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Try It, You Won’t Like It? Elites’ Conceptions of Citizen Participation and Attitudes Towards the Institutionalization of DMPs

par Rangoni, Sacha
Référence COST Workshop: Varieties of Deliberative Practices: Forms, Evolutions and Consequences (Septembre 2024: Lisbonne, Portugal)
Publication Non publié, 2024-09

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

There is a fairly broad consensus in the literature concerning the existence of a democratic malaise (Newton 2012) and a disaffection of citizens from the institutions and actors of representative democracy (Dalton 2004; Gourgues et al. 2021). One response considered by both the scientific community and public authorities is the implementation of deliberative mechanisms. As a result, numerous deliberative mini-publics have been organized in recent years at various levels of government and by multiple actors (e.g., Paulis et al. 2020). The Belgian case is particularly illuminating in this regard, given the institutionalization of deliberative practices within two parliaments after an increase in such experiments since the early 2010s (Vrydagh et al. 2020).While the literature on citizens' attitudes towards mini-publics is abundant (notably Pilet et al. 2022; Rojon, Rijken, and Klandermans 2019), there is much less regarding elected officials. This is despite their central position in the functioning of representative democracy and their role as veto players when it comes to establishing new practices (Bedock 2017). Moreover, with few exceptions (Reuchamps and Sautter 2023), the effect of the institutionalization of deliberative mini-publics within an assembly on elected officials’ attitudes towards citizen participation is largely under-analysed.Based on twelve semi-structured interviews conducted with French-speaking MPs of the Brussels Regional Parliament between October 2023 and February 2024, this contribution explores MPs’ evaluations of institutionalized mixed deliberative commissions and their conceptions of citizen participation. More broadly, it questions how it is possible that, as deliberative processes develop and become institutionalized, the conception of participation among elected officials does not change, and may even become more distrustful of participatory tools. Finally, from a more exploratory perspective, this contribution aims to outline the types of transformations in the institutionalized deliberative mechanism that the interviewed deputies aspire to.