The Democratization of the Policy Process in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This paper examines the five-stage model of the policy-making process and how the process is democratized. In many contexts, the policy-making apparatus of political representation and expert administration—the very machinery developed over the past two centuries to govern well without requiring too much from citizens—exhibits certain acute failures. These failures can be addressed with mechanisms of citizen participation and deliberation. Belying the skeptical claim regarding the feasibility of participatory democracy, experiences in local governance have combined representative and participatory mechanisms in hybrid configurations that make government more responsive and just than either pure form. These experiences suggest that the historic antagonism between proponents of representative and participatory democracy confuses more than it illuminates. A contemporary, pragmatic challenge for democratic theory and practice is to identify the contexts in which received governance mechanisms exhibit serious and systematic democratic deficits, and then to devise appropriate institutional remedies. This paper pursues a part of that challenge by illuminating characteristic deficits of the conventional representative and professionalized policy-making process and then suggesting how novel combinations of representation and administration on one hand, and participation and deliberation on the other, can and in some cases have, addressed those deficits. This exploration surveys several of the ways in which participation and deliberation can address shortcomings of a minimal representative policy process. There are certainly other ways to address those shortcomings that do not involve popular participation; attention is focused here on the subset of solutions that deepen democratic engagement. Furthermore, important criticisms of participation and deliberation that claim, for example, that such processes exclude particular perspectives or interests, or that they reinforce patterns of domination and inequality, lie outside the scope of this treatment.