industry. And Iceland was indeed a success story with

low unemployment and strong economic growth with averaging 3-4% annually since the mid-

1990s. The world was witnessing was the “miracle on Iceland” (Gissurarsson 2004).

In a few days in September 2008, however, the miracle turned into a financial and political

nightmare. The collapse of the three major banks created not only a situation of economic

crisis for individual citizens, companies and government agencies, but also a deep and broad

sense of frustration and antipathy against the established political and financial system. In

January 2009, thousands of citizens gathered in what has been labeled as the ‘pots-and-pans-

revolution’ (Hardarson & Kristinsson 2011), ending with the toppling of the government and

the election of the first Social Democratic government in the history of Iceland. The

legitimacy of the political system was eroding and in an opinion poll in 2011, only one in ten

Icelanders expressed ‘great trust’ in parliament (survey cited in Gylfason 2012).

As a response to the crisis and the protests, the Icelandic political establishment turned

their attention to a number of solutions, whom all had a common focus: the deepening of

citizen participation. Among these solutions we find the online crowdsourcing of the new

constitution (Gylfason 2012, Landemore 2014, Castells 2012, Åström et al 2013), the two

referendums in 2010 and 2011 on foreign debt which are “the only known direct democratic

votes on sovereign debt resettlement in history” (Curtis, Jupille & Leblang 2014), and on

local level in the capital Reykjavik the rise of the citizen initiative system called Better

Reykjavik (Åström et al 2013).

Some scholars argue that this supposedly ‘participatory turn’ on national level has not

endured. On the contrary, politics on national level has started to find its way back to ‘politics

as usual’ (Bergmann 2014). Yet, the development on local level in the capital Reykjavik has

been steady towards more participatory politics, and the most interesting part is therefore not

the participatory response to the crisis in itself, but the ongoing day-to-day work that has put

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participatory institutions in the heart of local government. Before the local elections in 2010,

the city of Reykjavik had no digital platform for citizen participation, and now, after the 2014

local elections, there are two digital platforms (Better Reykjavik and Better Neighborhoods)

and also a formalized committee for issues concerning citizen participation and democracy

(Committee for Democracy and Administration). This development and implementation of

democratic innovations are rather rare. Usually, democratic innovations are introduced with

an experimental approach and platforms and processes can therefore fairly easy be invoked in

times of systemic stress, and then later discarded when the issue or problem has blown over

or, for the time being, been solved. To discard such innovations can often be done without

much resistance from the administration, nor the citizens, since they are not a part of the

institutional framework.

But what happens if democratic innovations, on the contrary, is initially introduced and

framed as being an additional and continual part of the institutional framework? And what

role does the characteristics of the political context, the characteristics of the institution, and

the type of dominant change-agent have in the implementation of such innovations? And what

are the driving forces for developing the democratic innovations, once they are in place? This

article aims to answers those questions.

The article is structured as follows: firstly, a discussion on the theoretical background and

previous research will be conducted. Secondly, the choice of method and data will be

discussed, and the research questions presented. Thirdly, a short description of politics in

Iceland will follow. Fourthly, the data will be presented and discussed. The article will end

with a discussion on how to understand the implementation of the democratic innovations and

what type of institutional change that has been occurring in Reykjavik. Since this is an early

draft, there will be sections that are not finalized at this stage, and I therefore appreciate all

possible feedback at this stage.

Democratic Innovations and Political Institutions

The roots of the literature on democratic innovations are found in the traditions of

participatory and deliberative democracy. Founded on the theoretical and empirical finding in

these two fields, the concept of democratic innovations is bridging the traditional separation

in the fields by “indicate how deliberation (as realized through a combination of

inclusiveness, considered judgment and publicity) might be embedded in participatory

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institutions that have significant decision-making powers (realise popular control)” (Smith

2009, p. 197).

The tradition within both participatory democracy and deliberative democracy is either

purely theoretical or focusing on politics outside the established institutions. The same

patterns can be found in the literature on online deliberation, where there has been more focus

on deliberation per se, than on the connection between public deliberation and the policy-

making process (Jonsson & Åström 2014). It has thus, for a long time, been a lot of focus on

deliberation and participation per se and outside the political institutions, and less, or no,

focus on the relationship between deliberation, participation and institutions in action.

