Chair

Sonia Bussu

Speakers

• Katharina Huseljić, Marco Wähner, All Politics is Local: Mobilization, participation and context effects
• Christoph Deppe, Dannica Fleuß, A Framework for Measuring Transmissions

Discussant

Oliver Escobar

The recent systemic turn in democratic theory is increasingly affecting how participatory governance is understood, practised and studied. Firstly, this has led to greater attention to how participatory governance initiatives are linked to both the political-administrative system and civil society. The lack of connection to the policy process has so far often limited the impact of participatory processes on policymaking (Pateman 2012; Hendriks and Lees-Marshment, 2018). Secondly, there has been a move towards more complex participatory interventions that increasingly look like systems. These developments have partly been a result of frustration with one-off experiments with stratified random selection (i.e. citizen assemblies; citizen juries), often opened and (micro)managed by political and bureaucratic elites, which might have contributed to depoliticise the radical proposal of deliberative democracy (Chambers 2009; Papadopoulous 2012; Lee 2015) and crowd out organic forms of civic life (Pateman 2012; Martin et al. 2018). New participatory systems potentially address this issue by moving beyond discrete forums and one-off initiatives and towards permanent and interconnected online and offline spaces of participation (Dean et al. 2019).

This webinar reflects specifically on managing the tensions between the different demands of lay citizens, organised civil society, and public officials within participatory governance.

The webinar is part of a series organised by the PSA Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Specialist Group. The full programme can be found here https://deliberativehub.wordpress.com/

All webinars will be held on Zoom. We’ll email you the link when you register.