Citizen Participation in German and Spanish Local Governments: A Comparative Study

Abstract

In recent decades, citizens have become more and more disenchanted with the traditional institutions of representative government, detached from political parties, and disillusioned with old forms of civic engagement and participation. This has favored a renewed interest in citizen engagement and citizen participation and a growing re-emergence in academic and political discourse of ideas and values of community, localism, and citizen participation. This article analyzes the main objectives and the actual implementation of citizen participation initiatives in the local governments of two European Continental countries, Germany and Spain. The aim is to find out the factors that affect the possible decoupling between the objectives and the “real” uses of citizen participation. Our results show that most local governments in these two countries are using citizen participation only to increase the level of perceived legitimacy or to comply minimally with legal requirements, without really taking advantage of citizen participation to enhance decision-making processes. These findings confirm that institutional theory becomes the rationale to explain the implementation of citizen participation in these two European Continental countries.

Keywords:

• citizen participation
• local governments
• institutional theory
• cross-country comparison

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This study has been carried out with the financial support of the Spanish National R&D Plan through research projects SEJ2007-62215-ECON/FEDER and ECO2010-17463 (ECON-FEDER) and of the University of Zaragoza through research project UZ2007-SOC-02-268156.

Notes

¹The latest opinion barometer of the Spanish Center for Sociological Research (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2009) shows that the third cause of concern for Spanish people is disenchantment and lack of trust in politicians, just behind the current economic situation and unemployment.

²Our understanding is that information is a basic precondition to citizen participation but it does not mean real citizen participation as such. Therefore, by changing decision-making processes, we refer to initiatives that at least seek to know citizens' opinions through consultation mechanisms or initiatives that promote an active participation of citizens in decision-making processes, as opposed to those initiatives where citizens rarely participate and where their opinions are not taken into account (see Vigoda, 2002).

³The legitimacy gap describes the situation where there appears to be a lack of correspondence between how society believes an organization should act and how it is perceived that the organization has acted (Deegan, 2006). Two major sources of the legitimacy gap are changing societal expectations and a situation in which unknown information about the organization becomes known.

⁴The stakeholder theory focuses on the stakeholder view of the organization (Alam, 2006). According to this theory, accountability is fulfilled by managers following an agent-principal relationship. It is argued that organizations should design the proper mechanisms for controlling managers (agents) so that they act in the interest of the organization's stakeholders (principals), as they have a legitimate or moral right to know about the value created by the organization. As citizens are key stakeholders for the public sector, citizen participation initiatives can be interpreted as the search for managerial tools that better reflect the interests of these stakeholders.

⁵The legitimacy theory states that, if organizational legitimacy is threatened, organizations will disclose strategic information in an effort to re-establish organizational legitimacy (Deegan, 2006). Citizen participation initiatives oriented towards the diffusion of information may be used by public organizations to regain the confidence of citizens. In these cases, the diffusion of information becomes an end in itself and attempts to change citizens' perceptions without necessarily changing the functioning of the organization.

⁶Three classifications of isomorphism are proposed (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983):

1. coercive, results from both formal and informal pressure imposed on an organization by legal, hierarchical or resource dependence (in the case of local governments, from central or regional governments);

2. mimetic, in which organizations imitate practices and models of leading organizations in their institutional field in an attempt to get greater recognition, becoming, in this case, passive adopters of innovations; and

3. normative isomorphism stems from environmental pressure for transformation from stakeholders such as politicians, financial institutions, scholars and multilateral organizations, as well as from specialized groups within a profession who try to define the conditions and method of work.

⁷Art. 23: “Citizens have the right to participate in public affairs either directly or through representatives […]”. In the same vein, Art. 9 of the Spanish Constitution states that “It is the duty of the authorities […] to facilitate the participation of all the citizens in the political, economic, cultural and social lives” (Constitution of 1978).

⁸The questionnaire was sent, either in Spanish or German to the e-mail address of the citizen participation area/department, when possible, or to the general e-mail address of the city council, in which case we asked that it was passed to the appropriate area/department. In order to obtain as many responses as possible, reminders were sent a month later, where necessary.

⁹The questionnaires were answered by technicians or managers of the citizen participation department/area. Their positions were as follows: in Germany, Citizen Participation Manager - Department of the Interior and Sports (Berlin); Manager of Personnel and e-Government - Department of Finance (Bremen); Manager of Citizen Participation- Mayor's Office (Dortmund); Officer for Statistics and Elections- Statistics Department and City Research (Düsseldorf); Manager of Citizen Participation- Urban Development Bureau (Essen); Manager of District and Administrative Reform - Department of Finance (Hamburg); Manager of Citizen Participation - Department of e-Government and Online Services (Cologne); Manager of Citizen Participation - Division of the Mayor and City Council (Leipzig), and Citizen Participation Technician - Department of the Mayor and Personnel (Stuttgart). In Spain, Manager of Citizen Participation and Associations - Department of Welfare and Territorial Cohesion (Barcelona); Manager of the Area of Citizen Participation - Department of Citizen Participation (Córdoba); Manager of the Area of Districts - Department of Citizen Information and Consumer Affairs (Gijón); Manager of the Service of Citizen Participation - Department of Citizen Participation (Hospitalet de Llobregat); Technical Head of the Area of Research and Community Diagnostic - Board of Citizen Participation (Las Palmas); General Manager of the Area of Citizen Participation - Department of Citizen Participation (Madrid); Manager of the Area of Citizen Participation - Department of Citizen Participation, Immigration, and Cooperation for Development (Málaga), and Manager of the Technical Office of the Advisory Board - Service of Citizen Participation (Zaragoza).