Citizen involvement in public policy: Does it matter how much is at stake?
(2022) Public Administration : an international quarterly covering public administration throughout the world — Vol. Online first (2022)
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- Abstract
- Public administrations increasingly try to find new ways to involve citizens in policy-making. However, many democratic innovations draw in only a fraction of the public. Why? I hypothesize that we observe such low participation rates because there is often not enough at stake for citizens. I test this with a pre-registered survey experiment on citizens’ intentions to participate in participatory budgets in the Netherlands. I fielded the experiment among a sample of citizens that had just experienced a participatory budget (N = 225) and among a population-based sample (N = 1,369). I operationalized the stakes as the amount of public money about which citizens can decide. The results show that more money generally does not increase citizens’ intention to participate. Supplementary analyses confirm the experimental findings and provide reasons how and why the stakes involved (do not) matter for citizens’ involvement.
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Citations
van der Does, R. (2022). Citizen involvement in public policy: Does it matter how much is at stake? Public Administration : an international quarterly covering public administration throughout the world, Online first. https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12846 (Original work published 2022)