Democratic innovations and responsive politicians

In this project, we investigate the types of contact local politicians have with residents and the kinds of contact they prefer the municipality to facilitate. The context is that in recent years, various new ways for citizens to participate in local politics—so-called democratic innovations—have been developed. Involving citizens strengthens the democratic readiness of the population, but may also contribute to legitimizing the representative democratic system. However, research indicates that local politicians are not always comfortable with the different forms of citizen participation being introduced. For local politics to be perceived as legitimate, it is theoretically important that elected officials are responsive to citizens both before and after elections. It is also assumed that effective solutions to local problems can be developed together with knowledgeable residents who are aware of the issues at hand. So far, we have known little about what kind of interaction with citizens local politicians feel they need in their role as elected representatives. Our findings so far show that local politicians generally are very much in contact with residents, and they highly value face-to-face contact. They desire spaces or events where they can listen to what citizens have to say. At the same time, local politicians almost unanimously express that they do not desire arenas or events where they can formulate policy together with citizens. When examining public meetings specifically, most elected representatives find settings uncomfortable when tension is high and criticism significant. Being held directly accountable in this kind of face-to-face meetings with residents is, in other words, challenging. Furthermore, results from the Democracy Survey conducted by KS (the Norwegian Association of Local and Regional Authorities) show that elected representatives in the three municipalities involved in the project (Åfjord, Rana, and Drammen) have a significantly more positive view of citizens' opportunities to engage in local decision-making than the citizens do. This is not uncommon among the municipalities that have carried out this survey. However, based on these findings, the three municipalities are now working to develop ways for facilitating contact between politicians and citizens. These should be measures or institutionalised arrangements that the politicians themselves wish to trial, with group leaders in the three municipal councils being directly involved in the development work. The development effort is being carried out in the municipalities, in collaboration with the research team and KS. The researchers involved in this part of the project come from the Institute for Social Research (ISF), Nord University, and the University of Oslo—the latter being responsible for project management.

Local governments need to manage complex societal problems in areas such as climate change, demographic change and depopulation, and marginalisation. To provide effective and targeted policy responses to such problems, politicians need citizens’ inputs to understand citizens’ world views and problem perceptions, to ascertain citizens’ needs and preferences, to obtain factual knowledge and, not least, to assess support and resistance. In practice, politicians often fail to use the potential benefits of interactive arenas organised by local governments. The result is that relevant citizen-generated information does not always reach political decision makers, and problems remain ill-defined or even ignored. The DEMRE project will expand our knowledge of how local elected representatives can better contribute to manage complex, emerging problems by adopting innovative practices of citizen participation and engagement. Despite scholars’ and practitioners’ long-standing interests in designing new arenas to facilitate citizens’ political engagement, very little is known about politicians’ distinct needs in interactions with citizens and about how well various interactive arenas match these needs. The aim of the DEMRE project is to better understand how the design of interactive arenas affects their capacity to meet politicians’ needs, to measure local politicians’ responsiveness in terms of setting emerging problems on the agenda and to develop a normative theory on the democratic potential of accommodating politicians’ needs in citizen engagement. If the insights gained in this project are allowed to guide the design of interactive arenas, we believe that politicians will find such arenas more attractive, which, in turn, will result in polices that are better informed and adapted to address urgent local problems. Improved citizen-politician dialogue can also improve the legitimacy of local democratic institutions.