In recent years, however, a more holistic ‘systemic perspective’ has been discussed in the

literature (Mansbridge et al 2012; Warren 2012). The systemic perspective acknowledges that

the democratic innovations has begun to move from the drawing to become real world

political institutions and applied ad hoc in political events. When analyzing, and

understanding, democratic innovations as parts of a democratic system and with different

functions in the system, the role of political institutions become vital.

Understanding Gradual Institutional Change

Institutions do matter in the study of politics. Over the last three decades, the development of

institutional theory has been vast and it is now common to label at least three main

perspectives as the ‘new institutionalism’: rational choice institutionalism (RI), historical

institutionalism (HI) and sociological institutionalism (SI). More recently an additional

approach, discursive institutionalism (DI) has been discussed in the literature. In this section, I

will present and discuss these four forms of institutionalism, and also present the theoretical

framework that will be applied in this study.

Since the institutional perspective in political science is both wide and deep, it is

impossible to cover the whole history of the approach in a few sentences. It is, however,

important to present and discuss the core ideas with each approach, since the model I will

apply in this article borrows elements from three of the main approaches; historical,

sociological and discursive institutionalism. The model I will apply in this article - Mahoney

and Thelens framework of gradual institutional change - borrow elements from all three of the

main approaches (historical, sociological and rational institutionalism).

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In this paper, I will apply a modified version of Mahoney and Thelen’s (2010) framework

of gradual institutional change. The framework is mainly based on insights from historical

institutionalism1, and consists of three core independent variables; characteristics of political

context, characteristics of political institutions, and dominant change-agents. To briefly

present what these three variables consists of; the characteristics of political context focuses

on veto possibilities among the actors; the characteristics of institutions focuses on the level

of discretion in interpretation/enforcement afforded to the actors; and the dominant change-

agent are divided into four categories: insurrectionists, symbionts, subversives and

opportunists (p. 18-29).

These three variables are interconnected through what Mahoney and Thelen call ‘links’.

Through these links, the dependent variable, modes of institutional change, is affected. Four

modes of institutional change is presented; displacement (the removal of existing rules and

introduction of new ones), layering (the introduction of new rules on the top of or alongside

existing ones), drift (the changed impact of existing rules due to shifts in the environment),

and conversion (the changed enactment of existing rules due to their strategic redeployment)

(2010, p. 15-16)

Figure 1. Framework for Explaining Modes of Institutional Change

Characteristics of Political context

III Type of dominant II Type of Change-agent Institutional

Change

Characteristics Of Institution I

Note: Adopted from Mahoney, James & Thelen, Kathleen (2010).

1 The authors are, however, specific to argue that ”our propositions can be explored with equal profit by sociological and rational-choice institutionalists” (p. 32). Thus, my addition of insights from DI and SI should be understood as an attempt to empirically test and, possibly, develop the framework.

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This model is, however, not complete but needs to be developed and broaden. The

conceptualization of ‘political context’ and ‘institutions’ are too narrow. There is a need to

include the insights from Schmidt (2010) that:

“The institutions of discursive institutionalism, however, are not the external rule-following

structures of the three older institutionalisms that serve primarily as constraints on actors, whether

as rationalist incentives, historical paths, or cultural frames. They are instead simultaneously

constraining structures and enabling constructs of meaning, which are internal to ‘sentient’

(thinking and speaking) agents whose ‘background ideational abilities’ explain how they create

and maintain institutions at the same time that their ‘foreground discursive abilities’ enable them

to communicate critically about those institutions, to change (or maintain) them (Schmidt, 2008).”

(p. 4).

There is, thus, more than the veto possibilities and possibilities to discretion that is vital to

endogenous change.

