Citizen Participation and Democratic Deficits: Considerations from the Perspective of Democratic Theory

(forthcoming in Activating the Citizen.

Edited by Joan DeBardeleben and Jon Pammett. Palgave MacMillan)

Mark E. Warren

Are there political problems faced by the developed democracies to which more

citizen participation is the answer?1 From the perspective of democratic theory, the

answer is clear and long-standing. Governments should be responsive to citizens as a

consequence of citizen participation, through elections, pressure, public deliberation,

petitioning, or other conduits. For these forms of participation to function democratically,

all affected by the decisions of a government should have the opportunity to influence

those decisions, in proportion to their stake in the outcome. From a normative

perspective, governments are in democratic deficit when political arrangements fail the

expectation that participation should elicit government responsiveness. From an empirical

perspective, governments are in democratic deficit when their citizens come to believe

that they cannot use their participatory opportunities and resources to achieve

responsiveness. From a functional perspective, governments are in democratic deficit

when they are unable to generate the legitimacy from democratic sources they need to

govern.

My aim in this chapter is to clarify the question of democratic deficits as they

relate to the participatory elements of democracy. What would it mean to understand the

participatory features of the developed democracies as ‘in deficit’? To address this

1 I am grateful to Joan DeBardeleben for providing many of the examples from the European Union as well as paragraphs on pp. 10, 11, and 15, and suggested wording elsewhere. I thank Hilary Pearse and Laura Montanaro for their research assistance.

question, I distinguish two kinds of participatory issues within the broader problem of

democratic deficits. The first, deficits in formal institutions of electoral democracy, are

well-recognized and well-researched. The second is more recent and distinctive: deficits

have appeared in the many new forms of ‘citizen engagement’, which have developed in

response to deficits in electoral democracy. Following this distinction, I suggest that each

kind of deficit requires distinct, though complementary, approaches. The first kind of

deficit calls for institutional reforms, such as the redesign of electoral systems,

parliamentary institutions, and basic constitutional changes, so that they are more

responsive, and have greater capacities for information gathering, deliberation, and policy

formation. The second kind of deficit calls for what I shall call the ‘retrofitting’ existing

institutions: designing new forms of democracy which supplement and complement the

formal institutions of electoral democracy, primarily in those functional policy areas

where electoral institutions now have weak capacities to generate democratic legitimacy.

The Concept of a Democratic Deficit

The term ‘democratic deficit’ originated in discussions about the political

integration of the European Union (EU) (Bellamy and Castiglione 2000). As a problem

frame, the EU debate does not directly generalize to the developed democracies, as the

EU is not a ‘state’ but rather a federation that emerged as an incremental consequence of

market integration under the direction of the European Commission. The claim that the

EU is in ‘democratic deficit’ reflected not a democratic past that was eroding, but rather

the growing democratic expectations that came with political integration, combined with

institutions—the European Parliament in particular—that can and should be measured

according to democratic norms. Measured in these terms, the EU was (and is) found

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wanting, with expectations evolving more quickly than the institutions. In the early

1990s, ‘permissive consensus’, which enabled the elite-brokered rule that underpinned

the EU was thrown into question by the Danish and French referendums on the Maastrich

Treaty (Norris 1997). It is unclear whether representative institutions can generate the

legitimacy to replace the permissive consensus. Turnout for European Parliament

elections is low, and parties focused on Europe-wide issues have yet to form, leaving

candidates to focus on national issues. Much policy continues to be formed by relatively

independent regulatory commissions. There is little worry that the EU might become an

illegitimate tyranny: its structure is relatively ‘safe’ in that it is well checked by national

governments, judicial review, and elections (Moravcsik 2002). But it is not clear whether

the EU can find the democratic legitimacy to push forward with a deeper integration—

that is, it lacks the responsive flexibility that a confident and connected people will give

its government (Follesdal and Hix 2006; Pammett, this volume).

Although the institutional differences between the EU and the established

democracies do not allow direct comparison, at a broader level the EU serves as a

limiting metaphor for a more general condition. It is in this sense that the ‘democratic

deficit’ metaphor is apt, as it suggests a set of problems that are well short of crisis.

Neither the EU nor the established democracies—the vast number of which are EU

members—are failing. Over the last several decades, there has been little to bear out the

1975 predictions of the Trilateral Commission’s Crisis of Democracy, which expressed

the fear that an excess of political demand would cause democratic institutions to revert

to authoritarianism. The problems of the developed democracies today are less dramatic,

consisting in a widespread citizen malaise with respect to the formal institutions, and

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common views among citizens that political institutions underperform. The ‘deficit’

concept suggests that we think about democratic malaise structurally, as a misalignment

between citizen capacities and demands, and in terms of the capacities of political

institutions to aggregate citizen demands and integrate them into legitimate and effective

governance.

