The Bureaucratization of Participation

Abstract

IntroductionIn a previous article (De Vries, 1997) I addressed the formalization of participa-tory procedures in The Netherlands in the 1990s. A decline in public participationwas shown to have taken place, as well as a relocation of public participationfrom the decision-making stage to the beginning of the policy-making process.The formalization of public participation was no longer a form of interactionbetween officials and the public but a formal hearing in which officials just writedown the comments of the public and put these comments into a report. This canbe very depressing for the participants. This was explained as being a reaction tothe upheaval in participation in the 1970s during which efficiency and govern-mental authority were neglected. The implicit hypothesis of that article was thatthe formal institutionalization of democratic procedures and the actual inclinationto make policy processes more democratic — for instance as indicated by publicparticipation in the policy-making process — do not have to be congruent. Thisarticle examines another aspect of this phenomenon, namely the relation betweenthe institutionalization of democratic procedures and the degree to which publicpolicy-makers are open to the public and actually seek their support in the policy-making process. In OECD countries, in particular, as they have varying but highlevels of formalized democratic procedures, the question is whether further institutionalization of such procedures has an impact on the openness of publicpolicy-makers.This question is relevant, because in many OECD countries a gap existsbetween the polity and the community. People seem to withdraw from politicalparticipation. National but particularly local elections increasingly suffer fromlow turnouts (Lijphart, 1984). The participation in policy-making processes is leftto a few hardliners and representatives of local organizations, especially neigh-borhood groups. The solutions sought for this problem in many of these OECDcountries is to increase the number of formal procedures to enhance democracy.One can point at the direct election of majors at the local level (as in Italy butother countries also have plans), the right to organize referenda (originally inSwitzerland, but nowadays also in many other countries like Belgium and The