Recording of presentation introducing narrative analysis, outlining what it is, why it can be a useful approach, how to do it and where to find out more. Presentation given at methods@manchester seminar at University of Manchester on 4 March 2010.

What is Narrative Analysis

Can we design institutions that increase and deepen citizen participation in the political decision making process? At a time when there is growing disillusionment with the institutions of advanced industrial democracies, there is also increasing interest in new ways of involving citizens in the political decisions that affect their lives. This book draws together evidence from a variety of democratic innovations from around the world, including participatory budgeting in Brazil, Citizens’ Assemblies on Electoral Reform in Canada, direct legislation in California and Switzerland and emerging experiments in e-democracy. The book offers a rare systematic analysis of this diverse range of democratic innovations, drawing lessons for the future development of both democratic theory and practice.

Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation

Over the past two decades we have heard an historically unprecedented volume of talk about and praise of democracy, and many governmental, non-governmental, and international organizations have been engaged in democracy promotion. Democracy is a subject that crosses the boundaries in political science, and within my own field of political theory there has been a major revival of democratic theory. In political theory, argument about “democracy” is usually now qualified by one of an array of adjectives, which include cosmopolitan, agonistic, republican, and monitory. But the new form that has been by far the most successful is deliberative democracy. By 2007 John Dryzek could write that “deliberative democracy now constitutes the most active area of political theory in its entirety (not just democratic theory).” Not only is there an extremely large and rapidly growing literature, both theoretical and empirical, on deliberative democracy, but its influence has spread far outside universities.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1537592711004877

Participatory Democracy Revisited

Citizens' engagement on local governments' Facebook sites. An empirical analysis: The impact of different media and content types in Western Europe

This book concerns the process of designing IT systems for large, complex purposes. It is structured as a textbook-style introduction to the processes required for use in university teaching and for self-study purposes by people working in the field of IT system development. The content of the book is the fruit of a decade of research by the authors in their pursuit of a method to plan and design IT projects that will provide sustainable, useful solutions to the needs of the companies for which they are commissioned.

Participatory IT Design: Designing for Business and Workplace Realities

This article pursues two main objectives. First, it provides a transnational overview and analysis of participatory budgeting, which has been central to the literature on democratic innovations in citizen participation. Second, it combines this broad empirical project with a theoretical approach based on the construction of ideal-types in the Weberian tradition. Namely, it presents six models of citizen participation: participatory democracy, proximity democracy, participative modernization, multi-stakeholder participation, neo-corporatism, and community development. Although these models have evolved from participatory budgeting and the European context, it is our contention that they can help us to understand the socio-political and ideological dynamics, contexts and impacts of civic engagement and democracy today at the transnational scale.

https://delibdemjournal.org/article/413/galley/4653/download/

Transnational Models of Citizen Participation: The Case of Participatory Budgeting

Participatory budgets in Europe. Between efficiency and growing local democracy

The global or planetary reach of gentrification has become a mainstream in critical urban studies. Yet, the ‘travels’ of a concept originated in specific places and times have often brought about a...

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Articulating urban change in Southern Europe: Gentrification, touristification and financialisation in Mouraria, Lisbon:

/pdf/participatory-budgeting-worldwide-1sbb4fun7u.pdf

Participatory Budgeting Worldwide

Much has been said about Participatory Budgeting. Still, how to make it a successful and long-lasting experience remains open for debate. Studies have advanced in analyzing many PB “features”, discussing its capacity to promote transparency, empowerment and accountability. However, little was said about its capacity to maintain continuity over time. With the increasing number of experiences all over the world we can observe that not always the numeric growth represent the emergency of strong and stable experiences. Many Participatory Budgeting experiences are implemented but after a short time disappear from the local political agenda. In this paper we analyze the Portuguese Participatory Budgeting panorama discussing the phenomenon of fragility and volatility that many PB have faced in this country. We argue that the explanatory power of some apparently important variables, such as ruling party change, is very limited. Finally, based on the empirical discussion we propose an analytical model that may help to understand the dynamics of this phenomenon in Portugal and other countries. We think that identifying “fragility” points is an important step for enhancing Participatory Budgeting experiences.

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Giovanni Allegretti

Papers

Transnational Models of Citizen Participation: The Case of Participatory Budgeting

Participatory budgets in Europe. Between efficiency and growing local democracy

Articulating urban change in Southern Europe: Gentrification, touristification and financialisation in Mouraria, Lisbon:

Participatory Budgeting Worldwide

(In) stability, a key element to understand participatory budgeting: Discussing Portuguese cases