From this perspective, the EU challenges look much like those common to the

developed democracies. The list is well-known. As it must protect national identities and

interests as well as minorities, the EU cannot function as a majoritarian manner, and thus

lacks the capacity for decisiveness. It handles some protections through federal

structures, others though subsidiarity, and still others through independent judicial

review. Most developed democracies are evolving along similar trajectories. In addition,

the EU functions to regulate trade and market integration, responding less to citizens than

to market forces, which in itself requires regulatory processes that are relatively insulated

from ‘politics’—including democratic politics. Likewise for the developed democracies.

Finally, over the last half century or so, governing has become increasingly technical and

complex: no citizen can hope to know more than a tiny fraction of the business of

government. The result, of course, is that government is very much a matter for experts,

who at best attempt to uphold the public trust, and at worst govern as disconnected

technocrats.

Our received models of electoral democracy have had the advantage of clear lines

of direction from, and accountability to, majorities or majority coalitions. Outside of

questions as to whether ‘majoritarianism’ should be equated with democracy (it should

not), the electoral machinery of democracies is an increasingly poor fit with the complex,

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pluralistic, multi-level business that governing has become. Our societies now seem to be

developing more rapidly than their institutions of government—in terms of citizen

expectations and values, in terms of complexity and demands for sophisticated

performances, in terms of pluralism, and in terms of levels and scales of organization.

Under these circumstances, the most common and least costly form of citizen

participation—voting for representatives—has less functional value.

Yet these developments do not make citizen participation less important for

governing. It is because democracies build in responsiveness and accountability to the

people that they have reflexive capacities to form collective wills. Democracies enable

their societies to benefit from evolving consensus where possible. Where consensus

remains elusive, democracies transform conflict into discourse, where it can serve a

creative rather than destructive role. At the limit, democratic deficits undermine the

capacities of democratic political systems to evolve and reform into ever more effective

and legitimate agents of citizens. The notion of a ‘democratic deficit’ calibrates the

problem: the misalignment in the established democracies is not a ‘crisis.’ Rather, the

concept identifies long-term problems which, if left unattended, are likely to gradually

undermine the legitimacy and capacities of governments.

What Should We Expect? Participation and Trust

To what extent can democratic deficits be narrowed through more citizen

participation? This dimension of the question also requires perspective, since the same

trends that open deficits may also limit participatory responses. Those who first

emphasized the complexity of governing and its strategic consequences—Max Weber

and Joseph Schumpeter—concluded that effective citizen participation is limited to

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choosing an elite in competitive elections. In the face of governing structures that depend

upon professionals and favour concentrated power, citizens can at best play a passive and

mostly retrospective role in checking elites who abuse their offices. These expectations

have empirical relevance even today. In a study of citizen views of participation in the

US, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2002) argue that citizens do not like ‘politics’; they

would prefer that politicians do their jobs while they get on with their lives. On average,

citizens are averse to conflict. They are interested neither in the constant engagement

necessary to communicate their preferences (when they have them), nor in disciplining

politicians to attend to them. Rather, they want to trust politicians to look after the public

good—though, of course, their trust is often disappointed, which in turn reinforces

disaffection. Those who believe more participation is the answer to democratic deficits,

Hibbing and Theiss-Morse argue, are waging an uphill battle.

Although Hibbing and Theiss-Morse overstate their case (Dalton 2007), such

studies are important for calibrating expectations for participation in a healthy democracy

(Moravcsik 2002; Van Deth 2000). No citizen can attend to, let alone master, every

decision that affects them. Nor, given the range of possible activities and satisfactions in

today’s societies, should we expect citizens to choose attentiveness to politics—

particularly conflict-oriented politics—over competing forms of engagement: family,

friends, occupations, hobbies, recreation, and entertainment. In the developed

democracies with their high degrees of institutional and system differentiation, political

organization does not encompasses these other domains, and so citizens are faced with

trade-offs. From an economic perspective, the political resources any citizen is able to

marshal will be scarce.

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A good democracy should enable citizens to optimize their political resources.

Ideally, citizens should be able to focus their lowest cost resource—voting—on choosing

representatives who will fight most of their battles and protect most of their interests.

They may join associations that fight other battles. In both cases, citizens would judge

whether their interests align closely enough with their representatives—whether they are

formally elected or informally selected—that they can trust them as political proxies

(Warren 1996, 2000). To participate in these ways, citizens do not need to participate

directly in decision-making, but they do need to know something about their

representatives’ trustworthiness, based on judgments about alignments of interests and

value. They need to participate to the extent that they can ensure that they are, in fact,

being represented. In many areas of government—typically those overseen by executive

bureaucracies or quasi-judicial commissions—citizens may simply decide that public

officials share their interests, and will uphold the trust placed in them by the public. They

may decide that their representative proxies will alert them when and if their trust appears

misplaced. Under these circumstances, citizens would be able to allocate their high-cost

political resources to the few areas where political conflicts exist—where they have

reason to mistrust government or their representatives—and where the investment of

knowledge, time, and attentiveness may make a difference. In this way, a healthy

democracy would enable citizens to divide their relationships to government between

those of active participation and those of trust based on informed deference. In turn, this

division of labour would enable citizens to deploy their political resources to those issues

that are most contested, and to which trust is least warranted. The political institutions of

a democracy should strive to underwrite these participatory expectations.

