Consenting Participation? How Demands for Citizen Participation and Expert-Led Decision-Making Are Reconciled in Local Democracy
| Author | Felix Butzlaff |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221091884 |
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221091884
Political Studies Review
2023, Vol. 21(2) 340 –356
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/14789299221091884
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Consenting Participation?
How Demands for Citizen
Participation and Expert-
Led Decision-Making Are
Reconciled in Local Democracy
Felix Butzlaff
Abstract
The rising participatory demands of citizens have been addressed with a variety of democratic
innovations. However, increasing demands for democratization have been accompanied by
a parallel rise in scepticism and doubt about the capabilities of representative democracies to
ensure policy efficacy. I seek to address this democratic ambivalence by focusing on the demands
for citizen participation in the context of local democracy. In a series of qualitative interviews,
and using Vienna’s Seestadt Aspern, Europe’s biggest city development project, as an illustration,
I examine (a) bottom-up and top-down understandings of democracy and participation among
administration, city-planners and citizens and (b) strategies to reconcile inconsistent expectations
of participation. I show that conflicting understandings of participation are dealt with in different
settings and that, despite a public commitment to democratic participation, citizens, city-planners
and administration alike expect a democratically concealed yet controlled management process
allegedly ensuring more efficacious policy decisions.
Keywords
democratic ambivalence, democratic theory, participation, urban planning, democratic
innovations
Accepted: 17 March 2022
Introduction
Contemporary demands for individual democratic participation keep rising while at the
same time scepticism about the efficacy of democracy and participation is soaring. How
are these contradictory developments reconciled in political practice? On the one hand,
Institute for Social Change and Sustainability, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Wien, Austria
Corresponding author:
Felix Butzlaff, Institute for Social Change and Sustainability, Vienna University of Economics and Business,
Welthandelsplatz 2, Building D5, Room 3.080, 1020 Wien, Austria.
Email: felix.butzlaff@wu.ac.at
1091884PSW0010.1177/14789299221091884Political Studies ReviewButzla
research-article2022
Article
Butzlaff 341
participatory demands are constantly growing and are being catered to (Saurugger, 2010).
Contrary to many accounts, which interpret shrinking party membership and voter turn-
out as evidence for declining participation, a qualitative change and an expansion of the
forms and the scope of political participation in Western societies is occurring (Theocharis
and van Deth, 2016; Walker et al., 2015). Instead of stating political apathy tout court,
demands for unmediated engagement by citizens, shrinking levels of trust and anti-sys-
tem (populist) movements indicate that established institutions of democratic mediation
are increasingly questioned (Gerbaudo, 2020). More and more groups that have not been
engaged in traditional channels of participation in the past voice demands for democratic
participation (Della Porta et al., 2017). Consequently, direct citizen participation in pol-
icy-making has become a new normal, especially at the local level (Bherer et al., 2016).
On the other hand, there are increasing doubts about the ability of democratic partici-
pation to guarantee policy efficacy. As policy programmes to the Covid-19 pandemic
have recently shown, expert-led, top-down forms of decision-making are thriving,
because they are believed to enhance problem-solving capacity (besides spurring resist-
ance such as anti-vaxx and anti-mask-mobilizations) (Cassani, 2021; Rapeli and
Saikkonen, 2020). Thus, while the expectation to integrate citizens directly is growing, it
appears that the magnitude of problems our societies are facing – ranging from the inter-
national pandemic to rising inequalities, economic decline and the climate crisis – calls
for an expert-informed governance including only the most knowledgeable specialists.
The parallel rise in demands for bottom-up participation and top-down steering has been
conceptualized as a growing ambivalence with regard to the problem-solving capacities
and normative foundations of liberal and representative democracy (Blühdorn, 2019).
This ambivalence points to a growing tension between, on the one hand, the expecta-
tion that representative democracies include citizens ever more and more directly and, on
the other hand, the expectation that only more technocratic top-down decision-making
can deal effectively with increasing social crises and urgencies. While protesters against
COVID restrictions demand more direct democracy and warn about imminent experto-
cratic authoritarianism, social movements such as Fridays for Future call for a more
expert-led rule to fight a threatening climate crisis. These developments are not new but
have been conceptualized as a democratic dilemma between effectiveness and participa-
tion (Dahl, 1998) for a long time. Yet, what is specific about the current societal configu-
ration is that the resulting ambivalences emerge within citizens vis-à-vis democracy itself
(Blühdorn and Butzlaff, 2020) as opposed to between different sections of society (which
could then be addressed through electoral politics). The growing demand for individual
autonomy and participation in decision-making is contrasted by increasing calls for
expertocratic effectiveness to manage ever-expanding societal challenges (Blühdorn,
2019). Scholars seeking to disentangle the democratic ambivalence have therefore called
for a combination of normative and empirical approaches (Müller-Rommel and Geißel,
2020), institutional and citizen-oriented perspectives (Mayne and Geißel, 2016) and a
revision of established indicators for democratization (Blühdorn and Butzlaff, 2020). In
this article, I address the difficult relationship between citizens’ demands for being
included and the confidence they have (or lack) in expert-led planning through the lens of
understandings and expectations that are attributed to citizen participation and examine
how possible contradictions are dealt with in the context of local democracy.
To this end, I use the case of Vienna’s Seestadt-Aspern, one of Europe’s biggest city
development areas, as an illustration of a development shaping many other contexts.
Located at the eastern outskirts of Vienna, it presents a relevant and promising case as it
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