Project description

Background

The DEMRE project aims to expand current knowledge on how local elected representatives can contribute to managing complex, emerging problems by adopting innovative practices for citizen participation and engagement. In recent years, the importance of open and consultative governmental processes for improving the effectiveness of and public support for public policy has received increasing attention (Prebble, 2018, p. 104). Given the complex and multi-faceted character of emerging societal problems, policymakers increasingly rely on distributed intelligence and engagement with a broad range of stakeholders to assess problems and ensure effective, coordinated and innovative implementation of policy solutions. Local governments are, for instance, seen by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as pivotal in adapting to global warming and climate events (Field et al., 2014), not least because local politicians are in a unique position to engage people with different experiences, backgrounds and knowledge on local impacts (Cutter et al., 2009; Preston & Stafford-Smith, 2009). Similar preconditions apply to other policy problems, such as social integration and inclusion of marginalised groups. To provide effective and targeted policy responses to complex problems, politicians need to interact with citizens to understand citizens’ world views and problem perceptions, to ascertain citizens’ needs and preferences, to obtain localised factual knowledge and, not least, to assess support for and resistance to specific policy proposals. The growing recognition of the importance of politician-citizen interaction highlights the need to understand how such interaction should be arranged. More specifically, we are interested in how interactive arenas should be designed so as to meet politicians’ needs.

If politicians fail to engage meaningfully with citizens because interactive arenas are not designed to meet politicians’ distinct needs for interaction, local political systems’ overall political responsiveness could be compromised. We define responsiveness as the capacity for identifying and responding effectively to emerging problems and challenges that affect the local community. DEMRE’s primary objective is to better understand how local political responsiveness can be improved by deliberately designing interactive arenas to meet politicians’ needs for engaging with citizens and civil society. The secondary objectives are as follows: (1) to better understand how the design of interactive arenas affects these arenas’ capacities to meet politicians’ needs; (2) to understand how and to what extent politicians’ varying roles are considered when interactive arenas are designed; (3) to measure local politicians’ responsiveness in terms of setting emerging problems on the agenda; and (4) to develop a normative theory to capture the democratic potential of accommodating politicians’ needs in citizen engagement. In DEMRE, these objectives will be met in collaboration with three municipal project partners (Åfjord, Rana and Drammen), the Norwegian Association of Local and Regional Authorities (KS) and academic partners in Denmark.

Theoretical approach and research questions

The overarching question raised in DEMRE is the following: How can political responsiveness to complex problems be promoted by designing arenas for citizen interaction that meet politicians’ needs? The project will investigate elected representatives’ responsiveness to local problems. 2 Generally, political representation is understood as “acting in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them” (Pitkin, 1967, p. 209). According to Pitkin (1967, p. 155), to “promot[e] the interest of the represented,” representatives should be well-informed about the needs and preferences of their constituents and able to communicate with them. Consequently, a crucial aspect of representation is to identify and address changing societal problems (Baumgartner & Jones, 2015). DEMRE builds on the assumption that interaction with citizens is a prerequisite for understanding citizens’ needs, preferences, world views and problem perceptions, as well as for obtaining necessary localised factual knowledge and assessing support for and resistance to specific policy proposals. It follows that political representation requires interaction with citizens to fulfil its purpose. However, citizen engagement is not a one-way channel for passively transforming citizens’ inputs into policy. To solve societal problems, elected representatives must, as political leaders, make difficult decisions on behalf of their constituents (Sørensen, 2020; Mortensen et al., 2022). Citizens may not fully understand which solutions will best serve their interests, and they may lack strong preferences regarding alternative policy solutions (Manin et al., 1999; Egan, 2014). Furthermore, politicians do not merely respond to constituents’ preferences and expressed opinions. Rather, politicians actively contribute to preference formation by detecting and interpreting problems (Mansbridge, 2003). Finally, politicians may intentionally mislead citizens to believe they are being given power through designing symbolic “rubber stamp committees”, but which conveys merely an illusion of responsiveness (Arnstein 1969). Therefore, DEMRE will assess political responsiveness to citizens’ interests and preferences, as well as to solving observed problems that need to be addressed in local communities.