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Even measured against these more modest expectations, however, political

institutions in established democracies are in deficit. The easiest form of participation,

voting, has been stagnant at best in established democracies over the last several decades

(Franklin et. al. 2004, 11), and in EU elections has been at markedly lower levels than in

national votes. Citizens are now more likely to distrust their political institutions—

particularly legislatures—than a few decades ago. They are more likely to judge that

government performance has deteriorated. They are less inclined to identify with political

parties, which remain the key institutions for translating public opinion into government

(Pharr and Putnam 2000, Rosenblum 2008). As in other advanced democracies, voting

turnout in Canada has declined in recent decades (reaching a record low at the federal

level of 60.9 per cent of eligible voters in 2004, with a slight rebound in the competitive

election in 2006 (Elections Canada 2006). And, in Canada as in the EU, elite-brokered

constitutional referendums have failed to pass muster with the voters (LeDuc, this

volume, Johnston et al. 1996).

Other developments also suggest that political institutions based on electoral

representation are failing to generate the legitimacy necessary for many government

functions. Innovations driven by gridlocked government and poorly performing programs

began a few decades ago, as evidenced by the rapid proliferation of ‘public engagement’

devices including, for example, citizen juries and panels, advisory councils, stakeholder

meetings, lay members of professional review boards, representations at public hearings,

public submissions, citizen surveys, deliberative polling, deliberative forums, focus

groups, and advocacy group representations (Cain, et. al. 2003; Smith 2005, 2008; Gastil

and Levine 2005; Fung 2006a). These developments are not in themselves evidence of

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democratic deficits in electoral institutions, but they do suggest that there is much

necessary political work generated within complex, pluralized democracies is not

accomplished through formal electoral democracy.

While the general patterns of disaffection are clear, the causes are not. There is

disagreement as to whether the political disengagement of citizens should be attributed to

the poor performance of political institutions (Pharr and Putnam 2000, Dalton 2004); to

the increasing capacities of new generations of better educated, more informed, less

deferential citizens to be critical of those institutions (Dalton 2004; Inglehart 1997;

Nevitte 1996; Norris 1999); to a broader civic phenomenon of declining participation in

the social groups and networks that are vital to foster norms of trust and reciprocity

(Putnam 1995, 2000); or to a fundamental popular distaste for the conflict-ridden

messiness of politics and a general disinterest in public policy debates (Hibbing and

Theiss-Morse 2001, 2002).

Electoral Representation Deficits

Not every actionable diagnosis requires that causes be pinpointed precisely.

Deficits in electoral representation are a case in point: because electoral representation

forms the most visible connective tissue between the people and decision-makers, issues

here are likely to be interconnected with most of the possible causes of democratic

deficits. While I do not address causalities here, their relevance to normative democratic

theory depends on how we cast the normative expectations. What should electoral

representation achieve, normatively speaking?

All forms of electoral representation share three formal features which specify the

extent to which they have democratic content. Through elections representatives are

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authorized to represent those who inhabit geographical constituencies. Electoral

representation is held to be egalitarian and inclusive owing to the universal franchise.

Every member of an electoral unit, excluding those unfit or not yet fit to exercise the

responsibilities of citizenship, is entitled to one vote. Subsequent elections function to

hold representatives accountable for their performance while in office (Pitkin 1967;

Mansbridge 2003; Urbinati and Warren 2008, Warren 2008). These three features include

normative criteria: institutions that are inadequate or incomplete in one or more of these

dimensions are also less than democratic—they are ‘in deficit’ from a democratic

perspective.

In practice, democratic deficits appear in each of these three dimensions of

representation (see, e.g., Fung 2006a). With respect to authorization, for example,

citizens may have unstable preferences which are neither adequately formed by the

electoral process, nor communicated by the blunt instrument of the vote. Elected leaders

often claim mandates based on very thin evidence, since voting is information poor.

Single Member Plurality (SMP) systems compound the information problem by limiting

the choices of voters, usually to a maximum of two viable parties. The stagnation of

voting itself diminishes the significance of electoral authorization. In the 2006 federal

election in Canada, for example, the Conservatives were able to form a government based

on a 36.3 percent share of the vote. But because turnout was only 64.7 percent, the

government was authorized by a mere 23.5 percent of eligible voters. This outcome may

in part be the result of the preference of the strongest political party to form a ‘minority

government’ rather than a multi-party coalition, as is more common in Europe,

particularly in countries with proportional representation electoral systems. However, a

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similar phenomenon can arise as a result of other institutional arrangements and political

practices as well.

Another problem is that the roles of political parties are increasingly ambiguous.