Democratic Innovations: Design and Functions

The design of democratic platforms has been scrutinized in the literature (Rose & Sæbø

2010). Departing from Dalton, Scarrow and Cain (2003) categorization, it is possible to distinguish three models of transformative reforms: representative

democracy (reforms that seeks to improve electoral processes with electoral adjustments),

direct democracy (reforms that seeks to bypass, or complement, the processes of

representative democracy, e.g. referendums) and, advocacy democracy (reforms that seeks to

allow citizens participate in policy deliberation and formation, yet leaves the final decisions to

the elites) (2010, p. 126). While most current democratic innovations are advocacy reforms, the

innovations in Reykjavik are mixed. While BR is a typical example of an advocacy reform, BN is a hybrid case that ought to be labeled semi-direct.

Method, Data and Research Questions

The study is based on interview data (N=8) with key stakeholders connected to the Better

Reykjavik and the Better Neighborhoods in 2014, interview data from an initial round of

interviews in 2012, and three workshops in which Better Reykjavik and Better Neighborhoods

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has been the topic. Secondary, and complementary, data is taken from previous studies on the

political culture and party structure of Iceland and Reykjavik.

The interviews were conducted with a semi-structured approach. A common template

questionnaire was used in all interviews, and a battery of follow-up questions was also

applied. Since the interviewees had different relationships to the project, the questions had to

be customized to their position and knowledge about the project.

One of key features with a semi-structured approach is flexibility (Bryman 2008). This

study would, of course, have possible to conduct by quantitative measures, such as a sensus

survey among politicians and civil servants in Reykjavik. The reason why I choose semi-

structured interviews over a survey is connected to the fact that there exist little, or no,

research combining the insights from applied democratic innovations and institutional theory.

And, there are no previous studies on the case of Reykjavik. I therefore lack both previous

research and knowledge about the case. From these grounds, I concluded that qualitative

approach, using semi-structured interviews would be good to get as much information as

possible out of the respondents, so that they would not be too narrowed into my frame.

The article is based on one set of primary data and complemented by another set of

secondary data in form of previous research.

The primary data consists of interviews with key stakeholders. The interview data is

gathered from an initial round of interviews in 2012, three workshops in which Better

Reykjavik and Better Neighborhoods has been the topic, and a second round of deep

interviews that were conducted in Reykjavik during one week in October 2014 by the author.

The deep interviews lasted 50 – 70 minutes and were taped digitally and later transcribed into

text. All interviews are anonymized and are in the text referred to as [Interviewee 1;

Interviewee 2; and so on].

The secondary data is mainly gathered from the work of Kristjánsson (1996; 2004) and

Kristinsson (2001) about party politics, and Bergmann (2014) about Icelandic political

culture.

The study aims to answers three research questions. The first question concerns the

description of the implementation of the platforms. The second question concerns the

institutional change, and how we can understand it. The third question aims to understand the

driving forces for development within the government, and connect that to further research.

1) How did the BR and BN become implemented? [descriptive]

2) How can we understand the institutional change in Reykjavik? [analytic]

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What role did the characteristics of the political context have?

What role did the characteristics of the institution have?

What type of dominant change-agent became essential?

3) What are the driving forces for developing the democratic innovations, once they are in

place? [analytic]

Characteristics of the Political Context in Iceland and Reykjavik

To begin with, Iceland is a very small state with only 320,000 citizens. It is also very

concentrated with 120,000 living in Reykjavik, and a total of 250,000 living within Reykjavik

metropolitan area. It is thus a sparsely populated country outside the city area, with only

smaller towns on the coasts. The size of the population matters to the understanding of

Iceland, since much of the political history is characterized by strong local elites often

connected to the fishing industry and politics.

In this section I will, very briefly, present the history of Iceland with focus on the modern

and contemporary history. I will then continue by presenting some previous research on the

party structure in Iceland, and also some previous research on political culture.

A few words on the general history

The history and the use of history in politics are also of interest when painting the picture

of the Icelandic context. As the first settlers came in 874 CE, the nation is rather young. The

modern history is commonly referred to be starting in 1904 when Iceland was granted home

rule, while still being under the Danish Crown. After the globally turbulent time of the Second

World War, the citizens of Iceland were offered to have a referendum on independence from

Denmark. The participation rate was high (98,6%) and the results can hardly be discussed:

99,5% voted for independence and 0,5% (or 377 citizens) voted against independence. On the

17th of June 1944, Icelanders celebrated its independence and Iceland was declared a

republic.

