The Participation Gap
The Participation Gap

Author: Russell J. Dalton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-10-06

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0191053325

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The dilemma of democracy arises from two contrasting trends. More people in the established democracies are participating in civil society activity, contacting government officials, protesting, and using online activism and other creative forms of participation. At the same time, the importance of social status as an influence on political activity is increasing. The democratic principle of the equality of voice is eroding. The politically rich are getting richer-and the politically needy have less voice. This book assembles an unprecedented set of international public opinion surveys to identify the individual, institutional, and political factors that produce these trends. New forms of activity place greater demands on participants, raising the importance of social status skills and resources. Civil society activity further widens the participation gap. New norms of citizenship shift how people participate. And generational change and new online forms of activism accentuate this process. Effective and representative government requires a participatory citizenry and equal voice, and participation trends are undermining these outcomes. The Participation Gap both documents the growing participation gap in contemporary democracies and suggests ways that we can better achieve their theoretical ideal of a participatory citizenry and equal voice.

Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions Catching the Deliberative Wave
Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions Catching the Deliberative Wave

Author: OECD

Publisher: OECD Publishing

Published: 2020-06-10

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9264725903

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Public authorities from all levels of government increasingly turn to Citizens' Assemblies, Juries, Panels and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems ranging from climate change to infrastructure investment decisions. They convene groups of people representing a wide cross-section of society for at least one full day – and often much longer – to learn, deliberate, and develop collective recommendations that consider the complexities and compromises required for solving multifaceted public issues.

Digital Citizenship
Digital Citizenship

Author: Karen Mossberger

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2007-10-12

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0262633531

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This analysis of how the ability to participate in society online affects political and economic opportunity finds that technology use matters in wages and income and civic participation and voting. Just as education has promoted democracy and economic growth, the Internet has the potential to benefit society as a whole. Digital citizenship, or the ability to participate in society online, promotes social inclusion. But statistics show that significant segments of the population are still excluded from digital citizenship. The authors of this book define digital citizens as those who are online daily. By focusing on frequent use, they reconceptualize debates about the digital divide to include both the means and the skills to participate online. They offer new evidence (drawn from recent national opinion surveys and Current Population Surveys) that technology use matters for wages and income, and for civic engagement and voting. Digital Citizenship examines three aspects of participation in society online: economic opportunity, democratic participation, and inclusion in prevailing forms of communication. The authors find that Internet use at work increases wages, with less-educated and minority workers receiving the greatest benefit, and that Internet use is significantly related to political participation, especially among the young. The authors examine in detail the gaps in technological access among minorities and the poor and predict that this digital inequality is not likely to disappear in the near future. Public policy, they argue, must address educational and technological disparities if we are to achieve full participation and citizenship in the twenty-first century.

Making Politics Work for Development
Making Politics Work for Development

Author: World Bank

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2016-07-14

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1464807744

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Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.

Citizen Participation in Public Decision Making
Citizen Participation in Public Decision Making

Author: Jack DeSario

Publisher: Praeger

Published: 1987-01-13

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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As services provided by government have expanded over the past several decades, so inevitably, has bureaucracy--especially the corps of professional administrators in charge of programs ranging from health care to the maintenance of efficient transportation networks. Under pressure from reform groups to promote public accountability by involving citizens in the decision-making process, government has begun to place private citizens on many important health, education, transportation, and environmental planning bodies. This study of citizen participation and technocracy, written by twelve prominent specialists, provides the first comprehensive theoretical and empirical analyses of these recent developments and their impact on formulating, directing, and implementing public policies.

Participation in Social Policy
Participation in Social Policy

Author: Tulia G. Falleti

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-11-15

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13: 1108650449

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Health is a defining feature of life and its politics vital. Governments and international organizations have promoted community participation in public health since the late 1970s. However, we lack comparative studies of these participatory institutions in public health. This Element proposes a conceptualization of programmatic participation and distinguishes between two types, monitoring and policy-making. Falleti and Cunial review the origins of state-sanctioned institutions that mandate community participation in health in the two world regions with most advanced social welfare systems, Western Europe and Latin America, implying a comparative analysis of eleven health care systems. They argue that the origins of participatory institutions help account for the resulting types of programmatic participation. They delve deeper into the study of the experience of participation for policy making and analyze two hundred local participatory projects in public health. Falleti and Cunial focus their attention on the characteristics of participants, the role of health care professionals, and the role of local politics in the execution of community projects.