In theory, parties put forward platforms for which they seek authorization; in doing so,

they enable voters to authorize substantive policy preferences. Yet broad declines in party

identification suggest that party elites should have less confidence that votes are

signalling approval or disapproval of a party’s proposal policies and positions—a deficit

that is particularly pronounced in Canada, where voters are four to five times more likely

to declare an absence of partisan ties than Americans or Britons (Clarke and Stewart

1998, 368-69, Cross and Crysler, this volume). While levels of partisan identification

vary across European countries, at the EU level citizens find it hard to view

parliamentary elections as a contest between competing political parties, partly because

of the weakness of Europe-wide party groups and partly because these elections are often

understood as ‘second order’ politics, that is, commentaries on national politics rather

than on EU-level issues (LeDuc, 2007, pp. 142-43).

Indeed, advocacy groups are increasingly displacing political parties as key

conduits of public opinion, though we have yet to understand and assess their connections

to electoral authorization (Whiteley, this volume, Dalton, et. al. 2003). As Justin

Greenwood notes (2007, p. 180-83) at the EU level, the European Comission has actively

promoted the formation of a wide range of Europe-wide groups or associations, in part to

gain the benefit of expert input, but also to reinforce the EU’s ‘input legitimacy’ by

creating a systematic and transparent process of interaction with a range of civil society

interests. Because of the weakness of elections and political parties as ‘authorizing’

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vehicles in the EU, however, interaction with advocacy groups may take on an even

greater role there than in most national states.

With respect to inclusion, citizens are formally equal by virtue of the universal

franchise. In practice, however, electoral systems add several layers of exclusion. The

first layer of exclusion resides in constituency definition: leaving aside problems of

drawing boundaries, electoral institutions represent ‘the people’ only insofar as they are

residents of a particular territory. Attributes not tied to geographical residence (e.g., sex,

occupation, life-style, class, religion, etc.) are not formally represented (Rehfeld 2005).

The second layer of exclusion is inherent in the design of electoral systems, simply

because they function to produce collective governing capacity under conditions of

conflict. But different systems produce different degrees of exclusion. SMP systems in

particular exclude minorities. In some cases (Canada at the federal level, for example),

SMP systems exclude majorities as well, concentrating power in the hands of

representatives of a plurality of voters. In contrast, consensus-based Proportional

Representation (PR) systems tend on average to be more inclusive (Lijphart 1999). But

all electoral systems produce legislative bodies that fail the tests of descriptive

representation (and thus exclude the perspectives of those most disadvantaged within

society), though some systems (party-list PR) tend to do better than others on this

measure. A third layer of exclusion concerns the locus of decision-making in complex

societies. Even without the first two layers of exclusion, collective decision-making has

tended to slip into the hands of administrators over the last several decades—not owing to

any conspiracy or even as a consequence of bureaucratic power, but simply owing to a

lack of legislative capacity to set more than broad goals for the more complex work of

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administration. As well, in contemporary, differentiated, market-capitalist societies,

governments are also responsive to markets, which tend to shift much social control out

of the domain of government altogether Lindblom 2002). As a strategic consequence,

some government agencies are effectively insulated from democratic control (central

banks, for example), and some government policies are responsive not to votes or other

clearly democratic inputs, but rather to those who control productive resources. The

development of the EU in response to economic integration is a case in point (Bellamy

and Castiglione 2000). More generally, the fact that powerful EU institutions, such as the

European Commission and the European Council, are only indirectly responsible to the

pubic at large raises the possibility that these institutions are more responsive to well

organized interests than to the public. The problem is not limited to indirectly responsible

institutions. Even elected representative institutions respond better to intense and well-

organized special interests than to latent interests, unorganized interests, and public

goods. Because pressure groups tend to represent those with the resources to organize and

who care intensely about a single issue, constituency communication may systematically

disadvantage public will-formation around common goods. That said, the Commission’s

efforts to increasing transparency and establish criteria to help assure that groups

represent their acclaimed constituencies are reforms that support inclusion (Greenwood,

2007).

With respect to accountability, the picture is also mixed. On the one hand, the

sheer amount of electing has increased steadily in the EU, Canada, and other OECD

countries over the last several decades—so much so that while voter turnout has been

declining in most elections, the number of times citizens vote—their numbers of trips to

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the polls—has actually increased over the last several decades (Dalton and Gray 2003).

On the other hand, while there are many ways and means of introducing accountability,

the vote is often a weak mechanism. Voters are often inattentive, information is

incomplete, and other forms of power permeate the system, including actors with

capacities to provide or withhold economic resources, or administrative officials who

have knowledge that representatives cannot match. Citizens often demand contradictory

things from government, such as first-rate health care and schools combined with low

taxes. And while elections may serve to aggregate preferences into competing packages,

they are not very good instruments for stimulating deliberative consideration of collective

goals and trade-offs.