The Financial Crisis and the Local Election in 2010

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In a few days in September 2008 Iceland turned into a financial and political chaos. The

collapse of the three major banks created not only a situation of economic crisis for individual

citizens, companies and government agencies, but also a deep and broad sense of frustration

and antipathy against the established political and financial system. In January 2009,

thousands of citizens gathered in what has been labeled as the ‘pots-and-pans-revolution’

(Hardarson & Kristinsson 2011), ending with the toppling of the government and the election

of the first Social Democratic government in the history of Iceland. The legitimacy of the

political system was eroding and in an opinion poll in 2011, only one in ten Icelanders

expressed ‘great trust’ in parliament (survey cited in Gylfason 2012).

As a response to the crisis and the protests, the Icelandic political establishment turned

their attention to a number of solutions, whom all had a common focus: the deepening of

citizen participation. Among these solutions we find the online crowdsourcing of the new

constitution (Gylfason, Landemore, Castells, Jonsson et al), the two referendums in 2010 and

2011 on foreign debt which are “the only known direct democratic votes on sovereign debt

resettlement in history” (Curtis, Jupille & Leblang 2014), and on local level in the capital

Reykjavik the rise of the citizen initiative system called Better Reykjavik (Åström et al 2013).

At the local level in Reykjavik, a parallel process started. In the Reykjavik City Elections,

held in May 2010, the newly established political party, Best Party (Besti flokkurinn), that

“started as a parody of the old parties” (Hardarson, & Kristinsson, 2011) and with a party

leader that labeled himself ‘anarcho-surrealist’ (Gnarr 2014, p ix), received 34,7 per cent of

the votes. With the two traditionally strongest parties, the Independence Party

(Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn) and the Social Democratic Alliance (Samfylkingin) at 33,6 per cent

and 19,1 per cent respectively, the Best Party was the winners. The Best Party then formed a

coalition government with the Social Democratic Alliance. In the spring of 2014, the most

recent local elections were held, this time without the Best Party that dissolved itself (due to

its political beliefs that politics should not be an occupation). Sprung out of the Best Party,

however, is Bright Furture (Björt framtíð)2, that got 15,6% of the votes, and could together

with the Social Democratic Alliance (31,9%), the Left-Greens (8,3%) and the Pirate Party

(5,9%) create a new coalition that is now in majority in Reykjavik.

Despite the deviation from other European municipalities when it comes to the

embracement of democratic innovations, Reykjavik is following the trend among

industrialized democracies in terms of decline in electoral participation. In the period from

1950 to 2005, the average rate was 87.7 percent, with lowest point at 81,9 percent. In the 2006

2 Björt framtíð is also, since 2013, represented in the national parliament.

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elections, the rate dropped to 78,7 percent, and with the 2010 elections to 73,4 percent

(Eyþórsson & Kowalczyk 2013, p. 3). This trend seems to be steady, with the 2014 electoral

participation rates at 66 percent.

Characteristics of Political Institutions in Iceland

Iceland is a representative democracy with a multiparty system. In this section I will present

and discuss the party system in Iceland.

The Party System

There is a modern tradition that the Independence Party (Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn) and the

Progressive Party (Framsóknarflokkurinn) rules in coalition. The rule of these parties was,

however, broken in the aftermath of the financial and political crisis in 2009, when the Social

Democratic Alliance became the biggest party. The rule of the Social Democrats did,

however, become short, and in the 2013 national elections, the Independence Party and the

Progressive party once again took office.

Despite the central position of the political parties, and then especially the Independence

Party and the Progressive Party that has been power holding parties for decades, the political

parties in Iceland can be described as ”internally fragmented” and that they lack a ”clear

ideological dividing lines between the parties” (Kristjánsson 1998, p. 154). Kristjánsson

(2004) also notes “that the Icelandic version of ‘parliamentary government’ did not include

any notion of rule by organized political parties. In nineteenth-century Iceland, ‘democracy’

implied direct national self-rule of the people, by the people and for the people.” (p. 163).

