Governance-driven democratization

Abstract

While democratic reforms of electoral institutions continue, their capacities for deepening democracy are limited by the large, pluralized, complex, and territorial political units through which they work. Much of the institutional innovation in democracy has shifted elsewhere – into ‘governance’, the development and administration of public policy. The democratic potentials of governance reside in the potentially responsive linkages between what governments do and what citizens receive. From the perspective of democratic theory, however, this ‘governance driven-democratization’ is a frontier. Concepts inherited from participatory democratic theory such as citizen engagement and direct democracy obscure more than they reveal. Most of the new experiments engage a relatively few citizens. Many involve only self-selected stakeholders and activists, and so by-pass broader public interests, or generate new forms of exclusion. In this paper, I specify the concept and domains of governance-driven democratization, and suggest a method for critical assessment. We can ask, on a case by case basis, about opportunities and dangers as measured by the democratic values of inclusion of the affected, empowerment, representation, and deliberation.