ABSTRACT

Inclusion in local policy processes through citizen dialogue has been depicted as both the solution to many democratic challenges and a democratic problem in itself. Nevertheless, it has been widely adopted throughout Europe. The hierarchically flat, co-governing setup of these instruments can be expected to clash with representative-heavy political cultures, such as that in Sweden, which raises questions about what role they end up having in this context and whether they complement representative democracy. By conducting a comparative study of two rural Swedish municipalities, we confirmed that traditional, hierarchical governance indeed dominates the studied processes. Our results also suggest that, due to skewed participation and unclear input handling, the studied instrument does not appear to constitute a viable complementary democratic institution in terms of representation. Instead, we argue that, conducted in this way, it may potentially fill a range of different purposes without aspiring to fully complement representative democracy.

摘要

通过公民对话纳入地方政策进程被描述为解决许多民主挑战和民主问题本身。尽管如此，它已在整个欧洲广泛采用。可以预期，这些工具的等级扁平、共同治理的设置会与代表权重的政治文化发生冲突，例如瑞典的政治文化，这引发了关于它们最终在这种情况下扮演什么角色以及它们是否补充代议制民主的问题。通过对瑞典两个农村城市进行比较研究，我们证实传统的等级制治理确实在研究过程中占主导地位。我们的研究结果还表明，由于参与偏斜和输入处理不明确，就代表性而言，所研究的文书似乎并不构成一个可行的补充民主制度。相反，我们认为，以这种方式进行，它可能会满足一系列不同的目的，而不是渴望完全补充代议制民主。