This article examines the obstacles to public participation in a representative democracy and the approaches that can help to overcome these obstacles. Democracy is never perfect because of the inherent difficulties of developing democratic institutions, yet the drawbacks of representative democracy are considerably greater than those of direct democracy. We consider public participation as an element of direct democracy integrated into the structure of representative democracy in order to balance the power of the centre with that of the constituent members of the democratic system. We underscore the role of nomocracy, by which we mean promoting the power of equitable legal and other social rules over the power of the centre. In public participation, the functioning of rules faces greater obstacles than in other forms of democracy. Thus, the professionalism of planners and public administrators is particularly important in formulating these rules; it is even more important when the challenges of establishing rules are major or insuperable. We distinguish between two types of planning professionalism: teleocratic (based primarily on technocratic skills) and nomocratic (based on the nomocratic liberal approach). We recognize the significance of the former, but our main contribution to the debate on public participation is to emphasize the crucial importance and priority of nomocratic professionalism in overcoming the difficulties of citizen involvement and the shortcomings of representative democracy. To test our conclusions, we explore the practice of citizen engagement in the process of planning bikeway networks in several large Bulgarian cities, where public participation is frustrated by the prevalence of the teleocratic approach and the lack of nomocratic traditions.

中文翻译：

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克服公民参与的失败：自由主义方法在规划中的相关性

本文探讨了公众参与代议制民主的障碍以及可以帮助克服这些障碍的方法。由于发展民主体制的内在困难，民主从来都不是完美的，但是代议制民主的弊端比直接民主的弊端要大得多。我们认为公众参与是直接民主的一个组成部分，直接民主融入了代议制民主的结构中，以平衡中心力量与民主制度组成成员的力量。我们强调法治的作用，这意味着我们要促进公平的法律和其他社会规则的力量超过中心的力量。在公众参与中，规则的运作比其他形式的民主面临更大的障碍。从而，规划人员和公共管理人员的专业精神在制定这些规则时尤其重要；当建立规则的挑战主要或不可克服时，这一点就显得尤为重要。我们区分计划职业化的两种类型：远程民主（主要基于技术专家的技能）和官僚主义（基于官僚的自由主义方法）。我们认识到前者的重要性，但是我们对公众参与辩论的主要贡献是强调了官僚专业精神在克服公民参与的困难和代议制民主的缺点方面的至关重要性和优先性。为了检验我们的结论，我们在保加利亚几个大城市的自行车道网络规划过程中探索了公民参与的实践，