The impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic in citizen participation at the local level in Spain. Insights from public participation officers and members of advisory councils.

With roughly 11 million official cases and more than96,000 casualties up to the moment, Spain is oneof the EU countries that has been worst affected by COVID-19. In 2020, Spain’s economy shrank by 10.8%, almost doubling the average in the EU (-6%), and working hours for the equivalent of 2 million of jobs were lost. We had juststarted to develop two research projects on citizen participation at the local level in two Spanish regions when the WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic. Both projects, combined the use of quantitative (web surveys) and qualitative methods (case studies) to analyse the links between ideology of the governing party and the development of citizen participation experiences at the local level and the performance of Advisory Councils (AC) at the regional and local level, respectively. We included the effects of the pandemic related restrictions on citizen participation as a second research question in both projects, with several questions in the questionnaires (N=622 and N=380) and some attention devoted to this issue in the in-depth,semi-structured interviews with officials (N=27) and AC members (N=35). The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, we use these data to describe what are the main effects of the pandemic on citizen participation at the local level according to two of its main actors(public participation officers and members of advisory councils),and how do they assess the overall impact of the pandemic. Secondly, we focus on the differences in the evaluation on the impact of the pandemic. Are there practitioners’ profiles or participation arenas that have been less affected by this crisis? Which factors explain the differences in the assessment of its impact? To answer to these questions, we will combine qualitative and quantitative evidence collected in the projects described above.