Making User-boards a School in Democracy? Studying Swedish Local Governments

Abstract

In its final report, a Swedish Government Commission has argued that representative democracy should be complemented by a high degree of local participation. The Commission argues that user-boards and citizen panels, for instance, are tools for vitalising democracy by educating people about democratic principles. This argument rests on two assumptions: (a) about the effects of participation in terms of a learning process at the individual level, and (b) about certain specific organisational circumstances that facilitate the learning processes. However, despite having long been evident in democratic theory, the assumptions lack empirical support. Thus, each of the Commission's assumptions poses an interesting empirical challenge: First, does local participation give rise to an individual democratic learning process? Second, does the link between local participation and representative democracy co-vary with the individual learning process? This article presents results from a process-oriented comparative study of two Swedish municipalities that introduced user-boards in the school sector. The article shows that participation in user-boards gives rise to various degrees of learning processes about democracy for individuals. It also shows that a relation between local governments and user-boards, characterised by dialogue and cooperation, increases the possibility that participation in user-boards will give rise to these learning processes.