Assessing the legitimacy of participatory democracy: the perspective of civil society organisations

Citizen participation in policymaking is often said to stem from a need to educate citizens in politics (normative), to control government (liberal), or to increase support for government decisions (instrumental) (Pedersen & Johannsen, 2016). Even though citizen participation in policymaking has grown in the last decades, civil society organisations remain essential in established democracies (Foley & Edwards, 1996). Civil society significantly contributes to influence policy and hold policymakers accountable, partly in an effort to make policies more inclusive, especially in neo-corporatist countries. A significant body of literature has explored how the increasing space for participatory democracy influences citizens, politicians and civil servants (Vetter, 2009; Michels & De Graaf 2010). Yet, we know very little about the impact of said citizen participation on civil society and its organisations (for a few notable exceptions, see for instance: Bherer et al., 2016). In this article, we address this gap by exploring how the increasing space for individual citizen participation affects how local civil society organisations perceive the legitimacy of participatory democracy. The context of our study is Belgium (Flanders), a country with a neo-corporatist tradition in which many civil society organisations have a long standing relationship with (local) governments (e.g., through strong advisory and collaborative relationships). With our research we aim for a better understanding of how traditional preferential partners of government (civil society) perceive the shift towards a participatory democracy in which individual citizens are increasingly solicited by government to participate in local decisions. Our research focusses on following two research questions: “What are civil society organisations’ perceptions of legitimacy of participatory democracy?” And “To what extent are civil society organisations’ perceptions of the legitimacy of participatory democracy dependent on the conditions under which participation takes place?” We formulate the following hypotheses: on the one hand, civil society organisations may perceive increased citizen participation as not legitimate because they fear losing their own preferential relation with government. On the other hand, civil society organisations may perceive increased citizen participation as legitimate because it creates social capital, which turn may strengthen civil society. To test these two competing hypotheses, we conduct a survey-experiment with a mixed-factorial design. We have two types of respondents: civil society organisations that answer on behalf of their organisation, and individual citizens that serve in the governance of civil society organisations. The survey-experiment contains vignettes with different decision-making scenarios that are randomly assigned over the respondents. This design allows us to compare the results of the dependent variable (input-, throughput-, and output-legitimacy) within the group of different civil society organisations (organisational factors serve as mediating variables). The conditions are included in the independent variable- vignettes differ on the type of initiator of citizen participation (between-manipulation), and on the extent to which citizens are involved (within-manipulation). With our research, we directly address the panel’s call for contributions aiming to explore the role of societal actors on the local level, in our case civil society organisations, and the quality of democracy.