In the 1970s, the political parties in Iceland were in crisis. There was a strong societal

pressure on the parties and one major reform from that period is that the parties now have

primaries. The reform was initiated to open up the democratic process by letting citizens vote

for which candidates that should run. From the perspective of the political parties, the reform

backfired in some sense, since it has led to that “individual politicians often perceive an anti-

party position as beneficial to their political success, increasing their popularity among

potential participants in an open primary by taking a stand for ‘the people’ and ‘democracy’

against the dictates of ‘the party bosses’” (Kristjánsson 1998, p. 158).

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This had ended up in the conclusion that “[i]ncreasingly Icelandic political parties

resemble umbrella organizations for individual politicians rather than highly disciplined

organizations” (Kristjánsson 1998, p. 163).

Even more importantly for this study is that “[p]arty representation at the local level in

Iceland has always been weak” (Eyþórsson & Kowalczyk 2013, p 2). Yet in Reykjavik and

the other bigger municipalities, ”the national parties have held almost all of the seats for

decades.” The national politics thus “seem to have been well represented in Iceland’s largest

municipalities, but to a much lesser extent in the smaller ones.” (ibid. 2).

Dominant Change Agents and the Links to Institutional Change

In this section, I will present and discuss the development and implementation of BR and BN

in Reykjavik, departing from the interview data.

The first part will focus on the implementation of BR and BN in local government. The

second part will focus on the institutional barriers that have been identified in the literature as

being obstacles to implement new institutions.

The Implementation of Better Reykjavik and Better Neighborhoods

Better Reykjavik (BR) and Better Neighborhoods (BN) are two different platforms that can be

seen as two complementing channels for ICT-based political participation (in short two

democratic innovations), in the City of Reykjavik. In this section I will focus on the initial

shortly present both platforms and highlight their differences and similarities and how they

are thought to complement each other.

Better Reykjavik

BR started out as a participatory online platform called Shadow City (Skuggaborg) by the

non-profit organization (Citizens’ Foundation) in 2010. The main initial idea with the

platform was to fill the gap between citizens and politicians and create an around the clock

online channel for citizen participation [Interviewee 2]. It was then used as a platform for the

political campaigns of the parties in the 2010 Reykjavik local elections. All political parties

was invited to create an own page on the platform and collect ideas from the citizens and

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initiate discussions. The platform was widely used, and it “was all over the news, and all the

links and ideas that were being discussed in the society, left and right. We had tens of

thousands of people interacting over a period of two weeks” [Interviewee 2]. BR, thus,

became a hype.

The design of BR is similar to a e-petition system, yet it differs in two aspects; it allows

discussions both for and against the idea, and it is based on ‘votes’ rather than signatures. It is

also important to call it an ‘initiative’ or ‘priority’ system rather than a ‘petition system’

according to the developers, since it does not deal with petitions, but with the priorities of

the citizens. The system thus provides any registered citizen3 to post a new idea. When the

idea is posted, it is open for every citizen to vote for or against the idea, and also to discuss

the idea with other citizens. The platform is also integrated with some of the biggest social

media platforms, so that participants can share and comment on the idea from their social

media platform.

After the elections, the newly formed coalition between the Best Party and the Social

Democrats choose, in cooperation with the Citizens’ Foundation, to reconstruct and

implement the platform in the local municipal system under the name Better Reykjavik, since

the name Shadow City had negative connotations [Interviewee 5]. The decision to take in the

platform was processed in a steering group consisting of politicians from the majority and

civil servants. In line with Icelandic political culture, the minority did not participate in these

meetings, following the ‘winner-takes-it-all’ mentality of ruling in the municipality

[Interviewee 8].