Still, there are important differences in the kinds of accountability electoral

systems can provide. Westminster systems, for example, specialize in strong

retrospective accountability, owing to strong institutional connections between electoral

parties and the power of the majority party in parliament to govern. But the costs to

inclusion and other forms of accountability are high. In Canada, it is unusual for a

government to represent a majority of voters, owing to a combination of regionally strong

parties and SMP. Only three times in Canada’s history have governments based their

power on a majority of voters. When this fact is combined with the Westminster-style

concentration of power in the Office of the Prime Minister, the effect is to sever

representative linkages to the other parties represented in parliament. The system fails in

the deliberative dimension of accountability as well: legislatures should have a

deliberative element, which serves a democratic function by displaying before the public

reasons for decisions and decision-making (Urbinati 2006). Because Westminster

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systems concentrate power in the Office of the Prime Minister, decisions are announced

and then defended. In a pure Westminster model, parliament itself is a weak policy-

making body, empowered only to say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and lacking the power or capacity to

formulate decisions in deliberation with the affected publics. Because Westminster

systems concentrate power, there are few incentives for power-holders to seek out

information or deliberate policy options even in the semi-public forums of parliamentary

committees, let alone the public forum of the legislature (Peters 1997). Accountability to

citizen is after the fact; when governments miscalculate—as they are often do without

inclusive linkages to citizens—they find themselves left with angry or disaffected

publics. Of course, this is an all-other-things-being-equal kind of diagnonsis: these effects

are mitigated, for example, by minority government, federalism, Senate reform, and

parliamentary reform—though many of these characteristics, adopted in the absence of

other reforms, are just as likely to produce stalemate as performance, further eroding

legitimacy.

Those EU countries that use PR systems present a different kind of accountability

problem. Parliamentary styles tend to be more consensual and deliberative, no doubt a

structural consequence of the coalition-building required by PR systems as well as

systems with effective dual chambers (Lijphart 1999, Steiner, et. al. 2004). For the same

reasons, however, it is difficult for citizens to hold any particular party responsible for

policies which are often brokered not only among coalition partners, but also between

chambers, or (in some cases) between executives and legislatures. The trade-offs between

accountability and institutional complexity are characteristic of the EU as well. As

DeBardeleben and Hurrelmann (2007b, p. 7) point out, in a complex system like that of

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the EU, it is difficult to hold any particular institution or individual accountable ‘since it

is difficult to trace political acts to identifiable agents.’ Referring to multilevel

governance systems, which include both the EU but also federal states like Canada, they

note that blame-shifting by authorities at various levels in the system ‘can be used as a

political tool by political actors in the face of unpopular policies or policy failure’.

Finally, electoral representation in itself limits the deliberative dimensions of

accountability (Mansbridge 2004). Because elected representatives function within a

context that combines public visibility and adversarial relations, they must weigh the

strategic and symbolic impact of speech. Thus, representative institutions have limited

capacities for deliberation, which requires a suspension of the strategic impact of

communication in favour of persuasion and argument. Because of electoral cycles,

representative institutions have limited capacities to develop and improve public policies

over a long period of time. And because representatives must attend to vested interests,

representative institutions have limited capacities for innovation and experimentation.

In short, there are good reasons to conclude that, however necessary, the

traditional and recognizable forms of democratic representation—elected officials

convened in representative assemblies such as legislatures, parliaments, and councils—

are no longer sufficient to carry out the normative purposes of democratic representation,

at least not as stand-alone institutions.

Democratic Deficits in the Participatory Response

Although these observations are not new, they do underscore the degree to which

politics—and democratic demand—has flowed into venues outside of electoral

representation. The developments are striking. As Dalton, Cain, and Scarrow (2003)

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demonstrate, political changes that open venues outside of electoral representation have

developed rapidly in all the OECD countries with long-standing democratic systems. On

the demand side, citizens increasingly expect to have a voice in matters that affect them,

with younger cohorts leading the way, even as they participate less in formal democracy

(Dalton 2007, Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Saunders, this volume, Pammett, this volume,

cf. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002). On the supply side, decision-makers have

increasingly identified ‘democratic deficits’ as an issue in all of the developed

democracies, in practice if not in name. Public sector decision-makers increasingly find

the authority granted to them by election, appointment, or expertise insufficient for their

decision-making and governance responsibilities. In most areas of public policy,

decision-makers have found that standard administrative techniques based on legislative

mandates are suboptimal. They may generate unexpected opposition from stakeholders,

fail to maximize the effective and efficient use of public resources, lack the legitimacy

necessary for public acceptance and cooperation, fall short of substantive goals, such as

health, public safety, individual development, or fail to achieve normative ideals, such as

distributive justice. Performances that publics judge to be clumsy, inefficient, wasteful,

unjust, or unfair can undermine citizens’ confidence in public sector organizations, and

democracy is impoverished when the citizenry lacks collective agents for public

purposes.

Over the last few decades, we have seen an enormous inventiveness in addressing

these deficits through new institutions designed, in one way or another, to involve

citizens in decision-making (Smith 2009, Gastil 2008, Parkinson 2006, Fung 2006b). The

array of processes and practitioners is now extensive, including, to name a few,

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referendums, public hearings, public submission processes, client polling, deliberative

polling, town hall meetings, citizen juries, citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting,

numerous techniques for dialogue, neighbourhood councils, and issues forums. ‘Citizen

participation’ and ‘engagement’ are typically understood by administrators as one among

many strategies for gaining advice, co-opting pressures, and improving services, in this

way seeking to increase the legitimacy of their policies (Brown 2006). The frameworks

of engagement usually have administrative rather than ‘political’ origins. And

administrators are typically seeking citizen input rather than citizen empowerment in

decision-making.

