Participatory Democracy In Southern Europe

Citizen participation is a central component of democratic governance. As participatory schemes have grown in number and gained in social legitimacy over recent years, the research community has analyzed the virtues of participatory policies from several points of view, but usually giving focus to the most successful and well-known grass-roots cases. This book examines a wider range of participatory interventions that have been created or legitimized by central governments, providing original exploration of institutional democratic participatory mechanisms. Looking at a huge variety of subnational examples across Italy, Spain and France, the book interrogates the rich findings of a substantial research project. The authors use quantitative and qualitative methods to compare why these cases of participatory mechanisms have emerged, how they function, and what cultural impact they’ve achieved. This allows highly original insights into why participatory mechanisms work in some places, but not others, and the sorts of choices that organizers of participatory processes have to consider when creating such policies.

In this thought-provoking book, José M. Magone investigates the growing political, economic and social divisions between the core countries of the European Union and the southern European periphery. He examines the major hindrances that are preventing the four main southern European countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece) from keeping up with the increasing pace of European integration, and the effects that this is having on democratic governance.

The rapid development and the growing penetration of information and communication technologies (ICT) provide tremendous opportunities for a wide and cost effective application of the ideas of participative democracy and public participation in government decision and policy making. ICT can drive dramatic transformations in the quantity and quality of communication and interaction of government organizations with citizens, revitalizing and strengthening the modern representative democracy which currently faces big problems of reduced citizens’ trust and involvement. This book deals with the application of these e-participation ideas in the special and ‘difficult’, and at the same time highly interesting, national context of Southern Europe and the Balkans. The first chapter provides an overview of e-participation concepts and practices whilst the following chapters analyse pilot applications of e-participation concepts in eight different Southern European and Balkan countries (Spain, France, Italy, Slovenia, Serbia, Albania, Greece, Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)). They cover both the ‘classical’ e-participation paradigm, based on official e-participation spaces created, operated and controlled by government organizations as well as emerging new e-participation paradigms including e-participation based on web 2.0 social media, and ‘scientific-level’ e-participation, based on opening government data to the scientific community. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies.

Analysing the evolution of selected public policies and the changing roles and structure of the state in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain since the 1960s, this volume makes a major contribution to work on democratic regime transition in southern Europe.

In the acclaimed Politics of Democratic Consolidation, Nikiforos Diamandouros, Richard Gunther, and their co-authors showed how democratization unfolded in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, culminating in consolidated democratic regimes. This volume continues that analysis, posing the basic question: What kind of democratic politics emerged in those countries? It presents systematic analyses of the basic institutions of government and of the dynamics of electoral competition in the four countries (set in comparative context alongside several other democracies), as well as detailed studies of the evolution of the major parties, their electorates, their ideologies, and their performances in government over the past twenty years. The authors reach two major conclusions. First, the new democracies' salient features are moderation, centripetalism, and the democratization of erstwhile antisystem parties on the Right and Left. Second, no single "Southern European model" has emerged; the systems differ from one another about as much as do the other established democracies of Europe. Contributors: P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, University of Athens • Richard Gunther, Ohio State University • Thomas C. Bruneau, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey • Arend Lijphart, University of California at San Diego • Leonardo Morlino, University of Florence • Risa A. Brooks, Stanford University • José R. Montero, Autonomous University of Madrid • Giacomo Sani, University of Pavia • Paolo Segatti, University of Trieste • Gianfranco Pasquino, University of Bologna • Takis S. Pappas, College Year, Athens • Hans-Jrgen Puhle, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main • Anna Bosco, University of Trieste

Offers an introduction to the politics of Italy, Spain and Turkey, providing a comparative case study analysis of why democratization outcomes vary across the three countries.

This is a study of the international context of democratization aiming to enlarge on previous studies which have concentrated upon internal domestic factors in the overthrow of authoritarian undemocratic regimes.

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.

Participatory democracy has become a buzzword in current discussions about how to democratize the EU. European institutions associate it with civil society involvement in European governance and claim that it might reduce its so-called democratic deficit. The Treaty of Lisbon formalizes this promise by enacting a new Article 11 TEU specifically dedicated to participatory democracy as a founding principle of the EU legal order. However, two fundamental paradoxes have been overlooked. Whereas participatory democracy was traditionally meant to further the maximum participation of citizens in political life, the EU supports a modern version of the participatory ideal where citizens are represented by a self-designated elite of civil society experts. This book takes a critical stance on that technocratic form of government. At the same time, it examines whether there are realistic ways for a bureaucratic organization like the EU to involve a truly civil society of active citizens in governance. This book claims that European civil society may only flourish if social Europe acts as a counterweight to economic Europe. It analyzes whether the EU has developed a social dimension strong enough to protect civil society from the colonizing forces of European economic integration. (Series: Law and Cosmopolitan Values, Vol. 8) Subject: EU Law]