The most pressing issue was how to implement the platform into the municipal body. Since

Icelandic municipalities are obliged to communicate answers to citizens coming in with

questions, suggestions or complaints, the implementation of a platform such as BR would

increase the amount of work drastically. It was therefore vital to find an alternative way for

the city to connect to BR. The solution that was decided upon was that the city would go into

an agreement with the NGO, letting the NGO run the platform and deliver only some of the

suggestions and ideas to the departments in city hall. “Originally we had the idea that we

going to have a cooperation agreement between us, and that were our biggest mistake not to

make that.” [Interviewee 2]. But days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, and

then more than one year had passed. The contract was still being handled within the

administration and in the end, the NGO and the City “settled down with something that

looked like a contractor agreement” [Interviewee 2].

3 There is no age limit to BR. School children as well as retired citizens can participate.

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The institutional arrangement is rather unique. Each month, a project manager4 goes to the

BR platform and collects the five most popular ideas for each department. These ideas are

then presented and discussed within each department. The ideas are then handled as any other

formal errand within the departments. When the decision is taken (implement or discard), a

message is sent from the department to the project manager, whom communicate the result to

the citizen whom initiated the idea.

An idea, or priority, is thus not takin into consideration due to a set limit of votes or likes,

but is taken into consideration in relation to the relative popularity to other ideas. The

consequences of such a design is that a very popular idea can be discarded since that

department already have filled their quota, while the opposite, i.e. that a very unpopular idea

might be taken into the department since there is no competition that month to a particular

department. Thus far, however, there exists no case in which a very popular idea has been

discarded, while the opposite has happened a lot and almost become a problem, since civil

servants at the departments must take on a formal process to an errand with maybe less than

three votes [Interviewee 4].

Better Neighborhoods

One year later, in 2011, the BN project started as a complementary process to BR with

focus on the improvement of neighborhoods. While BR is characterized by bottom-up

participation with little structure, BN is a formally structured process with four (?) stages. The

first stage is taken in October each year when the mayor holds a press conference and thereby

officially opens the collection of ideas from the citizens in each neighborhood in Reykjavik.

This collection phase is open for all citizens residing in the designated neighborhood to

participate, and the platform on which these ideas are collected, is open for one month. The

second stage is that all ideas and suggestions are scrutinized by a local committee and the

local committee than selects the best ideas for elections. In the third stage, the selected ideas

presented for the citizens in the neighborhoods and every citizen have a possibility to

participate and elect ideas within the framework of the budget (at 300 000 000 million ISK

per year, equals approx. 1,944,800 Euro). Citizens then design their own list of priorities

within the framework of the budget and then ‘vote’ on this list of things that should be done.

Since the beginning in 2011, there have been three elections within BN. Electoral

participation has been 6%, 7%, and 8%. These low rates of participation have been met with

4 The job as a ’Project Manager’ was created with the implementation of BR. In the first two years, 2010-2012, the position was half-time. Since 2013, the position is a full-time employment.

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mixed responses. While some civil servants and the NGO consider it to be at the same level as

other similar processes in other states [Interviewee 1; Interviewee 2], mainly politicians

consider it to be a problem with such low figures [Interviewee 3]. One of the ideas expressed

is that in the coming years have one or two bigger projects instead of a large number of

smaller projects [Interviewee 1; Interviewee 2].

Institutional change

To sum up, the change that has been occurring in Reykjavik is that the two platforms BR and

BN has been implemented into the system and that the Committee for Administration and

Democracy has been created. Figure 1 below illustrates this development.

Figure 1. Institutional Change in the City of Reykjavik 2010-2014.

Institutional Barriers in Reykjavik

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To change or add an institutional feature to be more participatory or citizens-oriented into the

established representative framework often meet resistance in some form. From a normative

political point of view this is understandable, since the representative model is built upon a

rationalistic ideal in which the experts (i.e. politicians and civil servants) should rule on their

mandate of the citizens, for the common good. When participatory features is involved into

the policy making process, the idea of rationality becomes threatened and also the idea of

representation, so the argument goes.

In this part, I will focus on the interview data specifically dealing with these questions.

There are four main issues that will be dealt with ’is BR and BN a threat to actors in the

institutions’, ‘struggles within administration’, ‘legal barriers’ and ‘perception of public

opinion’.

