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What determines the vote in referenda: issue-preferences or second-order considerations? Scholars suggest issue-voting is stronger in salient elections. Based on survey data collected during Chile's constitutional referendum, the article challenges this argument. An innovative conjoint experiment allows us to estimate if different elements of the constitution sunk the proposal. Coupled with vote choice models, results indicate that second-order considerations played a more important role than the literature predicts. We argue this is because studies mostly study referenda on European integration in parliamentary systems. Unlike European integration, the constitutional proposal was not a cross-cutting \"issue,\" but one tied to the incumbent. Presidentialism exacerbated government/opposition dynamics, such that the incumbent's popularity significantly affected vote choice. We discuss why this is similar to what transpired in other Latin American countries and draw lessons for participatory democracy.

How does public participation in planning and environmental governance engender democratic legitimacy? Drawing a distinction between the optimistic and critical participation literature, I argue that both these strands of research have tended to neglect the public’s perspective on this question. This oversight has, in effect, produced strongly normative and essentialist understandings of democratic legitimacy that treat legitimicy as intrinsic to either process or substance of participatory governance. Proceeding from an anti-essentialist understanding of democratic legitimacy, which primarily relies on contemporary social perceptions and expectations of democratic institutions, I outline a normatively agnostic framework for exploring how legitimacy is engendered through participation. Using this framework to investigate citizen experiences of participation processes in Sweden, I highlight how democratic legitimacy can gainfully be understood as a multidimensional, provisional, and contingent quality that individual citizen participants “confer” and “retract” in a plurality of ways. Based on this, I conclude by suggesting that sustained research engagement with the public’s expectations and experiences of participatory governance can reveal critical insights into the potentials and challenges for realizing democratic planning outcomes.

This article provides an explanation for how increased public participation can paradoxically translate into limited democratic decision-making in urban settings. Recent sociological research shows how governments can control participatory forums to restrict the distribution of resources to poor neighborhoods or to advance private land development interests. Yet such explanations cannot account for the decoupling of participation from democratic decision-making in the case of planning for climate change, which expands the substantive topics and public funding decisions that involve urban residents. Through an in-depth case study of one of the largest coastal protection projects in the world and drawing on global scholarship on participation, this article narrates the social production of resistance to climate change infrastructure by showing how the state sidestepped public input and exercised authority through appeals to the rationality of technical expertise. After a lengthy participation process wherein participants reported satisfaction with how their input was included in designs, city officials switched decision-making styles and used expertise from engineers to render the publicly-supported plan unfeasible, while continuing to involve residents in the process. As a result, conflict arose between activists and public housing representatives, bitterly dividing the neighborhood over who could legitimately claim to represent the interests of the “frontline community.” By documenting the experience of participants in the process before and after the switch in decision-making styles, this article advances a sociological description of public influence in policy: The ability for participants in a planning process to recognize their own input reflected in finished plans.

What determines the vote in referenda: issue-preferences or second-order considerations? Scholars suggest issue-voting is stronger in salient elections. Based on survey data collected during Chile’s constitutional referendum, the article challenges this argument. An innovative conjoint experiment allows us to estimate if different elements of the constitution sunk the proposal. Coupled with vote choice models, results indicate that second-order considerations played a more important role than the literature predicts. We argue this is because studies mostly study referenda on European integration in parliamentary systems. Unlike European integration, the constitutional proposal was not a cross-cutting “issue,” but one tied to the incumbent. Presidentialism exacerbated government/opposition dynamics, such that the incumbent’s popularity significantly affected vote choice. We discuss why this is similar to what transpired in other Latin American countries and draw lessons for participatory democracy.

Venezuela is experiencing a transitional political process in which the government and the majority of Venezuelans want to move from a capitalist representative democracy to a more socialist participatory democracy. This transition is enmeshed in complexities, contradictions, and political opposition. Reflection on the experience of accompanying neighborhood groups in local decision making in Caracas from 2002 to 2006 suggests that planning practitioners and scholars can be allies in the grassroots processes of empowerment and self-determination of local communities and advocates and active agents in the \"trickling-up\" of greater planning participation to upper levels of government.