At the same time, the administrative contexts have perhaps masked the essentially

political nature of these developments. We have not really grappled systematically with

the question as to what ‘more citizen engagement’ in this sense would mean for the

democratic system as a whole. But we must: these developments are likely to continue,

and insofar as democracy is deepening, much of the action is occurring here rather than

within formal representative institutions (Cain, Dalton, and Scarrow 2003, Warren 2002,

2003, Fung 2006b, Smith 2009).

At the same time, these new arenas of democratization can cause their own

democratic deficits. Referendums, while inclusive of the entire electorate, provide

numerous opportunities for interest-group mischief (Pharr and Putnam 2000, 44-8).

Moreover, as the European constitutional referendums of 2005 demonstrated, they may

produce outcomes they are hard to interpret because they force voters into yes/no

responses on issues that are inherently complex and multidimensional. Many other kinds

of new opportunities for citizen participation are less inclusive because they are based on

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self-selection, and therefore tend to favour those who are better educated and wealthier,

generating the paradox that increasing citizen opportunities for participation may increase

political inequality (Cain, Dalton, and Scarrow 2003). The same dynamic of self-

selection allows the most intense interests and loudest voices to dominate, leading to

under-representation of those who are less organized, less educated, and have fewer

resources (Mansbridge 1983). And for similar reasons, participatory venues can increase

the neglect of public goods or increase the unjust distribution of their burdens by

empowering local resistance by well-organized groups. Forms of participation that

simply aggregate existing opinion (e.g., public submissions and hearings) contribute little

to the deliberative formation of preferences and policy. And participation without power

can lead to more disaffection, as citizens go through the exercise of engaging, only to

have decisions taken elsewhere and for reasons unrelated to citizen input (Abelson and

Eyles 2002, 8ff, 16; Irvin and Stansbury 2004 58-60). Under these circumstances, more

participation can actually decrease democratic legitimacy. Finally, participatory venues

are replete with representative claims by individuals and groups, on behalf of any number

of interests, identities, and ideals. These representative claims are usually untested, not

because they are untestable in principle, but because we have little grasp of what

representation means outside of the formal institutions of electoral representation, in spite

of the current and growing importance of these informal domains of representation

(Urbinati and Warren 2008; Rubenstein 2007).

What Should Be Done?

These considerations should help disaggregate the question as to whether more

citizen participation will reduce democratic deficits. There are at least two general areas

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we shall need to think about, corresponding to two distinct kinds of deficits. The first has

to do with deficits in the formal institutions of representative democracy. Democratic

deficits in electoral representation are likely to involve incremental reforms of existing

institutions, in part because they are not functioning so poorly that they are generating

broad constituencies for wholesale changes, and in part because democratizing strategies

are subject to limits of scale, complexity, and governability. Our expectations here should

probably focus on other goods necessary to a well-functioning democracy such as more

responsiveness, high capacities for inclusive deliberation of public matters and decisions,

and better performance in governance.

The second area of deficit is in administration and governance, where electorally-

based political institutions have inherent incapacities. The potential for more citizen

participation is greatest here, owing to the close relationships between policies and

interests enabled by their disaggregation and delivery (Warren 2002). I shall thus

distinguish the reform of representative institutions from the retrofitting of these

institutions—that is, upgrading their democratic capacities by supplementing them with

new democratic devices, primarily in the areas of administration and governance. In both

cases, we shall need to imagine institutional changes that build on broader social

changes—including increasing advocacy, changing norms of citizenship, and declining

deference to authority—while also enhancing system performance.

Reforming institutions

It is easier to generalize about democratic deficits in the developed democracies

than about institutional reforms, since the institutional causes of deficits vary with the

kind of system. Some systems, Denmark’s for example, exhibit few of the deficits

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evident in the other consolidated democracies (Elklit and Togeby, this volume), probably

because of that country’s history of supplementing electoral democracy with policy-

specific “network governance” (Sørensen and Torfing 2003). Others, such as Italy’s,

suffer from gridlock induced by inclusion. In the case of Canada, the institutions suffer

from overly concentrated executive powers and parliaments with weak deliberative and

policy-making capacities, combined with gridlock in federal-provincial relations. EU

institutions are sui generis, although they share some of these institutional problems of

national multi-level systems such as Canada’s.

We can think of reforms as targeting three kinds of institutions: electoral systems,

parliamentary bodies, and constitutions.

Electoral reform

From the perspective of democratic deficits, any reforms should function to make

parliaments more inclusive and deliberative, to increase citizen input into policy-making,

and to improve and stabilize policy outcomes (Lijphart 1999, Steiner, et. al. 2004, Peters

1997). In the Canadian case, changing electoral systems from SMP to a PR system such

as Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) or Single Transferable Vote (STV) should result

in reducing the capacities of prime ministers’ offices to make policy in the absence of

broad input and deliberation, since powers are more likely to be shared among coalition

partners. In addition, fixed election terms are likely to reduce the strategic powers of

executives. Both reforms should increase the inclusiveness of electoral representation,

which would in turn stabilize and probably improve policy outputs.

