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4 - Deliberative Engagement with Complex Policies
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- By Simon Burall
- Edited by Henry Tam
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- Book:
- Whose Government Is It?
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 27 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 February 2019, pp 57-72
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- Chapter
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Summary
The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote. (Schumpeter, 1976, p 269)
Nick Pearce has shown that the scope for democracy to embrace deliberative engagement is highly contested (Chapter Two of this book). Even if the sweeping rejection of participatory democracy by theorists such as Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels (2016) does not command general assent, much of the current thinking about democracy still appears to rest on Joseph Schumpeter's narrow conception of the ‘democratic method’. The foundation of this view is that elections allow voters to make their interests clear for politicians and civil servants to act on. This assumption is flawed, not least because party manifestos cover a wide range of public policies, from the economy, education and health to the environment and foreign policy, for example. Within each of these domains, the manifestos of all parties are a mixture of concrete proposals, broad sketches of an approach to policy and even broader political philosophy. It would be a very rare voter who agrees with every policy contained within.
Furthermore, legislatures such as the UK Parliament are elected for five-year terms. As the distance between the last election and the next widens, the likelihood of voters’ interests changing increases. It is difficult to see how, even a couple of years after an election, elected representatives are supposed to ascertain their voters’ interests in response to the latest unexpected event.
It is therefore impossible for the few bytes of information transmitted by voters’ crosses on their ballot papers to convey the complexity of their interests across all the proposals contained within any party's manifesto. This does not mean we should toll the bell for representative democracy. Elections are important for determining broad political direction. They are also important as the ultimate accountability mechanism, putting the power to reject poorly performing governments or politicians into the hands of citizens. However, they are only one component of a functioning democracy.
Democracies develop a wide variety of mechanisms for collecting a clearer signal about the interests of their citizens. These include a wellfunctioning and plural media, a robust and diverse civil society, lobby groups, statutory consultations and more informal public engagement processes, for example.
The hidden politics of policy design
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- By Simon Burall , Tim Hughes
- Catherine Durose, University of Birmingham, Liz Richardson, University of Manchester
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- Book:
- Designing Public Policy for Co-production
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 11 November 2015, pp 71-80
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Summary
This contribution reflects on the experience of being involved in an attempt to collaboratively develop and model proposals for open government. The contributors thoughtfully and carefully set out a range of challenging issues for more collaborative forms of policy design, reflecting on the interests and experiences of different stakeholders from both government and civil society. In doing so, they show how politics and values are central, if often hidden, in policy making. In particular, they show that seeking to make policy differently raises questions of legitimacy, representation, the exercise of authority, how trade-offs between competing interests and values are made, the allocation of risk and accountability and the interplay between different processes and cultures. This contribution demonstrates that failing to recognise these political dynamics risks undermining the legitimacy and viability of new forms of more co-productive policy design.
[We have] consistently made clear our commitment for the UK to become ‘the most open and transparent government in the world’. Our resolve has not weakened. Indeed, our engagement with civil society to develop and agree the stretching and ambitious commitments in this second Open Government Partnership UK National Action Plan has strengthened, not lessened our commitment to open government. The result of this partnership is a set of commitments that take important steps towards increased openness. (Rt Hon Francis Maude MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, 2013)
This contribution draws on an example of open, collaborative policy making which took place over the course of 18 months. Looking back on the process and therefore with the benefit of hindsight, we feel we have learnt a number of lessons about what makes for successful, open and collaborative policy processes. Collaborative policy making can only flourish when it has the political space to do so and this can only be opened, and kept open, by senior politicians. Without ‘senior’ permission to act differently, those within the process are unable to develop the creativity and flexibility required to identify and reach a commonly defined goal.
Politics, in the sense of shifting power balances and individual interests clamouring to be heard, churn just below the surface of any collaborative process.