The relationship between local councillors’ representative style and their support for participatory democracy

Abstract

The last few decades governments have operated in a challenging environment which increasingly calls for extended citizen participation. The aim of the article is to demonstrate that representative and participatory democracy are not two distinct realities, but that politicians’ opinions about their representative roles are associated with their attitudes about participatory democracy. To this end, the present paper links representative styles (partisan-delegate-trustee) with support for (1) the amount of citizen participation and (2) the type of citizen participation. Elected politicians traditionally perceive their representative roles either as ‘partisan’ (party-driven), ‘delegate’ (voter-driven) or ‘trustee’ (driven by their own judgement). We conducted a large-scale survey among Flemish (Belgium) local councillors ( N = 791). We show the biggest differences in support being between ‘delegates’ and ‘partisans’. The first group seems to be more receptive to (far-reaching) citizen participation and we explain that by their general orientation towards citizens.