In recent years we have witnessed increasing interest in democratic innovations; new measures to boost democratic participation and engagement between elections. Increased participation is seen as instrumental for improving governance effectiveness, to remedy perceived deficiencies of representative democracy and to provide legitimacy and support for governmental programs and initiatives. However, not all participatory measures seem equally democratic in terms of securing democratic equality, transparency and accountability. Because citizen participation is often biased, participatory measures run the risk of reproducing and reinforcing existing patterns of inequality in terms of participation and political influence. Politicians sometimes listen selectively to participants’ inputs, cherry-picking ideas instead of allowing all participants an equal say. Documentation of the proceedings and the outcomes of participatory instruments is not always made available to the public, and transparency and accountability may therefore be called into question.
Several recent studies indicate that citizens actively evaluate the democratic quality of participatory procedures, and that outcome satisfaction and decision acceptance can be substantially affected by this evaluation. Less is known, however, about how elected politicians assess the importance of designing participatory processes in keeping with established norms of democratic equality and accountability. This paper aims at analyzing such assessments based on empirical evidence from a web-based survey to all local councilors in Norway’s 422 municipalities in 2018. By posing a number of dilemmas pertaining to key aspects of “established” and “pragmatic” norms of democratic participation and engagement, we seek to identify the factors that can explain variations in attitudes towards such norms.