Based on the above, DEMRE will answer three specific research questions:

RQ1: How do current arenas for interactions with citizens and civil society actors support politicians in their partisan and community roles?

RQ2: How are politicians’ partisan and community roles considered in the process of designing interactive arenas?

RQ3: How do interactive arenas contribute to politicians’ capacity to put local problems on the political agenda?

Collaborating partners and methods

Regarding politicians and their need for interactions with citizens and civil society actors to solve local problems, the collaborating municipalities have an interest in drawing lessons from both interactive arenas already implemented and from innovative arenas to be developed, implemented and documented in collaboration with the research team during the project period. To ensure the broadest possible dissemination of project results and to promote the use of new knowledge in Norway, KS’s partner role be key.

The collaborating municipalities serve the dual purpose as collaborating partners and case municipalities. To provide knowledge on responsiveness in different municipal contexts the municipalities differ in terms of size, geographical location in Norway, historical backgrounds and the mixture of complex problems that they face, such as local climate policy, multiethnicity and marginalisation in urban communities and the threat of depopulation in remote areas.

To answer RQ1, we will adopt a stepwise mixed-methods approach to investigate how interactions with citizens and civil society actors support politicians in performing their roles as responsive representatives. In the first step, we will conduct an in-depth analysis of each collaborating municipality’s institutional setup, with particular emphasis on the organisation of political bodies, the relationship between top managers and elected politicians and the selected interactive measures in each municipality dealing with specific problems, such as climate change and green growth, inclusion of marginalised groups and depopulation of remote areas.

In the second step, we will interview elected councillors, citizens and civil society actors as stakeholders in the local community. Interviews will be conducted individually, as panel discussions or as group interviews, either face-to-face or digitally. In recruiting informants, consideration will be given to ensuring a selection that includes a variety of individual factors that can be expected to influence interaction between councillors and community actors, including gender, prior experience, and power base.

In the third step, based on the information gathered in the previous steps, we will identify, understand and categorise councillors’ perceptions of interactions with citizens. Data will be analysed to identify shared ways of thinking among elected politicians and across the municipalities.

In the fourth step, we will conduct a survey of all Norwegian councillors about their needs in interactions with citizens.

To answer RQ2, we will analyse data from the three collaborating municipalities. In addition to interviews with politicians, we will conduct interviews with administrative staff involved in the design and management of democratic innovations. We will conduct participant observation on arenas active or implemented during the project period, as well in the municipal councils and in affected standing committees, to investigate their function and inclusiveness and how different inputs from participants are negotiated and become qualified or disqualified for political attention. Thus, the data will consist of the within-case studies (Gerring, 2017) of the two interactive arenas in each collaborating municipality. The advantage of within-case studies is that references to specific events tend to sharpen informants’ perceptions and assessments compared to more open-ended interviews (Hay, 2016). Both councillors and administrators will be asked to describe the process of developing democratic innovations, with a focus on their own and other actors’ involvement, including what ends the interactive arenas are intended to serve and who defines the goals of the innovation in question. These data will be supplemented with observations of administrative meetings on the development of interactive arenas, as well as document studies, which will enable us to investigate how different needs and goals are negotiated in the design and implementation of interactive arenas.

To answer RQ3, we will first qualitatively study the conditions behind the formation of council agendas. The within-case studies described will be supplemented by asking citizens and civil society actors, politicians and administrators how and by whom local council agendas are initiated and shaped. A combination of document studies, qualitative interviews and observations of council and committee meetings will be used to investigate the selection and translation processes that relay inputs from interactive arenas to local council agendas.

Afterwards, we will investigate the impact of municipal size as a pivotal context factor. To measure problem-based responsiveness, we will construct a variable to compare the issues found on the agendas for local council meetings with the size and intensity of local problems, such as unemployment, poverty, the shares of elderly and young people in the population, depopulation and other indicators. In collaboration with DEMRE project members at Aarhus University, Denmark, we will analyse the impact of municipal size by means of a comparative analysis of data on Norwegian and Danish council agendas.

Finally, to analyse the effects that specific democratic innovations have on problem solving, the variable of how well councils respond to local problems will be combined with information on the prevalence of interactive arenas documented in the Organisational Database made available by Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development.