SCALE AND POLICY IMPACT IN PARTICIPATORY‐DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY: LESSONS FROM A MULTI‐LEVEL PROCESS
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12297 |
| Author | ADRIAN BUA |
doi : 10. 1111/p adm .12297
SCALE AND POLICY IMPACT IN
PARTICIPATORY-DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY:
LESSONS FROM A MULTI-LEVEL PROCESS
ADRIAN BUA
This article addresses two interrelated critiques of participatory-deliberative democratic institutions:
that they are beset by problems of scale and that they achieve weak policy impact. This article
tests these criticisms through the case of the UK Sustainable Communities Act (SCA), a multi-level
process that is relatively strongly institutionalized. The evidence lends qualied support to these
critiques. The article differentiates between contextual factors, related to the attempt to institution-
alize participatory-deliberative processes within existing socioeconomic and political structures,
and design factors to do with institutional and process design. The case of the SCA calls for cau-
tion about the claim that multi-level participatory-deliberative processes can overcome problems of
scale and policy impact, but the question remains open. The article ends by suggesting that expec-
tations of direct policy impact might be too high. Rather than determinants of policy, multi-level
participatory-deliberative processes might function best as agenda-setters.
INTRODUCTION
‘Participatory-deliberative processes’ (PDPs) aim to engage citizens in deliberative forms
of participation, oriented towards inuencing public policy-making (Smith 2009a; Hoppe
2010). Advocates argue that they can reduce the ‘distance’ between state and non-state
actors by allowing citizens to explore preferences and inuence policy through public par-
ticipation and deliberation (Burgess and Chilvers 2006). They have been valued for their
potential to increase the reexivity and responsiveness of policy-making (Hoppe 2010),
and to reduce social inequities by directly empowering citizens (Fung and Wright 2003;
Johnson and Gastil 2015).
However, PDPs have been criticized on the grounds of their poor scalability and low
impact – especially when operating at high tiers of governance. Unlike direct democratic
processes that aggregate millions of preferences through voting, PDPs are predicated on
deliberative interactions between participants, and are often oriented towards consensus.
For this reason they face problems of ‘scalability’, meaning that the impact that they
can, both practically (Dahl 1989) and legitimately (Parkinson 2006), claim to have on
policy-making decreases as scale increases. It is in no small part for this reason most
PDPs are consultative, and exert a weak inuence upon decisions (Goodin and Dryzek
2006), and those processes that are ‘empowered’ (Fung and Wright 2003; Johnson and
Gastil 2015) tend to operate at the local scale. Even in more strongly institutionalized
cases, claims of impact can be tenuous. Suspicions abound that public authorities tend
to ‘cherry pick’ recommendations that cohere with decisions that are already made, and
analysts have argued that elites might accept PDPs in order to pre-empt more contentious
forms of political action (Hoppe 2011). This has led sympathetic critics to argue that PDPs
are often limited to local issues of little strategic importance (Wainwright 2003), sceptics
argue that they offer little more than ‘therapeutic’ (Chandler 2001) forms of participation
that do little in way of engaging real power structures (Davies 2011, 2012).
Adrian Bua is at the Department of Politics and Public Policy,De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.
Public Administration Vol.95, No. 1, 2017 (160–177)
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PARTICIPATORY-DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY 161
Smith (2009a) argues that critics are too stark – these limitations can be ameliorated
through institutional design. Recent large-n research into the impact of PDPs upon
policy-making lends some support to this argument (Font et al. 2016). Moreover, there
has recently been experimentation with PDPs that aim to connect participation to higher
government tiers, suggesting that the problem of scale might also be ameliorated through
institutional design (Pogrebinschi 2013; Bua 2014; Pogrebinschi and Samuels 2014). How-
ever, the academic literature on these issues is limited. Thus the question of whether PDPs
can offer meaningful opportunities for citizens to inuence policy processes at higher
government tiers remains amenable to further empirical enquiry.
This article addresses this question through an empirical analysis of a multi-level PDP.
The UK Sustainable Communities Act (2007; SCA) was specically designed to connect
deliberations taking place in locally constituted citizens’ panels with central government
policy processes. The empirical analysis is informed by a framework distinguishing
between explanatory factors related to context and institutional design. Contextual fac-
tors relate to the attempt to institutionalize PDPs within the structures of representative
democracy and the capitalist political economy.They produce constraints that range from
those that are more contingent in nature (e.g. different electoral outcomes, or opening of
policy windows) to those that are structural in nature and would require more signicant
transformations to be resolved. Design factors encompass failures and achievements
attributable to, and ameliorable through, institutional and process design. This distinction
is an important one because it enables policy analysis to establish insurmountable and
ameliorable constraints, as well as the conditions and design features necessary for PDPs
to succeed.
The rest of the article is structured in ve sections. The rst describes the origins and
design of the SCA, and explains some contextual details of the UK political system. The
second explains the analytical relevance of the case vis-a-vis scale and impact. The third
section explains the methodological approach. The fourth, most substantive section,
presents the central arguments. In essence these are that (a) proposals were more likely
to be accepted where they cohered with framings and solutions already being processed
by central policy-making institutions, and (b) that the SCA did not act as a determinant
of policy. Rather, it exerted a recommendatory inuence on policy, and made original
contributions especially where specic proposals cohered with general policy direction in
relevant areas. The article ends by discussing the implications of these ndings upon the
aforementioned scalability and impact critiques of PDPs.
THE ORIGINS, DESIGN AND CONTEXT OF THE SCA
The SCA is UK legislation originating from policy reports by the think tank the ‘New
Economics Foundation’ (NEF). These charted the decline in locally owned enterprises and
increased monopolization of socioeconomic life in the UK by big business, to which they
attributed a range of pernicious social, economic and environmental consequences (Oram
et al. 2003). Given the highly centralized nature of the UK state (Faucher-King and Le Gales
2010), the policy levers available to tackle these developments existed at national level. The
reports identied a range of central government initiatives which it argued had failed to
reverse the trend. Policy ineffectiveness was attributed to favourable treatment of business
interests and centralized policy styles that make little use of local knowledge. The reports
recommended that a process be designed that would allow local citizens and groups to
Public Administration Vol.95, No. 1, 2017 (160–177)
© 2017 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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