Participatory Democratic Innovations in Europe

Download or read book Participatory Democratic Innovations in Europe written by Brigitte Geißel and published by Verlag Barbara Budrich. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representative democracy is often seen as a stable institutional system insusceptible to change. However, the preferences of the broad public are changing and representative, group based democracy has lost importance. This development made it necessary to change established ways of decision making and to introduce participatory democratic innovations. Many national and sub-national governments followed this route and implemented various kinds of participatory innovations, i.e. the inclusion of citizens into processes of political will-formation and decisionmaking. The authors analyse and evaluate the various effects of these innovations in Europe, providing a bigger picture of the benefits and disadvantages different democratic innovations can result in.