8 - How Citizen Control of Politics Is Negated, and the Puzzles That Remain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2023
Summary
According to Porto de Oliveira, ‘there are still no significant studies on negative cases of PB, that is, where the following question has not been answered: What happened with PB, in certain cases, for it not to be successful?’ (2017: 240–1). It is a criticism levelled at scholars of democratic innovations in general (Spada and Ryan, 2017). In explaining success across cases I have not yet exhausted the evidence base. We can learn much from independently explaining the absence of citizen control. In this penultimate chapter before concluding I focus attention both on this question and on unearthing some final stones by considering cases and theories that did not make their way into formal analysis. I show that where programmes have failed to empower, there are at least two sufficient explanations. One is the absence of participatory leadership alone, which resonates with the idea that participatory leadership is a necessary condition for success. The other is the combined absence of bureaucratic support, autonomous civil society and financial freedoms. Designers or adopters of participatory programmes are reminded that the otherwise beneficial features of political leadership can be immaterial where civil society and organizational staff participation is desultory, and where funds are lacking.
I then identify the key puzzle that remains – what distinguishes citizen control from its absence in cases where participatory leadership is present? The answers to this question remain inconclusive. Future research may need to investigate more closely whether the presence of some conditions is beneficial in the early stages of development of PB instigate participatory reform, absence of critical civil society in the presence of strong bureaucratic support could allow administrators to develop positive mobilization strategies that reach out to new publics early on, but in the long run, exclusion of civil society leaders will encourage an exclusive technocracy. I cannot test these ideas with the data I have here, but offer some plausible hypotheses based on case knowledge for future research.
Let us first return very briefly, as we have in previous chapters, to our initial examples of QCA approaches to PB data to iron out some final methodological assumptions. Although I assume asymmetrical causal explanations, this does not mean I can analyse sufficiency for the negation without regard to the analysis of either preceding necessity relations or the analysis of sufficiency for the outcome's presence.
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- Why Citizen Participation Succeeds or FailsA Comparative Analysis of Participatory Budgeting, pp. 179 - 196Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2021