Is BR and BN a Threat to Actors in the Institutions?

Since the institutional structure in representative democracies are based upon political parties,

there is often a resistance among political parties to embrace participation coming from

outside the party system. Following the basic argument in Arnstein’s (1969) ‘ladder of citizen

participation’, participation can range from ‘manipulation’ of the citizens to ‘citizens control’,

the reason for established actors (political parties and civil servants) to see new innovations as

a threat is highly depending on what rung such new innovation ends up.

Departing from the description above, it can be argued that the party system in Iceland is

rather weak and vulnerable, lacking a strong foundation in mass-movements. They would

therefore, assumedly, see platforms such as BR and BN as a threat, since they cannot control

what happens on these platforms.

Somewhat surprisingly, none of the interviewees considered BR or BN as a threat to either

the administration, nor to the political parties. When answering the question, all of the

respondents have different answers, yet they all lean in the same direction.

Struggles within administration

After the local elections in 2010, and the entrance of the new coalition, one of the first actions

was to negotiate and formalize a link between Better Reykjavik and the administration.

According to the interview data, the implementation of the BR platform can be said to have

been a “smooth sailing” [Interviewee 1]. There haven’t been any major struggles within the

administration, and BR has been seen as a positive innovation. Yet, there has been some

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tension within the administration, concerning epistemic issues such as expert knowledge

versus collective knowledge; increased workload for some branches, and how to view the

suggestions coming in via the system. In this section I will present and discuss these issues.

A first, and general answer, to the question “has there been any struggles within the

administration concerning BR and BN?” was; “no, not really” [Interviewee 1; Interviewee 4;

Interview 8]. On the contrary, there seems be a general unitedness among civil servants that

BR and BN are good ideas that everyone seems to support. This is similar to the results of the

previous round of focus-group interviews conducted in 2012 (Åström et al 2013).

Legal barriers

In the interview with a representative from the NGO, the BR had great support from both the

political majority and the bureaucracy. Yet, “there was some invisible bureaucratic obstacles,

that were sort of in the system” [Interviewee 2] that hindered the implementation of the

platform. When looking closer into these ‘invisible bureaucratic obstacles’, it becomes

obvious that the current regulative framework is important to the problems. The framework in

Reykjavik states that every formal question, idea or suggestion that comes into City Hall

should be processed and answered by the department in question.

Perception of Public Opinion

There seems to be a general feeling among the stakeholders that citizens are becoming

dissatisfied with various parts of BR and BN. The transparency of the system once the idea is

brought into the departments are one of these issues.

One description that occurs in one way or another in at least half of the interviews is that

citizens are becoming more and more skeptical to the process of BR, due to the lack of

transparency of the process. If a citizen creates a suggestion and aggregate a lot of support for

the issue, the issue is taken in to the responsible department and then, maybe half a year later,

the citizen get a mail back from the department saying that the suggestion was “accepted” or

“declined” [Interviewee 2; Interviewee 3; Interviewee 8]. This creates a problem, since the

citizens cannot follow the discussion on why or how the decision was taken. The minority

politician argues that citizens have been starting to ask the question: “is it not in the end the

politicians and the people in the administration that have the last saying? Are we just being

fooled?” and continues, “That is pretty much the feeling that you get.” [Interviewee 3]

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Another theme that many of the interviewees comes back to is that citizens seems to mix

up BR and BN, and also think that both platforms deal with small things like playgrounds and

benches in downtown areas [Interviewee 1;2;3;4;5].

Since no thorough evaluation has yet been done on BR or BN, the interpretations among

politicians and civil servants differs.

The Type of Institutional Change in Reykjavik

Following the modified model originally developed by Mahoney and Thelen, there are three

independent variables that are supposed to explain change in the dependent variable.

Departing from the presentation and discussions on the interview data above, it is possible to

see some general patterns in the case of institutional change in Reykjavik.