Although these reforms might produce parliaments that are more inclusive and

deliberative, the impact of electoral reform on citizen participation is likely to be modest

21

at best. In New Zealand, for example, although voter efficacy and perceptions of

government responsiveness initially increased, they are again in decline (Banducci,

Donovan and Karp 1999). Japanese voters have become disillusioned with their new

electoral system’s dual candidacy rules that allow candidates who have narrowly missed

out on election in a single member district to return to the Diet via the party list. The new

rules function very much like the old rules, in that they still protect incumbents, suppress

turnover, and encourage personalistic candidate behaviour (McKean and Schiner 2000.

447). The lesson may be that those changes that are possible are those that are not likely

to have a dramatic impact on political elites and other vested interests.

But even well-designed electoral reforms are unlikely to close democratic deficits.

Nor should we expect them to: given the complexity and scale of government within

pluralized contexts populated by multiple powers and actors, it seems unlikely that the

standard model of representative democracy—voters elect representatives who develop

policy guidelines and direct administrators to execute them—can ever again be adequate,

if indeed it ever was. Nonetheless, even if electoral reforms are not sufficient, they may

be necessary—particularly in SMP systems—to keep democratic deficits from growing.

Parliamentary reforms

Once voters elect their representatives, the bodies within which they serve should

function to form their interests and values into public wills. The design of parliamentary

bodies makes a difference. In the Westminster cases (Canada and the UK), parliaments

should no doubt be strengthened as representative policy-making bodies relative to prime

ministers’ offices, with the aim of increasing their capacities to receive and deliberate

inputs. These capacities can be increased through a number of reforms, including relaxing

22

party discipline and strengthening parliamentary committees. (Special Committee on

Reform of the House of Commons 1985; Martin 2002; New Brunswick Commission on

Legislative Democracy 2004). In addition, stronger freedom of information and sunshine

legislation would reduce the capacities of executives to use information for strategic

reasons, while increasing the numbers of informed participants in political processes—

though these are likely to be groups and parties rather than individual citizens (Cain,

Egan, and Fabbrini 2003).

Efforts within the European Union to strenghten the role of the European

Parliament would be another example of this type of reform. Since the Parliament was

made a popularly elected body in l979, its role has been gradually extended. With the

expected adoption of the Reform Treaty (Treaty of Lisbon) by 2009, the Parliament

would take on a further enhanced role in legislation alongside the Council, and the

Commission will be made formally responsible to it. In addition the Parliament would

also elect the President of the Commission based on a recommendation of the Council

(Benz, 2008). These treaty changes, akin to constitutional changes in a national polity,

are also efforts to address the EU’s democratic deficit.

Constitutional reforms

From a democratic perspective, there may be new roles for checks and balances,

which can increase the inclusiveness and responsiveness of political systems by

multiplying veto players, as long as mediating institutions exist to avoid conflicting

mandates and gridlock, as in the case of Germany. In Canada and the UK, changing

upper houses into democratically elected or otherwise democratically legitimate bodies

would introduce effective bicameralism, which should also increase the inclusive and

23

deliberative qualities of policy-making (Department for Constitutional Affairs 2003;

Gibson 2004). As in the EU, judicial review should continue to be strengthened and

developed, in order to pluralize and regularize points of access to the political system,

while dispersing powers of judgment (Cichowski and Stone Sweet 2003). On average,

these reforms should increase the inclusiveness as well as the quality of policy-making. A

stronger judiciary and rights-based regime should increase the power and standing of

citizens with respect to government, which is in turn likely to show up as increased

advocacy, particularly within the arenas of administration and services.

Political party reforms:

Finally, like other institutions within established political systems, political parties

have real but constrained potentials for reform. Dramatic changes in party organization of

the kind that would respond to declining citizen identification are most likely to follow

from changes in electoral systems and parliamentary reforms—changes that would alter

the environments and incentive structures to which parties respond. These constraints

differ by system, making it difficult to generalize about party reform across the

democracies.

But even though institutional contexts vary by country, parties face social and

cultural developments across the developed democracies that are much more comparable.

Citizens are less deferential to political elites, more plural in their identities, and more

likely to attend to values (Norris 1999, Dalton 2004). Citizens are increasingly

“postmodern” in Inglehart’s sense (1997). From the citizen’s perspective, many

representative functions of parties are being displaced by public interest groups. At the

same time, the bases of political authority have been shifting. It is not enough to win

24

elections and assume power; it is not even enough to be held to account by an opposition.

Government (and the oppositions that hope to succeed them) must continually explain

themselves to the public, and do so with every piece of legislation, and with every action

and inaction. From one perspective, governing now appears to be a permanent campaign.

From another perspective, however, the bases of political authority have become

increasingly discursive and public in nature. Merely winning elections no longer confers

the authority necessary to govern.

