Participatory Democracy and Political Participation

Democracies have developed a sense of crisis regarding levels of civic engagement and their own legitimacy, prompting government initiatives to reform the institutions and procedures of liberal democracy to provide more opportunities for political participation and bring citizens back in.
"Participatory Democracy and Political Participation" provides the first systematic evaluation of most visible and explicit efforts to engineer political participation via institutional reforms. Policies of democratic reform aim to increase the level of political participation by implementing institutions of participatory democracy. Such policies are debated in established democracies as means to counter downward trends in political participation. However, there is little empirical evidence whether this approach is able to actually increase or sustain political engagement without compromising other values of modern government.
- This new volume investigates this topical issue by integrating three different research approaches:
- Theoretical analyses that aim to bridge the gap between the normative and the empirical level of participatory democracy.
- Comparative large case analyses that focus on the empirical link between participatory institutions and political behavior.
Case studies on the structure, the politics and the behavioral effects of concrete reform initiatives within various established European democracies. The leading contributors analyze participatory institutions on the basis of empirical models of democracy such as direct democracy, civil society and responsive government and analyze the impact of these models on political behavior in general.
Providing adetailed assessment of democratic reform, this book will be of strong interest to students and researchers of political theory, democracy and comparative politics.