First of all, the political context in which BR is developed and implemented is rather

extreme. While the established political system is shaking, a platform for participation created

in the public sphere becomes one of the central arenas for discussing politics during the local

elections in 2010. Since it didn’t exist any digital platform for citizen participation before the

elections, and no official platform after the elections (i.e. the new coalition did not create a

new, own, platform, but did stick with the one already in place), there are strong reasons to

assume that if BR had not been created at that moment in time, there would not have been a

platform in place at all in the city of Reykjavik. In the earliest stages, BR had a solid function

in the political system: it was a bottom-up platform for new ideas and discussions.

Secondly, the political parties in Iceland are rather weak, and therefore more open for

change. The electoral reform with primaries in the 1970’s opened up for a modern political

culture in which the individual politician can actually benefit from distancing him/herself

from the party organization. It is therefore not that difficult to understand that the political

parties do not see BR and BN as a threat, but as a complement to ‘politics as usual’.

Another dimension is the fact that both civil servants and politicians perceive the public

opinion as regarding both BR and BN to deal with ‘small’ questions such as a playground or

benches in downtown Reykjavik. Since no survey data is available, it is not possible to

determine whether this is true or false, yet, that does not really matter in this context since

what are important is how civil servants and politicians perceive the public opinion, and not

what the actual public opinion is. If politicians and civil servants perceive that the public

thinks that the platforms are about small things, then it is totally rational to not see as a threat.

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To take the parallel to national level in Iceland makes the picture more clear: in the case of the

new constitution, the democratic innovation (crowdsourcing) was a real threat to whole

established political system, and the whole process challenged the legitimacy of the

established actors (the political parties, the experts and the economic elite). In that case, the

whole process was blown off, despite the fact that it ended up in a national referendum.

Thirdly, the dominant change-actors ought to explain a lot of the institutional change in

this case. The emergence of the ‘Best Party’ and the persistent work to implement BR and BN

into the institutional arrangement, of course, explains the initial phase of the implementation

process. If the Best Party wouldn’t have become the biggest party in the 2010’s elections, BR

would, most probably, not have been implemented.

To understand the persistence of the innovations, and the will to development among key

stakeholders, there is a need to see how the three independent variables interact with each

other. If the Best Party, being a newcomer with barely any ‘institutional capital’ or experience

from the political world, would have forced BR and BN into a rigid and inflexible

organization, in a political context that still had confidence in the ruling of established

political parties, both BR and BN, I’ll argue, would have been dissolved by the new majority.

This did, however, not happen. It is therefore reasonable to interpret the survival of the BR

and BN as a token that there has been a gradual (however small) change within the

institutions.

Returning to the analytical framework, it is probably most appropriate to interpret the type

of change as a combination of layering (i.e. the introduction of new rules on top or alongside

existing rules), and a form of conversion (i.e. the changed enactment of existing rules due to

their strategic redeployment). Since both BR and BN has been added to the institutional

arrangement and thus not replacing any existing institution, and due to the fact that few

practices, policies or laws have been changed in (e.g. how to handle citizen suggestions, or

how the departments should communicate the discussions to the public), I argue that it is

reasonable to argue for such a type of institutional change.

One of the most worn-out citations in research dealing with political change in some form

is probably Victor Hugo’s “nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come”. In

almost all cases, the quote, I argue, is a misfit since it most I applied in a strong normative

manner, thus that the author wants the time to be right. Yet, usually the analysis shows that

the time for the idea has not come. In the case of Reykjavik, however, it seems to be the case

that the idea of citizen participation did strike at exactly the right moment and that the two

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forms of institutions, that Roland (2004) has called ‘slow-moving’ and ‘fast-moving’

institutions, crossed paths with a particularly good timing.

Conclusions

This study set out to explain the institutional changes and the implementation of democratic

innovations in Reykjavik.

The analysis shows that when the Icelandic political system was hit by an exogenous chock

(the financial crisis), a ‘window of opportunity’ opened up. Due to the weak party institutions

in Iceland and the contemporary ‘discourse’, the ‘dominant change actor’ (the political party

the Best Party) could invoked a range of participatory tools that became implemented and

(normatively) institutionalized.

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