For these reasons, all parties have struggled over the last few decades to become

more internally democratic as well as more attentive to organized advocacy groups,

social movements, and the media, while retaining a cohesion sufficient to form platforms,

field candidates, and win elections (Kittilson and Scarrow 2004). Ideally, parties would

begin to view themselves as elements of a deliberative political system that generates

public legitimacy for their parties and their candidates through public arguments—a trend

currently most advanced in American staging of numerous pre-election debates among

candidates, organized and moderated by citizen groups and the media (Rosenblum 2008).

Still, because parties are creatures of the electoral system combined with

constitutionally-determined functions in government or opposition, there are limits to

party reform, particularly with regard to their functions in connecting society and

government. Parties can translate the voices of organized interests and social movements

into legislative bargaining positions, particularly in strong party systems. They are not

equipped, however, to represent latent and disaffected interests; nor can they engage

publics directly affected by policies on an ongoing basis. Their interests are, in the end,

episodic (determined by electoral cycles) and strategic (oriented toward winning

25

elections). Parties succeed when they put together winning coalitions, which means that

their concerns and platforms operate at a relatively high level of abstraction when

compared to the highly differentiated responses to highly complex societies that

responsive governing requires, and of the kind provided, say, by single-issue

associations, interest groups, and social movements. Parties are essential for democracy,

but their current difficulties are unlikely to be significantly mitigated by internal reforms.

Retrofitting institutions: Supplementary democracy

Institutions can be designed to be more sensitive to information, more

deliberative, and more formally inclusive. But for these potentials to be realized there

must be connective tissue between institutions and society. The connective tissue needs

to perform the political work of defining and engaging the publics affected by policies.

As suggested above, over the last few decades all democratic systems have experimented

with new, supplementary conduits for engaging citizens, gaining information, and

generating informed public opinion. What is distinctive about these experiments is that

they have little to do with organized party politics or formal political institutions. Most

are functional and segmented by policy area (Ansell and Gingrich 2003, Hajer and

Wagenaar 2003, Sørensen andTorfing 2003, Fung 2006a, 2006b).

We might think about these new forms of citizen participation as retrofitting

formal political institutions with venues designed to gather interests, organize latent

public opinion, and, particularly, provide governments with guidance that is not oriented

toward strategic electioneering. As also suggested above, however, many of these new

forms suffer from their own democratic deficits. Each has strengths and weaknesses: they

are more or less inclusive, more or less deliberative, and more or less costly. Each form

26

performs different kinds of political work, from co-opting obstruction to bringing

informed ‘publics’ into existence for future issues. They may generate information; they

may produce more just outcomes; they may produce legitimacy; they may institutionalize

new forms of learning. Each kind of process has costs: all cost time and money. But

many may also generate alienation, provide venues for NIMBYism, and produce

outcomes that are substantially more unjust than professional public servants might

produce if sheltered from public pressure.

Compared to our extensive and increasingly sophisticated knowledge of formal

political institutions, understanding these new forms of citizen engagement is still in its

infancy (cf. Fung 2006b, Parkinson 2006, Gastil 2008, Smith 2009). We have more

questions than answers: What kinds of processes are appropriate for what kinds of issues?

What kinds of processes are likely to generate better rather than worse outcomes—more

legitimacy, justice, or effectiveness, say—given the characteristics of the issues and the

constraints of time and money?

We know pieces of the answers. For example, combining experts with lay citizens

over time within a deliberative context can overcome many of the constraints of technical

complexity. We know that processes that allow citizens to self-select will bias the process

toward organized, high-resource interests, and that random selection can produce a closer

approximation of informed public opinion.

But we don’t know how to begin with an issue and a set of goals, and then design

a democratic process appropriate for these particular goals and constraints. We do,

however, have discrete pieces of knowledge and beginnings of middle-level theories that

27

we now need to develop into broader theories and generalizations (Fung 2006b,

Parkinson 2006, Gastil 2008, Smith 2009).

That it is possible in principle to narrow democratic deficits through the careful

design of supplementary institutions is suggested by research on the British Columbia

Citizens’ Assembly, an institution created by the BC Government in 2004 to produce a

referendum question on electoral reform (see also Rose, this volume, Warren and Pearse

2008). The Citizens’ Assembly (CA)—and experiment repeated in Ontario and the

Netherlands—included two key innovations. The first, random selection, avoided

interest-group domination of the venue. The second, extensive deliberation over a period

of ten months, developed citizen expertise and a near-consensus recommendation. A

survey indicated that the citizens of British Columbia placed an extraordinarily high level

of trust in the CA and its recommendation (Cutler and Johnston, 2007), a consequence of

an institutional design that closely matched the purposes and qualities of the issue.

The case of the BC Citizens’ Assembly suggests that it is possible in principle to

design supplementary forms of democracy in ways that directly address and affect

democratic deficits. Our more general understanding of supplementary democracy is,

however, still in its infancy. But we should get started, since it is likely that the long-term

solutions to democratic deficits will not only reform of our existing institutions, but also

retrofitting them with new and innovative forms of democracy.

28

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