Suchergebnisse

Young people are three times more present in the population than in elected assemblies. Their critical underrepresentation has so far received much less scholarly attention than other well-studied social groups, despite, for instance, women being underrepresented in parliaments to a smaller extent. This research investigates the reasons why parties, usually pointed as those who can sway group representation in politics, do (not) select young people for parliamentary elections. In-depth interviews have been conducted with 32 key informants from 6 Belgian parties (CD&V, Ecolo, Groen, MR, PS, and Vlaams Belang) responsible for candidate selection in the Belgian PR electoral system. Our interviewees' insights allow us to assess young candidates' assets and flaws in terms of their electoral popularity, political skills, and ticket-balancing value. This study also sheds light on parties' strategic candidate selection decisions regarding long-term people's management and openness to youth wings' lobbying efforts.

The last few decades governments have operated in a challenging environment which increasingly calls for extended citizen participation. The aim of the article is to demonstrate that representative and participatory democracy are not two distinct realities, but that politicians' opinions about their representative roles are associated with their attitudes about participatory democracy. To this end, the present paper links representative styles (partisan-delegate-trustee) with support for (1) the amount of citizen participation and (2) the type of citizen participation. Elected politicians traditionally perceive their representative roles either as 'partisan' (party-driven), 'delegate' (voter-driven) or 'trustee' (driven by their own judgement). We conducted a large-scale survey among Flemish (Belgium) local councillors ( N = 791). We show the biggest differences in support being between 'delegates' and 'partisans'. The first group seems to be more receptive to (far-reaching) citizen participation and we explain that by their general orientation towards citizens.

Effective citizen participation in policy decision making depends on the support of all democratic actors involved: citizens, but also politicians and civil servants. Drawing on data from over 4,000 respondents, we explore the existence of so-called 'multi-actor clusters', that is, groups of people who are characterised by a positive (or negative) stance towards different modes of local policy decision making, irrespective of their formal-institutional role (politician, civil servant or citizen). Cluster analysis shows two large clusters of respondents that clearly prefer participatory over representative policy decision making. The analysis also highlights a substantial cluster of respondents who clearly prefer representative policy decision making modes over participatory ones. Further analysis shows that a democratic actor's cluster membership is better predicted by individual (ideological) variables (such as left-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation), compared to contextual variables (like governing capacity, democratic quality, and social capital of the municipality in which the actors work and/or live). This research is important because it challenges the assumption that citizen participation is to be considered primarily as (part of) the solution for local governance problems like a lack of governing capacity, low social capital or decreased democratic quality in/of specific local communities. In this way, it contributes to our understanding of participatory forms of governance.