As deliberative and participatory practices play a greater role in political decision-making of democratic political systems in many parts of the world, political parties must adapt to demands of an increasingly more cognitively mobilized citizenry. While there is a growing body of literature about the functioning of such procedures in different social and political contexts, little is known about politicians’ reasons behind introducing them. Based on qualitative data collected among Hungarian politicians, this paper brings evidence to empirically assess why local politicians introduced Participatory Budgeting in Budapest, Hungary. Our findings suggest that politicians accept theoretical arguments for promoting citizens’ participation, newly elected local politicians expect to increase their party’s local embeddedness by creating new contact opportunities and emphasize that the introduction of Participatory Budgeting is a ground for experimentation. The article ends with a discussion about arguments that are put forth in the literature on European Participatory Budgeting but missing from the views of politicians, and concludes by highlighting the risks of institutionalizing Participatory Budgeting.

An energetic scholarly debate discusses possible reforms of representative democracy. Some support participatory forms of democracy, others a more elite-driven or technocratic democracy. This study contributes to the growing literature on the subject by emphasizing political sophistication as a theoretically relevant predictor of attitudes to democracy: different models of democracy make different demands regarding the political sophistication of citizens. The analysis includes two dimensions and three measures of sophistication: personal sophistication measured as political knowledge and internal efficacy, and impersonal sophistication measured as assessment of others’ political competence. Using the 2011 Finnish National Election Study, we find that perceptions of the sophistication of others have a substantial impact on preferences for political decision-making, and that politically sophisticated people support representative democracy. The analysis shows that perceptions of others’ political competence, which has been largely neglected by previous research, is a both theoretically and empirically relevant predictor of preferences for political decision-making processes.

This article examines the role of digital technology in enabling and enhancing democratic practices and forms of governance. It contributes to emerging debates on democratic innovations by proposing a novel theoretical account of decentralized participatory democracy. To develop our account, we draw on the experience of two EU-funded projects, D-CENT and DECODE, which produced innovative citizen participation platforms and digital public infrastructure. Bringing democratic theory into conversation with critical data studies and the new municipalism movement, we theorize how these projects advanced three political aims: organizing political communities to build collective power, empowering citizens through direct participation in decision making, and transforming political institutions. The article then analyzes the strengths and limitations of these projects to draw lessons for policy makers and practitioners for future digital democratic experiments.

This article examines whether democratic innovations in the United States attract citizens who are typically underrepresented within existing political institutions. We focus on participatory budgeting, an intervention where residents decide how to allocate a particular pot of public money. Taking “PB Chicago” as our case study, we use survey and interview data to examine whether organizers realized their stated goal of involving residents other than the “usual suspects.” We find that residents who voted in PB Chicago were more often white, college educated, and from higher-income households relative to both the local population and politically active residents in Chicago. While these residents were not necessarily the most active across other stages of the PB Chicago process, we find little evidence that lower socioeconomic status and minority residents were accessing the civic learning and empowerment gains associated with participatory forms of democracy. Outreach made the process more inclusive but was insufficient to overcome several important structural constraints. Of particular note, the needs and interests of less privileged residents were not met by the narrow capital works focus of PB Chicago. We suggest that when implemented under such conditions, participatory budgeting risks deepening existing political and social inequalities.

This is a bold new study of the recent emergence of democracy in Latin America. Leonardo Avritzer shows that traditional theories of democratization fall short in explaining this phenomenon. Scholars have long held that the postwar stability of Western Europe reveals that restricted democracy, or \"democratic elitism,\" is the only realistic way to guard against forces such as the mass mobilizations that toppled European democracies after World War I. Avritzer challenges this view. Drawing on the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, he argues that democracy can be far more inclusive and can rely on a sphere of autonomous association and argument by citizens. He makes this argument by showing that democratic collective action has opened up a new \"public space\" for popular participation in Latin American politics. Unlike many theorists, Avritzer builds his case empirically. He looks at human rights movements in Argentina and Brazil, neighborhood associations in Brazil and Mexico, and election-monitoring initiatives in Mexico. Contending that such participation has not gone far enough, he proposes a way to involve citizens even more directly in policy decisions. For example, he points to experiments in \"participatory budgeting\" in two Brazilian cities. Ultimately, the concept of such a space beyond the reach of state administration fosters a broader view of democratic possibility, of the cultural transformation that spurred it, and of the tensions that persist, in a region where democracy is both new and different from the Old World models.