Prevalence and Variation in the Occurrence of Dialogue Oriented Participatory Procedures at the Local Level

Today, dialogue oriented participatory procedures are part of the standard repertoire of (local) political administrative systems. They are implemented in order to increase and deepen citizens participation in the preparation of decisions and the formation of political will. The widespread assumption is that "democracy" can be improved as a consequence of more effective, more efficient, and more accepted political decision making and a deepened democratic socialisation of the citizens. Nevertheless, the existing practice of participation greatly varies between municipalities - even where institutional settings and task structure are identical or comparable. As the proliferation of participatory procedures may alter established mechanisms of democracy - like representation, accountability, and legitimacy - research should have a strong interest in quantifying and explaining the scope and the extent of this phenomenon. But literature is sparse. Even after decades of research on participatory procedures, we only have a gut feeling on the prevalence of the phenomenon and its structural determinants. Our research question is therefore: How prevalent are dialogue oriented participatory procedures on local level and do socio-political differences explain the variation of their use between municipalities. The proposed paper seeks to explore the level and distribution of dialogue oriented participatory procedures and to relate it to structural and political characteristics of the municipalities. We make use of a unique data set on the occurrence of participatory events between 2015 to 2018 for about 800 municipalities in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany. The data were collected with a semi-automated tool for scraping and coding online sources on participatory events.