Abstract
Our understanding of participatory processes is increasing rapidly. However, one area that has received sparse attention is the impact of the proposals from participatory processes on the policy and practice of public administrations. Which proposals are converted into actual policy and practice; which are modified or simply ignored? The field lacks a systematic understanding of the fate of proposals. This paper reflects on the methodological strategy adopted by the Cherry-picking project to analyze the fate of proposals from participatory processes in Spanish municipalities. The innovative project studied the impact of 611 proposals from 39 participatory processes across 25 municipalities. The paper not only describes and discusses the methodological challenges faced by the project, but also presents preliminary findings and a review of the substantive lessons learned through the design and fieldwork process.
Highlights
Do proposals that emerge from participatory processes translate into actual policies? While there is increasing academic interest in the use of participatory processes – institutions designed to increase and deepen civic participation in political decision-making (Smith 2009; Warren 2009) – by public authorities, little systematic attention has been given to this fundamental question
A systematic analysis of the factors that explain adoption and implementation by public authorities of proposals that emerge from participatory processes has not been undertaken
Since there has been relatively little research undertaken in this area and there are numerous possible impacts on the fate of proposals, information on over 100 variables was collected across the three different levels of analysis: municipality, participatory process and policy proposal, the same three levels we have used to select our final sample
Summary
Types of proposals are likely to vary across different participatory processes and political contexts. The main difference being that data mining over-represented processes developed in large cities (Galais et al, 2012) In recognition of this difference and to guarantee the presence of smaller municipalities (up to 20,000 inhabitants), cases have been selected from both datasets.. As a result of these operations we had two datasets, with 214 cases of participatory processes (the comparative web-mining datafile) and 187 cases (the CASI-CATI survey datafile) that served as the starting point of the sample selection process. 1. Region / Municipality Size (in Andalusia): 10 participatory processes selected from the web-content mining dataset for each of the three regions, plus 10 additional cases from Andalusian municipalities under 20,000 inhabitants (CASI/CATI dataset)
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