Recent Publications

Since the last ten or so years participatory and direct democracy is a topic in many European countries and even on EU level. (See the information on the European Citizens Consultations project in Politeia Newsletter April 2007.) For a variety of reasons representative democracy is under pressure in many political systems and on all political levels. Manifestations of this phenomenon are declining membership figures of political parties, declining figures of turnout especially at local, regional and European elections, the growth of political movements and parties either at the extreme right or extreme left of the political spectrum and, at least in some countries, serious problems with the formation of cabinets and in some cases loss of political legitimation of authorities or even the political system.

Some may argue that these tendencies are neither new nor very threatening at this moment, but a lot of authorities esp. at local level everywhere in Europe apparently think otherwise. They try to regain political legitimation by implementing several ways of participatory and direct democracy, from local referenda and participatory budgeting to e-participation and from user boards (user panels, senior citizens counsels, counsels for handicapped, etc. ) to citizens jury and interactive policymaking.

Last year a team of political scientists from the Free University Brussels and Ghent University edited in the series Comparative Local Politics the reader Towards DIY-Politics. Participatory and Direct Democracy at the Local Level in Europe.

Readers not familiar with the acronym DIY, will find at page 21 that this stands for ‘do-it-yourself politics’, maybe a whimsical but also rather misleading expression. There is even less ‘do-it-yourself politics’ in these top-down organised ways of political participation than there is in political activities in political parties, action and pressure groups, in social movements and (trans-) national political networking. Can one imagine clearer examples of ‘do-it-yourself-politics’ than actions by animal rights activists or jihadis? They don’t just try to influence political decisions on invitation of (local) authorities, but they really aim to shape their own political universe, regardless the costs.

In between the introductory and concluding chapters by the editors we find in this collection contributions in which local referenda and newer instruments for participation are dealt with in a rather critical way. Especially interesting are comparisons between the differences in national and regional turnouts and outcomes of local referenda in Britain and France, within the Czech Republic and within Germany. Experiments with participatory budgeting in Rome, Sevilla and Morsang-sur-Orge (near Paris) are compared and the results are not unequivocally so as to make defenders of direct democracy happy.

The conclusions of research on new ways of democratic decision making in Belgium are not very promising either although the authors hope that other (still newer?) methods may show better results: ‘….It would therefore seem that participatory democracy in Belgium is disliked by local politicians and that citizens are uninterested. However, it remains unclear if this lack of use reveals a general low interest in citizen participation in local politics or if it shows that they are uninterested in the instruments existing in Belgium.’ Very positively tuned is a contribution on deliberative democracy in the Netherlands,maybe because it is descriptive and forward looking rather than empirical and evaluative. “The need to make political decision-making more inclusive is clearly present in the Netherlands. It is a positive development that local government invest creativity, money, time and energy in the search for new ways to involve citizens in politics’’.

Delwit, Pascal, Jean-Benoit Pilet, Herwig Reynaert, Kristof Steyvers (Eds.)Towards DIY-Politics. Participatory and Direct Democracy at the Local Level in Europe. Vanden Boele Publishers, Brugge 2007.

Ivo Hartman, IPP (Dutch Institute for Political Participation)