Public-Deliberative Participation Model: Socio-Cultural Mechanisms Shaping Political Participation in the 2024 Gorontalo City Mayoral Election

Abstract

Through a qualitative case study of the 2024 Gorontalo City mayoral election, this article demonstrates that declining local voter turnout does not necessarily reflect apathy or a weakening of civic engagement. Instead, the phenomenon reflects a structural and deliberative mismatch between citizens' socio-political capacities and the procedural design of local electoral institutions. By integrating the Civic Voluntarism Model, deliberative democracy theory, and the 3A³ framework (Actors, Arenas, Aims), this article proposes the Public-Deliberative Participation Model (PDPM) as a theoretical contribution to the study of democratization in Global South contexts. Research findings indicate that citizen political participation in Gorontalo City is largely shaped by socio-cultural actors within informal deliberative arenas, whereas formal electoral institutions are perceived to possess limited deliberative capacity. In this context, the act of not voting often emerges as a reflective and normatively significant choice—conceptualized here as "deliberative withdrawal"—rather than a symptom of democratic decline. By highlighting the "conversion gap" between civic capacity and electoral participation, this article argues that the primary challenge facing local democracy in Indonesia is best understood as a crisis of institutional recognition rather than a crisis of citizen participation. Theoretically, the article contributes to debates within the journal *Democratization* by extending the deliberative perspective beyond institutional arenas and offering an alternative framework for analyzing participation within culturally embedded democracies.