What do citizens want from participatory democracy? Understanding process preferences and assessing participatory processes

Resumen

This thesis addresses the study of citizen participation from two perspectives: the analysis of citizens' preferences towards participation and as well as the evaluation of the results of participatory processes. In Part I, citizens’ preferences towards different political decision-making proce-sses are analyzed. The main objective in chapter 1 is to understand citizens’ prefe-rences, at European level, towards two models of democracy that can be considered as alternative or complementary to the representative model: participatory democracy vs. the government of the experts. In each of these two models, internal variants that represent different ways of understanding both the participation and the government of the experts are analyzed. Chapter 2 delves into these issues but, this time, focusing on the Spanish case during the period 2011-2015, with the aim of analyzing how the appearance of new parties -and the perception of certain personal attributes of the experts, politicians and citizens- have influenced the preferences of citizens towards different decision-making processes. In Part II, the results of the participatory processes are analyzed. The focus is on processes, promoted by the administrations and aiming of including citizens in the process of policy making, developed at the local level in Spain during the 2007-2011 period -. Chapter 3, based on an initial sample of 40 participatory processes, analyzes the characteristics and level of implementation of the proposals arising from these participatory processes. The fourth and fifth chapters, through a selection of six case studies, aim to analyze the effects (both positive and negative) that participatory pro-cesses have on relations between the administration and civil society. Finally, in Part III, I intend to take a step towards applicability by showing the result of a collective exercise developed in the framework of a citizen laboratory. Spe-cifically, in chapter 6, the process of creation and characteristics of a prototype tool for citizen participation is described. Establishing a debate on how new technologies can solve - or increase - some of the limits or obstacles to participation analyzed in previo-us chapters.